Relay: Sunshine State Of Mind
I know every word to just about every song written in the early 1960s. That's not to say I'm not familiar with what came after, but I have a special place in my heart for bubblegum pop. What that special place is is still unclear, as I find myself hardly able to stand some of the annoying, grating sounds.
The words are mostly nonsensical gibberish phrases that eat up time on songs that rarely make it to the three-minute mark, which is also a plus, compared to those six-minute ballads the '80s made so popular. But when the sounds actually form sentences and complete thoughts, I am enamored.
The countless CDs of the songs I have made over the years have hardened them in my memory, prompting a sing-along whenever I turn on the tinny sounds of WLNG or walk into a grocery store where I fill in the words to their lyricless Muzak.
The lyrics, barely able to hold a candle to the sounds of today, according to some, act more as a historical recount and a social mouthpiece of the times.
Although girl bands were at the height of their popularity, something the genre would not see again until the advent of the Spice Girls in the 1990s, women were still largely objectified by men. Even the girls singing about the boys were saying it.
In a line in the song called "Party Girl," the singer tells a young woman, "I'll make you turn your dancing shoes in for apron strings and things." This is after the singer tells her she will marry him. At that point, her dancing and partying will end. After listening to so much of the music, I find it hard to believe that the party girl would object.
That's not to say that being a wife and mother is a bad thing. It's the absolute authority and unwavering determination with which he says it that is stunning.
Singing about very young girls is also typical in these songs. Some could argue it was because much of the music was being written and sung by boys, some only 16, and coincidentally the age of choice in many songs. But I'm not completely satisfied with that. How then, do you explain songs like "Young Girl," wherein a man complains to the young woman that she has fooled him into thinking she was older, and now she should go back to her mother who "must be wondering where you are." He then instructs her to "get out of here before I have the time to change my mind."
Groups like Tommy James and the Shondells, who sang "I Think We're Alone Now," popularized again in the 1980s when Tiffany brought it to the malls of America and The Turtles' "Happy Together," a song also brought back in the 1980s, but in a breakfast cereal commercial that noted the close bond of honey to graham crackers, may have come the closest to realizing the necessity of a man and a woman's interaction during a relationship. It doesn't seem that hard. General Mills figured it out.
But women were as much to blame, singing about how much they love a man who does not love them back. In The Supremes' song "Band of Gold," Diana Ross sings about her wedding night, where "we stayed in separate rooms." She waits at night for him to come home and "love me, like you did before." Sounds like a typical song of lament for lost love, but I suspect it was doomed from the start.
Although that is a particularly painful song, there are others much more upbeat, but with themes that I imagine set those other women up for the same defeat. Girls who wear bikinis and get suntans so the boys on the beach notice them, women who wait for a man to be through with another woman before offering themselves up as the next and women who are on the receiving end of a letter from their husband's secretary.
"Take a letter Maria, a message to my wife, tell her I won't be coming back, gonna start a new life." All the while, a selection of brass instruments are laughing in the background.
Somehow, I don't think things have changed much. Women still sing about the same things, they just appear to be self-riotous.
Somewhere in me, I long for the days in music when Sippie Wallace, the singer of songs such as "Murder Will Be My Crime," "Lazy Man Blues," and "Dead Drunk Blues," would make her husband kidney stew and give him a good whack in the head. Now that's good music.
Leigh Goodstein is a reporter at The Star.