Typical Girls: Women in Punk/Post-Punk/Underground Music (Circa 1975-1980s)

[mike AT appelstein.com]

Said article was basically my introduction to post-punk, the first  
time I ever heard of the Raincoats, Essential Logic or Rough Trade  
Records.  How different my life would've been otherwise...

mike

Quoting WWWhatsup <joly AT dti.net>:

> http://www.powells.com/blog/?p=1767
>
> The Picture of Lora Logic
> January 17th, 2007: Posted by Howard Hampton
>
> For many years, I've kept a picture of the singer Lora Logic up
> on my wall. A full-page portrait sliced from a 1980 issue of
> Rolling Stone, this is the furthest thing from your standard
> glamour shot. It's a washed-out color photo of a plain girl in
> a heavy coat holding her tenor saxophone. She's standing in a
> stark British kitchen — the kind that surely inspired the term
> "kitchen sink realism." There's a smart, levelheaded reserve in
> the way she looks back at the camera, but something
> inscrutable, mysterious, too. That look says: You don't know
> me. She could be anyone — a sensible librarian getting ready to
> make tea, or a troublemaking schoolgirl who escaped from St.
> Trinians with nothing but the clothes on her back and an old
> saxophone liberated from the music room. That look says: Listen
> up, best pay attention, you'll only hear these instructions
> once.
>
> When I originally picked up the handful of records by Essential
> Logic, her definitive post-punk group, I fell hard for the
> corkscrew voice, free-associating language, and sinuous, multi-
> tiered music. It was everything a young devotee of punk, loopy
> pop, early Ornette Coleman, and Donald Barthelme could hope
> for: the experimental and experiential blended in perfect off-
> the-wall harmony. A mere quarter century or so later (the time
> flying when you're having fun), I wrote about her (and some of
> her spiritual sisters) in an essay for The Believer, on
> occasion of the release of the Essential Logic collection
> Fanfare in the Garden. (Containing most of Lora's best work
> with the band and solo, it is an undiscovered country of sheer
> ebullient bliss. Go! Buy it! Now!)
>
> For my book, I retitled the piece "Fairy Tales from Strangers,"
> in honor of the Raincoats, her swell label mates at Rough
> Trade. They recorded the indelible "Fairy Tale in the
> Supermarket," and were aptly evoked by their fan Kurt Cobain:
> "When I listen to the Raincoats I feel as if I'm a stowaway in
> an attic...." In the brief window of opportunity after 1970s
> punk opened up a new anything-goes space, it felt like a
> revolution in sex roles was taking place in that attic, and
> rock equality was at hand. Lora Logic was the most unique and
> strangely self-possessed voice; Poly Styrene, her band mate in
> punk avatars X-Ray Spex (before giving Logic the boot) was the
> most striking, unreconstructed punk voice, with a timbre that
> could cut through a chainsaw. Chrissie Hynde was the most
> toughly seductive and "Precious." Deborah Iyall of Romeo Void
> was the most intimate and touchingly cynical; Exene Cervenka of
> X was the most exhilarating, the woman most likely to make
> "We're Desperate" sound like an mouth-watering come-on. Lesley
> Woods of the Au Pairs sounded like Marianne Faithfull fronting
> the Gang of Four; Faithfull herself came back with Broken
> English and sounded like Marlene Dietrich in the rubble of a
> bombed-out disco. We had Penelope Houston of the Avengers, Fay
> Fife of the Rezillos (brilliantly ridiculous: "I Can't Stand My
> Baby"), the beehive/lobster gals in the B-52s, almost
> commercial prospects like Lene Lovich and Rachel Sweet, the
> student prole models in the Delta 5, Myrna Marcarian of the
> Human Switchboard, and that's not even mentioning Patti Smith
> or Deborah Harry or Tina Weymouth playing bass for Talking
> Heads.
>
> In that moment, the line between realism and abstraction
> disappeared; suddenly, people were singing about everything,
> and everything — sex, politics, the daily grind, the search for
> a different life or a different sound — was connected,
> illuminated. Pop music, or an unreasonable facsimile thereof,
> caught up with reality and began to outstrip it.
>
> Those were, as the song says, different times. While there's a
> sense in which Lora Logic paved the way for Laurie Anderson as
> much as Sleater-Kinney, or at least prepared my ears for them,
> finally her work stands utterly apart: an emblem of an
> alternate future. I lifted my book's title from "Born in
> Flames," the 45 (b/w "The Sword of God") she recorded while
> moonlighting as the singer for Mayo Thompson's reconstituted
> Red Crayola (Gina Birch of the Raincoats was the bass player).
> I trust the meaning — or the mystery — is self-evident; so too
> my enduring philosophic love of Logic.
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>              WWWhatsup NYC
> http://pinstand.com - http://punkcast.com
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> TypicalGirls mailing list
> TypicalGirls AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/typicalgirls