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By Root 526 0

Take a song like “Caught With the Meat in Your Mouth”— where groups like Aerosmith indulge in stud-posturing, Bators asserts just what the title says, that he's got something on the crummy bitch and, implicitly, since this door swings both ways, on himself as well. Nowhere on this album does the miserable little snerd sing the words, “My dick is 10 inches long.” He can’t, because like the rest of the group he's Catholic (it is a fact that all of them used to be altar boys), so sex is a matter riddled with such guilt that both Stiv and Ms. Lunch7 are humiliated. Either that or the meat in her mouth is a symbolic communion wafer, in which case both parties are doubly blessed. It's getting harder than ever to tell heaven from hell these days.

The Village Voice, October 24, 1977

7Lydia Lunch was Stiv's girlfriend in those days, and later a rather polarizing, downtown New York guitarist and singer in her own right.

On the Merits

of Sexual Repression

May be this gets down to it: the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, the Crystals, the guy singers too, all those old classic rock ‘n’ roll songs were fueled by one thing: sexual repression, and consequent frustration. They may have been sexist, they may have been neurotic or even masochistic—sometimes I think the whole reason pop music was invented in the first place was to vent sick emotions in a deceptively lulling form. THEY WERE LITERALLY EXPLOSIVE WITH ALL THAT PENT-UP LUST AND FEAR AND GUILT AND DREAD AND HATE AND RESENTMENT AND CONFUSION. And it gave them a kind of anarchic power, which can still move us.

Listening to certain old Shangri-Las sides, you might find yourself laughing and crying at the same time. And the Spector stuff… not just the storied Wall of Sound but the urgency in those girls’ voices spelled pure sex, distillate of every scene between a boy and girl at the drive-in, vacant lots, house when the folks were out, wherever we found to sneak off to back then to see how far we could take it this time.

All that frustration got channeled into rock, all those powerful emotions were way out front and there was plenty of meticulous detail in the productions behind them. They were like magnificent tapestries depicting the most embarrassing and ridiculous yet painful situations, and they stand to this day.

While Blondie hardly constitutes a Wall of Sound, it wouldn’t be fair to hold that against them. They’re not the Blondie Orchestra, they’re a good little rock ‘n’ roll band which has been steadily evolving from the garage without ever losing sight and understanding of what was good, if not better than the rest, back there. Their songs are mostly good. Debbie's got about as good a voice by traditional “singing” standards as a lot of the people who recorded in the early Sixties. But you wouldn’t dare line one of these cuts up next to a Spector or Shangri-Las production, because it’d sound downright pallid. The reason you wouldn’t is that (as I keep harping on) the music seems to have no really strong emotions in it, and what emotions do surface occasionally, what obsessions and lusts, are invariably almost immediately gutted by fusillades of irony, sarcasm, camp, what have you, ending up buried.

IF THE MAIN REASON WE LISTEN TO MUSIC IN THE FIRST PLACE IS TO HEAR PASSION EXPRESSED—as I’ve believed all my life—THEN WHAT GOOD IS THIS MUSIC GOING TO PROVE TO BE? What does that say about us? What are we confirming in ourselves by doting on art that is emotionally neutral? And, simultaneously, what in ourselves might we be destroying or at least keeping down?

In the last few years we have seen the rise of a type of music perhaps previously unknown in human history: music designed specifically, by intent or subconscious motivation, to remove what emotions might linger in the atmosphere around us, creating a vacuum where we can breathe easier because we’re not so freaked by each other even though we still don’t communicate. That's your basic disco, of course. But it's not just disco music that does this. It's all kinds of music and you can talk all you want about Muzak