Once upon a time, there was a place called high school. In that now blurred span of four years, it is my guess that many of you Cadaver Girls out there were rowdy, obnoxious, sassy teenage rock and roll machines...I know I was. So one fine day browsing through the rows at my local record store, I found a record that summed up my high school experience in 18 minutes. It was by a band from Palo Alto, California called The Electrocutes, and they were gonna steal my lunch money.
The four faces on the cover looked like a meaner, ruder version of me and my friends, but as soon as I pressed play I knew that these girls were exactly like me and my friends. With poignant lyrics about sabotaging the popular girls and mercilessly stomping on the heads of random rats and bunnies, I felt right at home with these speed metal misfits.
Admit it. there is a time in your life when you can look back and say, "damn, i was obnoxious," and laugh about it. Now, if you somehow had a bitchin' chick band that could wail, how much more obnoxious, and awesome would you have been? It's been many moons since i left the high school wasteland, but a few weeks ago, a few choice cords from "Daquiri Jacquerie" popped into my head, and I gave the old record a spin. It promptly kicked my ass and left me feeling like the little kids on the back cover of the cd case, pushed around in a back alley, shielding myself from the impending doom of a pair of stiletto heels and a hurling trash-can.
Aside from the swift beatdown The Electrocutes gave me upon my return, I took another listen to the words, and instead of being merely giddy with teenage mischief, I heard a feminist undercurrent rumbling in the background that a less thoughtful 16 year old easily missed.
When the girls shout "I can't be your porno! Porno!" I laughed, giggling at the mere mention of it, but now, years later, I sing along proudly. Not to over analyze the screaming of a 16 year old chick band, but the premise of the track "Eggnog" is so refreshing because it blatantly says what very few high school girls say. "You wait! Hey! You wait! I don't wanna wait!" Maybe I'm digging too deep here, but with a few deftly placed and defiantly screamed phrases, The Electrocutes twisted the teenage sex-logic with a fierce and playful aggression that made them far more real and accessible to my young mind that the hyper-charged gender politics of Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, my definition of feminism in my high school days.
I knew, to a point, that The Electrocutes were the meanest girls I'd ever heard on record, but they were also the girls i wanted to party with. They also happened to "evolve" into their more commonly known form as The Donnas, the somewhat tamer, more All American rock band mold. I loved the Donnas, but i was the girl at the show who would scream "Daquri Jacquerie!" to the dismay and confusion of the crowd. But The "Donnas" knew what i meant, even though they never played along.
In that one fleeting album, graciously released by Sympathy for the Record Industry in 1997, I, and my equally obnoxious punk rock friends, learned to revel in our bad attitudes and penchant for lightning fast rock and roll, because high school is the one place where you can get away with it. It's a land where, for the few who realize that the ground they walk on is meant to take a beating, we could stomp our feet and create an unholy racket, because no matter how much high school sucked, we had our headphones and our rock n roll, and that's all we will ever need.
Posts
