Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [160]
January 1981
Every Song
a Hooker
This column is testament and deposition I did purchase one single 45 rpm record called “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim (I think it's Kim) Carnes. I forget what label it's on, you can go look it up somewhere if you care. You can find it if you try hard enough. I have also seen Ms. Carnes perform this song on a videotape on TV It was a gothic/Nouveau Romantic/s&m/etc. little strip of tape wherein Ms. Barnes, I mean Carnes, a blonde of apparent Irish extraction, wanked in the third person about all the sultry come-hithers she or someone could yank up outa her li’l ol’ bod, while the camera slowly panned back to reveal several tiers on which women dressed in black were slapping the faces of men dressed in white or vice versa I forget which, anyway it was on the beat.
Although I live in Manhattan, I must confess a certain ignorance of some of my neighbors’ more rarefied leisure-time activities. If anyone reading this magazine saw the same video strip and can explain to me what those people were doing would they please get in touch? Will reply immediately. Discretion assured.
As for Ms. Carnes, I am now informed that she does not holler, she does not shake them on down. She is a discrete modular woman who keeps her tresses fresh: immediately prior to entering the New Wave guignol where aforesaid vidtape was made she had very successfully completed and delivered a “duet” LP with Kenny Rogers. If the Mets win the World Series next year she might sing the National Anthem, and if Idi Amin is elected president of the United States in 1984 she may whistle tunes of ancient Cathay among his pale concubines. She's the drapes, but what's she framing?
Hooks, that's what. Fuckin’ dockloads of ‘em, buddy. And I am further informed that hooks are only the magic secret element that if you cram as many of them as you can into any one single it just might light up Billboard. YEA TEAM! A HIT!!! Dionne Warwick points and smiles. This is good. Yes.
Now you might get uppity and ask, “Just what the hell are these so-called ‘hooks’ and whence their derivation?” Cut to location footage. The withered black man is duly wheeled on-screen, at bottom of which the words “Aberdeen, Mississippi” appear.
“Mr. White, when you first wrote the words and adjacent notes to ‘I’m looking far in my mind, and I believe I’m fixing to die,’ did you have any idea of the fabulously incremental hook therein?”
“Shit, are you kiddin’? Whadda you think I am, a local curiosity or somethin’? First we did extensive demographic surveys, which revealed to us that there was a mood of nihilism in the land owing to concurrent Depression conditions that might be tapped for big bucks if we screw the right set o’ chords and words together! People always want to turn it into some kind of apocalypse when it's just their own pitiful little culture going down the drain, know what I mean? So I sat down and wrote it in the appropriate mode, and lord knows we cleaned up!”
“Were there any other hooks in said song, Mr. White?”
“Of course, fool. We made sure to stick in some shit about ‘families’ and ‘mother’ and all suchlike to keep the suckers thinkin’ they were gettin’ that ‘personal’ touch,” he laughs.
Listen, I hate hooks. The first time I saw the word “hook” was in a review of a Shocking Blue album in Rolling Stone in 1969. The author had evidently discovered that songwriters sometimes used it and now informed us that the bass riff was the almighty “hook” in their hit “Venus,” that one irresistible little melodic or rhythmic twist that’ll keep you just coming back and back and back to buy and buy and buy.
I went out one Friday afternoon more recently and bought Sucking in the Seventies. Now there's a hook. The Stones hadn’t counted on a Moral Majority-type backlash against