we wanna play with knives, we wanna play with guns…

cute weaponry!
apparently the hello kitty rifle is real according to shiny shiny! and there is a website called glamguns.com!!!?????

reviews from ‘the war against silence’

from the war against silence posted here for posterity as the site is now no longer updated. originally posted 31 August 95, 29 August 96 and 12 October 00

we are shampoo

from the soft-booted-elves-with-poison-dart-blowguns aesthetic of Long Fin Killie to the shiny plastic Killer Barbie pout of Shampoo is one enormous leap for music, and one small series of clicking noises for the Next Disc button. Shampoo is two impish teenage girls from England, which is something like saying Woody Allen is “Jewish, and balding a little”. Their names are Jacqui and Carrie. Their producer obviously did a lot of the work on this album. They apparently trash hotel rooms on tour with a vengeance. They were once the joint presidents of the Manic Street Preachers Fan Club. Their song “Trouble” was featured in the Power Rangers movie. If the five Power Rangers ever face Shampoo in combat, I’d advise you to bet on the band. Especially if they’re within earshot.
The most obvious thing to say about Shampoo, and I expect many people will, obligingly, say it, is that they are terrible. As musicians, by any stretch of that word, they are execrable. They can’t sing, and they couldn’t produce harmony if you strapped them to D50s from which all the keys but Cs and Gs had been removed, and rolled them down a hill. The “guitar” parts on this album sound like they were one-finger keyboard lines played with the factory-preset guitar sound on a Casio sampler the size and approximate timbral sophistication of an apartment-dwelling dachshund. Their lyrics sound like penmanship exercises for the academically retrograde. Their apparel appears to have been stolen from a charity clothing drive conducted by 1970s sitcom costumers on behalf of the Humbert Humbert Day Care Center. They have the worst blond dye jobs I have ever seen in my life (and this includes a couple of self-administered ones I’ve observed in the mirror, mind you). And their infuriating fondness for peering over the tops of their sunglasses at you in every single fucking picture on the CD liner will provoke you to the point where you’d like to suffocate them with their own vinyl pants, as an emphatic warning to all the rest of their sickening pseudo-rebellious empty-headed future-oblivious consumerist generation.
The other way of putting this, of course, is that Shampoo are totally, amazingly, brilliantly marvelous. Never mind Hole and Bikini Kill, this is the most breathtaking album of unapologetically female punk music I have ever heard. Compared to Shampoo, the difference between the Sex Pistols and ELP quickly starts to sound like round-off error. Joan Jett begins to sound like Motörhead run through a little pitch-shifting. Every time I listen to this and then remember the Jesus Jones/Thompson Twins-castoff mush that was Traci Lords’ album earlier this year, I shake my head in disbelief. Traci looked like this back when these two needed parental assistance to eat their birthday cakes, and she even sang on a Manic Street Preachers song; all this could have been hers. We’ve been listening to sloppy bar-chords for so long, or at least I have, that I’d almost forgotten that the point of punk was just that you could play it however you want, with over-quantized synthesizer pawings just as valid a shortcut as cranking the distortion on your amp up until you can’t hear the missed notes. This may be the first wholly original bit of youthful rebellion in fifteen years. It may be the most bracing evocation yet of just-post-adolescent sexual power cloaked in obviously-faked innocence that social taboos force you to credit despite its flagrant taunts. It may be the ultimate synergy between all the Shannon Dohertys of the world and all the Dale Bozzios they won’t eat lunch with. It may be the thing that finally makes scientists realize that you can’t just show a world Linda Blair re-runs and catwalk footage of bulimic hair-trigger-temper supermodels for decades without expecting some kind of terrifying mutation to eventually crawl out of somebody’s back yard. This might be the album where the men who usually rule rock finally realize that their crafty plan to just not explain power chords to the girls may not be quite crafty enough to keep them out of rock music until they’re too old to be dangerous. The album might also just be terrible. But I really don’t think so.
Whether you like them or not, the list of open-mouthedly astonishing things on this album is almost too intimidating to construct. Where could you even begin to argue with an album that yelps, gleefully, “We want our fifteen minutes and we want ‘em now!”? What rebuttal wouldn’t wilt in the face of the chirped little “Viva!”s in “Viva La Megababes”, never mind the total self-assurance with which the girls refuse to correct even the smallest mock-French plural article? With what do you fight the delirious hooks of “Delicious”, and the rhymes whose ridiculous pink hats you can see coming from at least three miles away? How do you withstanding the withering scorn of “Dirty Old Love Song” and “Skinny White Thing” (especially given the way you’re likely to start stammering uncontrollably when you hear Shampoo accuse somebody else of being “tacky and cheap, sickly and sweet”)? What will you have to say when you realize that Shampoo’s idea of “the olden days” is Adam Ant, Steve Strange and Gary Numan? (And how will you take that back when they prove, in “Game Boy”, that they really do know what those guys used to sound like?) If they can’t sing, what’s that little vocal pirouette buried in the chorus of “Shiny Black Taxi Cab”? (Well, okay, it’s probably some background singer their producer hired, but still…) If they can’t rock, what’s that churning feeling I’m getting from “Me Hostage”? (Er, I just thought of an alternate explanation for that one myself, possibly going back to that skate from earlier.)
What it comes down to, I think, is that this album is simply too perfectly integrated to disassemble. From the pink CD tray to the screwed up color scheme on the cut-off Union Jack T-shirt one of them is wearing in a liner shot, every detail is witheringly faithful to the unerringly self-sufficient “when you planned your fortifications you didn’t take into account cake throwing or shopping as an attack form, so it’s a good thing we don’t want to come in, anyway” elan. You could just throw the CD out, of course. The pink tray doesn’t feel any stronger than the usual black ones, so I imagine you could smash it with a couple well-placed jumps (or easily less than a minute of fury-blinded random stomping in its general vicinity). And with any luck the girls will become gigantomungus stars in Japan and never come to carry away your precious daughters, who you played your Joni Mitchell records for so lovingly when they were too small to understand, who you bought all those copies of Amanda Has Two Mommies for, who you played math games with so they wouldn’t perpetuate the gender stereotypes of the last generation, who you carefully didn’t brainwash into your religious traditions so they’d be able to make up their own minds when they were old enough. Yes, with any luck this whole Shampoo thing will just never catch on here in America, where girls have more sense, and your beloved daughters will never come clattering down the stairs from their bedroom in high heels you didn’t even know they had, wearing tiny T-shirts with babies’ faces over their breasts, chanting “We don’t care because we’re young / And our time has just begun!”. Yes, I’m sure that’ll never happen to you.
Except– Unless– Wait, what song is that you hear the strains of? What’s it saying? That’s not coming from upstairs in your daughters’ room, is it? Is it?! Well, no, as a matter of fact it’s coming from my car, as I drive past on my way home from yet another failed suburban quest to locate more of those good folding, stacking wooden bookshelves like the ten I already have and need several more of. No, this copy of We Are Shampoo is safe in the hands of a 28-year-old software designer whose hair is too short to put into pony tails if he wanted to, and who never wears sunglasses at all, much less pushed down his nose so he could peer over them. Although, on second thought, I’m not sure that’s not even more frightening than what you feared first. I reach for the volume knob. I pull onto the Mass Pike and head back towards Cambridge. My sap-encrusted CRX pulses. Passing salesmen roll up their windows and fumble in their glove compartments for a Phil Collins tape. “Having the most fun you ever had”, the girls sing. The city is spread out before me, and I have exact change. This will do, I think to myself. And then, with a broader smile, to nobody in particular and everyone: Viva.

girl power

…and while we’ve wandered afield into goofy music, I finally got an imported copy of the second album by the ever-dubious English gimmick-girl-band Shampoo, who fit this week’s trio theme in an inverted sort of way, since producer/multi-instrumentalist Con seems to handle most musical aspects of the band’s simplistic synth-dance-punk program, leaving Jacqui and Carrie the critical responsibilities of wildly amateurish singing and posing petulantly for endless image photographs, in which they have thankfully begun looking less like Nabokov models and more like unhealthily dedicated Miki Berenyi acolytes. I started dreading this album last August, the minute after I posted my review of their debut, in which I called them the greatest unapologetically female punk band in history, and the dread deepened to dangerous levels after my year-end write-up, in which I gave them #8 on my album list, and called We Are Shampoo the year’s only true punk record. Because although I still defend all those claims, Shampoo was practically the definition of a one-joke band, and the overwhelming likelihood was that a second Shampoo album would be odious beyond belief, and threaten to sour the whole Shampoo experience in the way that Jonathan Livingston Seagull went from timeless to ludicrous for me after I unwisely trudged through the malodorously syrupy swamp of The Bridge Across Forever. The surprisingly plausible cover of Gary Numan’s “Cars”, on a single b-side, gave me momentary hope that the girls might, incredibly, transcend themselves after all, but their appallingly garish version of the Waitresses’ “I Know What Boys Like”, the following single, put me back to feeling that doom was inevitable.
I suppose this fatalistic build up helped to even the odds a little, but even so I think Girl Power turned out much better than anybody had a right to expect. In my taxonomy of second albums, this could have been an …And the Little Girls Understand, but instead it managed to be a very respectable Don’t Look Back. It’s a virtual clone of We Are Shampoo, of course, but Shampoo were no more likely to make an Indigo Girls album than Mattel is to come out with Weight-Problem Barbie and a Ken modeled on Wallace Shawn, so it wasn’t stylistic variance we were holding our breath for, it was to find out whether this imitation would be plausible or pale. “Girl Power” has the giddy stomp of “Viva La Megababes”, the shimmering “News Flash” has some of “Shiny Black Taxi Cab”’s sparkle, and “Bare Knuckle Girl”’s excitable whoosh echoes “Trouble”. “Zap Pow” could be the sequel to “Game Boy”, “War Paint” to “Glimmer Globe”, the buzzingly infectious “Boys Are Us” to “Delicious”, the easy “We Play Dumb” to “Shampoo You”, “I’m Gonna Scream” to the simmering “House of Love”, and “Don’t Call Me Babe” to, well, “Viva La Megababes” again. There’s even a nearly deadpan pop song, “You Love It”, though it will be a while before Shampoo are ready to compete with Scarlet or Voice of the Beehive in this arena, and although I still think “Cars” would have been a much better single and album choice than “I Know What Boys Like”, I’m even warming to that. For both historical reasons and the classic yelps of “Viva!” on “Viva La Megababes”, I think I still would recommend We Are Shampoo as the sample to use if you want to determine whether you detest or adore an album that consists of cheerily trashy smurfettes singing worse than you do in the shower over backing music that already sounds like a cheesy karaoke version of itself, but Girl Power would also serve, and that’s the highest possible compliment I could have dreamed of giving it.

and just to prove I can find an even more disconcerting sentiment to end on than my oft-assailed support for Roxette, the even more fiercely dreaded Shampoo, who are only human because Mattel wouldn’t let them legally change their species to Anarchist Barbie, are back. A sophomore album is on the way, and I’m at least as apprehensive about it as you are skeptical, as I have no idea if Jacqui, Carrie and Con can do anything with their one-joke premise other than repeat it lamely. Asked only to sustain it over three more songs for this single, though, they do just fine. “Don’t Call Me Babe”, the second song here, was the theme to Pamela Lee’s movie Barb Wire, and I get the feeling that if they had let Shampoo direct it, instead of just write a song, it could have come out as a hyperkinetic cross between Tank Girl and Clueless. “Girl Power”, the new song, is similar in spirit, because surely you need at least two songs to trash the world to. The third one, to my intense delight, is a cover of Gary Numan’s “Cars”. They don’t do anything fancy with it, but they don’t have to. Just playing it, in their own style, shows both the surprising element of synth-pop composure that lurks under their vampire-brat veneer, and also the vitality that Numan’s song and style still have, despite the rather extended commercial slump his own career has fallen into. In place of his robotic whine, undead pallor and cybernetic diffidence, Shampoo substitute day-glow hair-dye, a tanker full of guitar samples, and a pout that could sink a thousand ships. Nations have been founded on less.

absolute shampoo

it’s not an implausibility quite on par with Britney Spears putting out a home-demo concept album about the Boer War accompanying herself solely on mandolin, or Eminem organizing a symphonic tribute to the Little River Band, but it’s close enough: Shampoo have not only released a third album, they’ve put it out themselves and it’s at least three-quarters serious. If there were ever a band that deserved to either evaporate the moment the dollar signs vanished from the eyes of their major-label A&R drone, or expire the moment drugs could no longer stave off the official conclusion of puberty, or both, it was Shampoo. “Viva La Megababes”, their defining moment, was patently idiotic, willfully immature, abjectly underthought and garishly overproduced. If you hated it, I can’t imagine trying to talk you around. But I adored them. I once wrote that We Are Shampoo was the best female punk record ever made, and if you look it up you’ll find that after 267 weeks of chances to go back and edit some more-rational accolade into this malleable medium, I still once wrote that We Are Shampoo was the best female punk record ever made. Girl Power, the second album, was almost an exact copy of the first one, but I chose to take that as heartening evidence that the first one wasn’t a fluke. Girl Power came out in 1995, though, and a lot has happened in what we might now think of as Shampoo’s field since they last contributed anything to it. True gender parity is a ways off, but there are now at least enough bands with teenage girls in them to suggest that equilibration is underway. If you thought Shampoo represented a triumph of belligerent attitude over musical craft, surely Lolita Storm have reset expectations for the extreme to which that concept can be taken (albeit, in my opinion, by dispensing with music entirely, which is not at all the same thing as dispensing with musical technique). And if you thought Shampoo were cynically contrived and tastelessly plastic, low-grade corporate pornography that existed only to be promoted as crassly as practical, then arguably the low profile of this new record, arriving after such a long absence and only available by mail-order from the band’s own web site (www.shampoo.org.uk), is intrinsically an admission of defeat. If Shampoo were a commercial fabrication, then what’s the difference between obscurity and nonexistence?
But turn that around: they did make this third album, despite no longer having the resources (if they ever did) to cram it down anybody’s throats, so it’s hard to blithely ignore the idea that they might have another motive. It’s even harder, I think, although obviously you’re as free to disagree with me as ever, to keep dismissing this album after hearing it. Where We Are Shampoo and Girl Power subsisted on bioluminescent lip-gloss and bubble-gum laced with microscopic magnesium flares, Absolute Shampoo is an actual pop record. Jacqui and Carrie get plenty of help again (Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, of St. Etienne, co-wrote eight of these eleven songs, and veteran Sarah Records producer Ian Catt co-wrote the other three and produced them all), but it was their own giggly defiance that turned the first two albums into cartoon riots, and it’s their own unexpectedly matured presences here that make this a much different experience. They turn down the best opportunity to reinhabit their old selves, in fact, right in track one, “Shampoo’s Cupboard”. The British-ism of “cupboard” aside (an American would say “closet”, but neither Shampoo nor the Spice Girls have ever bothered disguising their origins), the song is a free-associated pop-cultural litany, mostly of junk food and ill-conceived electric toys, like an unsorted version of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” that lists only things that wouldn’t appear in history books. Between gender, age and geographical gaps, I recognize less than half of the references (I know what Donkey Kong and Care Bears were, and Play-Doh, Etch-a-Sketch, Weebles, Speak and Spell, Deely Boppers and Mork and Mindy are all from my generation or earlier to begin with, but Roger Red Hat, Button Moon, Um Bongo, Game and Watch, cola cubes, Grange Hill and Tiny Tears are all ciphers to me, and I don’t even want to know what “white dog poo” refers to), but when the chorus rolls around, and it comes time to characterize all this nostalgia, they say merely “Here’s some things from our cupboard, / Memories from the young Shampoo girls”, and instead of treating all these objects like throwing stars for retarded ninja, it seems to me they are being inclusive, offering the possibility that we can have some Shampoo memories of our own, if we choose to so construe ourselves. Chunky guitars, twittering synthesizers, faux saxophones and languid “la la” backing vocals twine unhurriedly, and I hear Kenickie and bis, but also Madness, the Go-Go’s, Sleeper and the Thompson Twins. And at the end, instead of lost interest and an abrupt exit, there’s a graceful fade out, as if they are slowly, wistfully, letting go.
Let go they do, though, decisively enough that by the second track they’re ready for the sweeping “Inspector Gadget”, a sneaky updating of “Game Boy” that in the old Shampoo world would have been a withering rant against boyish tech-geekery, but here conceals a kernel of rueful affection. “Everything that he does, nearly drives us insane”, they say, and the magnitude of “nearly” is calibrated by the cohabitational implications of “Phone rings at six and he’ll wake us at seven” (and at least he lets them sleep for that extra hour). “Sod the Neighbors” has plenty of Joan Jett swagger, but faced with the choice between petulant intelligibility and sticking to the contours of the music, they opt for a syrupy girl-group blur in which the lyrical scrawls fade most of the way into the background. The gurgling, florid “Take a Break” falls somewhere between the Cardigans, Bananarama and Propaganda, and “Bet he did it with my teenage neighbour / While I was in labour” finds the girls again testing out older narrators. The bouncy, effusive kiss-off “Don’t Remember” is the closest thing here to an old-style Shampoo song, Princess-phone vocals and a sing-song chorus melody, Jacqui and Carrie chanting “Of course we don’t remember” with boundless scorn, leaving the suitor to wrench his come-on out of his spleen and decide whether it’s more humiliating that they can’t conceive of having shared his past, or that they know they wouldn’t remember it even if they had.
“Terrorist TV”, a sardonic ode to daytime television, probably ought to be the album’s goofiest song on lyrical grounds, but diffident acoustic guitar and stabbing piano circle warily around a steady drum pattern, and I begin to wonder if Shampoo have been listening to Melissa Ferrick. “First Class” is shouty and derisive, but the crisp drums and compact organ hook on the verses evoke old Manchester groove, the bridge borrows some sunny Byrds psychedelia, and the chorus is a linear descendent of “Our House”. “Star of the Show” crosses EMF with BTO and a writhing snake-charmer guitar solo. “Jet Lag” hints at EMF’s choppy synths and sample collages, too, but slows down to the pace of “Crimson and Clover”. The strangest conflation of eras might be “Love Hate Baby”, whose verses are spare, snapping drum-machine-and-synth hum on the order of the Human League or Giorgio Moroder, but whose choruses insert eerie, Rasputina-esque cello groans. The lyrics, appropriately, are about old eras returning to clash with new ones. “Baby you scare my mates”, they say, which implies that since we left them, they’ve found the patience to cultivate less-well-armored friends, and started to assemble existences that don’t revolve around simply shocking people any more. I believe that this, and not those formula biopics about sitcom prodigies turning to prostitution, is why we bother forming attachments to child celebrities: even though we know the pressure does them no favors, we need narratives that reach back as far as our recollections. The Truman Show was only superficially hyperbolic; stories about how to grow up are precious, and although we can glean a lot from vignettes, it also helps to have a few examples that begin at the beginning.
Just when I think the album is going to end with some sort of ringing cliff-hanger insight to leave me eager for the next chapter, though, it concludes with the mock-metal grind of “Sid”, an unabashedly mindless anthem about, as best I can tell, a totally non-metaphorical cat. After several repetitions and some reflection, though, I’ve decided that it’s better this way. Shampoo are older, but they aren’t that old yet, and the most honest meta-message childhood stories (including stories of the tentative transition out of childhood) can deliver is that preternatural wisdom can wait. Turning from sixteen straight to sixty is not the goal. Part of the reason Jagged Little Pill and Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie mean so much to me, for example, is that I think Alanis sketches, in her own rudimentary style, a remarkable number of ageless truths, but another huge component of my affection is that I’m so sure she’ll look back on some of these songs with intense chagrin. Proud, intense chagrin, I hope. If Shampoo survive to make a dozen more albums, they may decide that this kitty-cat trifle, all by itself, is a sufficient failure of artistic self-awareness for them to say that their adult career didn’t begin with Absolute Shampoo. But so what? So they weren’t quite ready to close the cupboard. Challenges intrude on their own schedule, not ours, yet we allow ourselves to feel much too much pressure to face them as they arrive. Childhood is accelerated. Every phase of our life is accelerated. Pop is temperamentally suited to remind us of many things, but there are a few lessons for which it may be one of the last teachers. Like “Life is long enough”. And “‘Once in a lifetime’ is fairy-tale logic, no challenge is unique”. And sometimes, knowing yourself is knowing when to suddenly smile, stand up, skip out of the room, and leave your empty chair behind to shrug at the grown-ups and say “Die as fast as you want. I’m not ready.”

trouble live on totp

promo video for viva la megababes

on the zig and zag show

rare clip of the girls on the weird and wonderful zig and zag show. includes a short interview and a performance of trouble, complete with hand-puppets in wigs!

« previous |