No Bondage, No More: ‘Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché’
By Eve Tushnet
I first heard about the X-Ray Spex from a Riot Grrrl flier handed out at punk concerts in the mid-’90s. Their one album, Germfree Adolescents, was on a list of woman-led punk music…
“A Train to the Astral Plane”: The Cosmic Folk of Jim Sullivan and Judee Sill
Originally released one month after the Apollo 11 moon landing, Jim Sullivan’s psych-folk hidden gem UFO (1969) is characterized by a drifting kind of hopefulness. Over the floating strings and upbeat horns of The Wrecking Crew, who famously backed The Beach Boys and Phil Spector, the album’s lyrics consider alien abduction and psychic links…
From Buzz Bin to Dust Bin: Nuclear Anxiety in Belfegore’s ‘All That I Wanted’
As far as innovative 1980s music videos go, probably none is more immediately visceral and less popularly remembered than Belfegore’s “All That I Wanted.”
Spirit of the Age: The Science Fiction Aesthetic of Hawkwind
By Joe Banks
Hawkwind are an indelible part of the UK’s underground culture. It’s been over 50 years since they formed in the seedy cradle of London’s Ladbroke Grove, but they still enjoy a fanatical cult following both in Britain and around the world. They may never have scaled the commercial heights of Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, but the influence they’ve exerted on modern music is profound…
The Thrill Is Worth the Pain: Hell and Survival in Dio’s ‘The Last in Line’
The first music videos to air on MTV and broadcast television were chaotic blurts of arty nonsense defined by pastel colors, cheesy dance party theatrics, and avant-garde visual effects…
All Tomorrow’s Spaceships: Future World Orchestra’s ‘Mission Completed’
Sometimes it’s in ephemeral fragments of the culture that time travel lurks. We learn to tune out the looming monoliths of the zeitgeist the same way we learn to tune out the sky: its ubiquitousness would otherwise be oppressive…
Cottage Cosmos: Alan Jefferson’s ‘Galactic Nightmare’
Bear with me, because this might get a bit rambling: the way I see it, in a healthy world, not only would we have in hand the levers of the factories, we’d also have the tools for our own artistic fulfillment…
“Splendid Sparkling”: Donatella Rettore’s Posthuman Pop Song
“Splendido Splendente” is a post-human song before post-human was even a thing. Through the metaphor of plastic surgery, Rettore imagines a future humanity with perfect features and “pelle trasparente come un uovo di serpente” (“skin as transparent as a serpent’s egg”)…
“Twenty Years of Crawling”: Kenny Rogers’ ‘Coward of the County’ and the Vietnam Syndrome
By Jesse Walker
I can tell you the day the so-called Vietnam syndrome started to die. On November 12, 1979, four and a half years after the last American troops fled Saigon, a new single was shipped to record stores and radio stations, a ballad by the fellow who’d had a smash hit a year before with “The Gambler.”
‘You Don’t Have to Get Pregnant’: Miseducation in the Age of Sexual Revolution
In the early 1970s, scores of liberated, fertile women were eager to join the sexual revolution. Along with the diaphragm and IUD, the recently available birth control pill gave women the autonomy to decide when and if they would have children. With so many options and the pill so new, where could a woman turn to get reliable advice and information about contraception?
We Are the Mutants 