Listen to OH BONDAGE UP YOURS! by X-Ray Specs.
Hello, it's me! I say that only because some of you (all of you?) may be disappointed to learn that Corbett isn't blogging this week. Instead, I'm here, and Corbett will pick up again sometime soon. We do have an innovation to introduce later this week, though, so stay tuned.
My posts for next few weeks are going to have a rough theme: "Punk Music Is Fun!" I want to write just a few words about that. It's an advertisement for the tunes we're posting (i.e., these are going to be fun and you should listen to them), but also an admonishment for myself. For a bunch of reasons, punk music has never seemed that fun to me. More like hard work. Punk music was supposed to slay the dinosaurs of 1970's rock music. The trouble was, I knew those dinosaurs pretty well, and loved them too!
Punk, on the other hand, didn't get played on the radio, and didn't played at my house. So I didn't know much growing up. And with so much written about punk's aesthetics, ideology, secret histories, and everything else, I felt it's almost easier to tune the music out than to engage with it and get to know it.
That won't do, though, because even if you think (as I do) that the Sex Pistols are tedious and overrated, there's a ton of great music sitting there that doesn't need an explanation or an argument to get it across.
Anyway, I don't want to overstay my welcome here, so let's get to the music we're posting. The idea is to post some great, fun songs, nothing too obscure, favorites of ours from the punk canon. We do hope you'll like them if you don't love them already!
Oh Bondage Up Yours! is pretty famous, but these days you're more likely to hear it sampled (Poly Styrene's ecstatic lead-in, "1! 2! 3! 4!," appears in dance & hip hop tracks with some regularity) than played through.
The title pretty much sums up the lyrical content to the song, and it's considered a feminist manifesto, the opening track to any decent "Woman In Rock" compilation. The best part of the song (apart from the wailin' sax) is how much righteousness and defiance is in the vocal. She means it, man!
Photo: Christmas Day.
Monday, January 7, 2008
OH BONDAGE UP YOURS!
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9 comments:
You can't sing along with every song of the "Rocky Horror Picture Show?" Not a good thing?
great! that sax really is fantastic!
yeah it barely sounds like a saxophone
Check out Debris, out of Chickasaw. I am not exactly sure they were punk but they were loud.
whoa how did you know about that group? that album was just re-issued this year. it's something else
Though not in "Manhattan," I'm "Leisurely Waiting" where you "Witness"ed this bunch. "Tell Me" was it at a "New Smooth Lunch?" They did make #84 on the list, though too bad slightly ahead of their time.
The guy I used to work with was with the group that became Debris after they split. He and at least some of the original Debris members have a band, now.
This is so bad and so long. The scream at the end of the chorus reminds me of 4-non Blondes or a horrible, horrible Cranberries.
i'll grant you it's one verse too long (still, less than three minutes long). you're just being crabby about the scream though.
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