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

[Douglas Wolk <dbcloud AT panix.com>]

Yeah, I pretty much agree with you there--nobody's wishing harder 
than I am for the Go Team stuff to be available on a shiny new CD, I 
would totally buy a Fertile Virgin ringtone, etc. (Note: that looks 
like sarcasm, but isn't.) But there are some legitimate arguments, 
along the same lines, for not reissuing some things. A couple of 
years ago, I asked Lois Maffeo for permission to post some MP3s from 
the Courtney Love (-the-band) singles on my blog; she responded, 
essentially, that since I'd asked, she had to say no: those records 
were really meant for people who were part of a particular scene at a 
particular time, and while she was happy to see them being propagated 
on mix tapes etc., she didn't want to be officially responsible 
herself for making them available again outside their intended 
cultural context. Which seemed fair to me.

Like Tobi, I'd also rather see a new musical/cultural/political 
movement than more documentation of the old one--!

On the Yoko Ono front: I have probably mentioned this here before, 
but she was one of the best, most interesting interviewees I've ever 
talked to, and pretty much every other journalist I know who's 
interviewed her has had the same reaction. I'm not quite as crazy 
about _Approximately Infinite Universe_ as Tobi and J Neo are ("Death 
of Samantha" aside), but _Plastic Ono Band_ and _Fly_ are both 
mindbendingly fantastic records. _Life with the Lions_ is pretty 
riveting, too.

Douglas

Mike wrote:

> All good points.  And I wasn't really thinking about the 50-copy 
> photocopy zines, anyway; it's totally understandable that the authors 
> would be uncomfortable seeing them anthologized or uploaded.  I'm 
> thinking more about the actual music that came out during that era - 
> the cassettes, 7-inches and LPs.  It seems to me that the songs and 
> live shows were generally meant for larger audiences than the zines.  
> It seems a shame to deprive today's youth of Viva Knieval, Heavens To 
> Betsy's "Direction" single or the _A Wonderful Treat_ cassette, for
> instance.