liner notes

by lynn rapoport

Girl talk

THE OTHER NIGHT a friend and I sat outside at Zeitgeist and talked about gender, identity, and the names people call one another. No one came over to beat us up – the music was loud, and a fine mist like insect pee was having a sedative effect. Which was different from the night before, on the way home from Rebel Girl, when the 14 Mission got really quiet, and a feminist crackhead threw a rock at me. I feel certain she had her reasons, and to her I dedicate this column.

My mind, like Britney's, is on girlhood, womanhood, and the trials that lie in between. As in, not a girl, not yet a woman, probably won't ever get there, owing to being stuck in a time-warped developmental stunt. I've been listening to the All Girl Summer Fun Band's self-titled sugar fix, and it's messing with my head. I keep trying to reconcile the hair-salon dryers on the cover and the sounds of Saturday-morning-cartoon teen angels singing their hearts out with the characters in the book I'm reading, Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues. Butches dance with their femmes in bars; cops with clubs and pensions strip them bare and rape them and steal their identities. It's early-'60s Buffalo, N.Y., a short, ugly interstate ride from where I learned how to be a girl, though not a very good one. In fact, the narrator visits my hometown, but the cops are no different there, and she ends up in a jail cell with teeth falling out of her head. The teen angels sing through my headphones. It's like eating cotton candy while watching someone get the shit kicked out of them.

Somewhere in the northwest, the All Girl Summer Fun Band – Ari Douangpanya, Kathy Foster, Kim Baxter, and Jen Sbragia – are mooning away the daylight hours, trailing around the house in flip-flops, talking on the phone with girlfriends about boyfriends. They seem like a sweet bunch – though one song refers to a whore of a boyfriend-stealer, and the narrator takes revenge by rearranging all of the bitch's CDs. Basically, they stick together. Sbragia's sketched them out on the back of the liner notes, with Foster's long cartoon arms stretched around her bandmates' shoulders in a display of solidarity. They even wrote themselves a theme song – which makes them seem even more like pen-and-ink TV characters.

Back in the early '90s, I had a thing for cartoons. I became infatuated with German pop band Throw That Beat in the Garbagecan!, whose Not Particularly Silly and Large Marge Sent Us were corny enough to puke at. Vocals were shared by a boy named Klaus Cornfield and two girls named Iwie Candy and Lotsi Lapislazuli, and they paid tribute to the B-52's and sang sentimental ditties about chocolate and reminded me of the weeks I spent traipsing around the Netherlands sleeping with someone else's boyfriend, from whom I learned about Throw That Beat and Glenn Danzig in the same day, speaking of solidarity and rearranging CDs.

Which is to say, I have a long history with summer fun bands – dating back to when I didn't worry about what kind of girl I was – and I snatched this album off the shelf last week like I'd been standing in line for years, since Throw That Beat broke up, since Tiger Trap broke up, since Go Sailor broke up, since my entire collection of Rose Melberg projects went missing. I still love that torn-up sugar-baby sound – sorrows drowned in sweetly fragile harmonies and jangly guitars. But I think we're drifting apart, like ninth-grade girls all across the land.

Maybe it's because it's hardly ever summer here, or because I've never owned flip-flops, or because these days I'm so fatigued that if I moon around for too long in one place, I end up falling asleep. Or maybe you can only have so many summer fun bands on your mind, no matter how well they croon, because the Shangri-Las sound starts to crowd out too many things, and then someone hits you with a rock.

That's what happened on the bus – I just wasn't paying attention. And that's what it feels like listening to this album, standing on street corners dreaming while the light changes colors, bouncing up and down on my heels while Sbragia and her friends sing about guys on scooters and the crush-sick stalking of gay boys. I wonder what I look like. My skirt's too short. Sometimes my life seems so unreal it might not exist. But I'm nothing like those girls in the band without my headphones on. And who knows – maybe they're nothing like that either. The book I'm reading describes events happening decades ago, but the songs I'm listening to sound like something you'd lock in the cornerstone of a building with a poodle skirt and a signed copy of Meet the Beatles! The angels sound better when I think about that. They sound like girls having fun on some other planet no one's ever seen.