Note: I actually wrote this some time ago, as the first of a planned series of girl-group essays. That never materialized (turns out nobody wants an essay series about a fairly niche, long past, deliberately non-boundary-pushing musical moment), so I thought I might as well give this one a home.
In 2000 or 2001, a
boy lay on a bed in a room in his grandmother's house. I put him there. He was
serious, beautiful, and had an obscurely tragic but also beautiful end awaiting
him later in the story (train tracks, autumn, dusk). But first, he turned on
his grandmother's beat-up old radio, tuned permanently to the oldies station,
and heard a song.
He's so fine, oh yeah
Gotta be mine, oh yeah
Sooner or later, oh yeah
I hope it's not later, oh yeah
Like anyone with
ears, the serious boy could not escape the perfection of the song's four-part
harmonies—and that low, simple lead line free of melisma or flourish, the voice
confident not from any sense of bravado but because
its beauty was self-evident and the singer had never learned to doubt it. But he
found them as empty as the nonsense sounds that kicked the whole thing off, doo lang doo lang doo lang; they seemed
to be taking place in another world entirely, cotton-candy-light and devoid of
engagement with the serious truths. Some kind of teenage thing, and although he
was a teenage boy if you wanted to be annoyingly literal about the whole thing,
he was definitely not that kind of
teenage boy (despite being in physical description quite a lot like the
soft-spoken, wavy-haired object of the Chiffons' affections, come to think of
it; we teen girls being predictable, after all). But the 117 seconds of the
song granted him a moment of hazy weightlessness that was the closest he would
come to levity; it could not save him from the train tracks, the autumn, the
dusk.
I wrote this insubstantial
tragic dreamboat into existence around age 15. My grandmother too listened to
the doo-woppier oldies station when she listened to music at all; she could not
brook even jazz, finding it hard to understand why anyone would want to listen
to "a bunch of people playing different songs at once." (My
protagonist would have certainly liked jazz, and ideally been better schooled
in it than I, with my collection in the genre consisting of Bird at the Apollo and a best-of
Thelonious Monk disc.) But I did not discover the song in my grandmother's
house, though I certainly lay back on my bed at home getting lost in those warm
female voices as my protagonist did, especially in moments of soul-flattening
misery. And I must have been less successfully armored with seriousness than
he, because the voices did not just drift pleasantly by but reached into my
chest, and had I needed them to, I was soft enough that they could probably
have saved me.
At that time my
musical diet consisted mainly of punk (preferably political) and riot grrrl and
those two jazz CDs, with a little lesbian folk around the edges. I hadn't heard
"He's So Fine" until my better-rounded best friend and bandmate put
it on one of her enviably eclectic mix tapes. I hadn't heard anything like it
at all before. In the middle of The Clash and the Germs and Parliament
Funkadelic and probably a few joke songs from Sifl and Olly, there opened up
this impossibly brief window of consuming sweetness.
I barely understood
what it was—I may not have even known the name of the group, or when it was
made, at first—but I copied it onto every mix tape I made for several years. It
didn't occur to me that there would be more where that came from. The internet
was not yet an obvious source of music; one didn't necessarily expect that even
current bands would have websites, much less one from 1962. It wasn't until I
got to college that I began to accumulate some context for that luminous
single. Eventually I used some Christmas money to order the remarkable One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group
Sounds Lost & Found Rhino box set. When it arrived I sat down in my
dorm room and popped the first CD in, and was promptly overwhelmed to the point
of welling eyes and helpless gaping grin. I hadn't been aware that there had
once been all these people dedicated to what seemed the pure pursuit of the
most perfect sonic beauty, weaving the richest-sounding pop arrangements I'd
ever heard (strings, chimes, Latin horns!) around the variously warm, shy,
bratty, bracing voices of very young women.
There is a sense in
which I seem to have aged in reverse between the ages of, say, 14 and 21.
Around the time I heard my first Chiffons song I was beginning to make a
project of not wanting everything I couldn't have. The emotionally elegant
silhouettes who drifted through my early fictions were a little better at it
than I was; they shook off love and family and camaraderie quite lightly, just
the opposite of these singing girls with their two or three ever-present
friends in harmony, their advice-giving parents, their successes in love or
their heartbreaks so gladly shared. Even if I'd had more than the one song, I
wouldn't have been quite ready for their unembarrassed youth.
Instead I formed an
all-girl punk band whose lyrical content comprised half sociopolitical ranting
and half Dadaist goofiness—absolutely no room for love songs or other girly
stuff. We were already not taken seriously as things stood. Not that we should
have been, possessing as little sense of songcraft and basic musicianship as we
did, but it wasn't just that; it was the ostensibly progressive dudes who let
slip that they felt weird about booking more than one female-fronted act on a
bill, it was an older female friend saying that she just didn't like the way
women's voices sounded. And so on.
Girl groups around that time called to mind
Destiny's Child, or the Spice Girls, whom I'd loved along with everyone in
sixth grade.
"They're not
really musicians," my mother's boyfriend explained to me one day. I'd just
gotten a cassingle of "2 Become 1" from a friend for my birthday—my
least favorite of their hits, what with all the uncomfortable sexiness, but I
clutched it proudly as a token of admission to a cultural realm where even the popular
girls hung out. "They don't play any instruments. All they do is dance
around and sing." I think I just nodded. His guitars filled a corner of
our living room and his classic-rock cover band sometimes practiced in our
basement at volumes so eardrum-battering that I escaped to the roof of the
garage. I hated him and would have given up my entire tape collection for him
to teach me how to shred and use what he called the wang bar. Instead he bought
a guitar for my uninterested little sister, which I appropriated the moment she
abandoned it.
This sense of
rock-dude authenticity was just in the air if you saw yourself as someone who
cared about music. So I, too, expressed disdain for women who did nothing but
stand there and sing; at least I wrote songs, and clawed at a few chords
between shouted lyrics. I wasn't good, but I could be real, sort of, and sing
about things that mattered.
I suppose you could
see it as a subconscious counter-rebellion, a few years later, when I sat
rocked open by the voices of an idealized, pastel-toned mainstream girl culture
four decades gone. I was certainly delighted when I learned that authentic
rock-guy George Harrison had unknowingly absorbed "He's So Fine" and
rewritten it as "My Sweet Lord"—and been successfully sued for
plagiarism. (Not that I have anything against George Harrison; the pleasure was
in the principle of the thing.) But in fact the girl-group sound was perhaps
the first body of music I loved that didn't
come packaged with an argument for its worth. It would not help me better
engage with my peers; it would not help me understand the ineffable musical
truths of a Bach or a Beethoven; it was not saying anything of political
importance; it would not connect me to a venerable American tradition. Its
beauty was superfluous in a way that, had it occurred in nature, would have
seemed evidence for the loving generosity of divine creation; you could see why
Phil Spector's phrase "little symphonies for the kids" needn't have
been exactly dismissive. Yes, the songs were there to make money—as the rough
and careless treatment of the Chiffons and so many other girl groups by their
labels would attest—but they were much better than they had to be for
commercial purposes, if never five seconds longer.
For instance, take
Judy Craig's voice shifting from playful to plaintive in the space of two bars,
the backup girls so blocking out the session players' on-the-clock plunking
that it takes me a few listens in a row to even register that they're doing something
back there. How to put it into words, what these inconsequential sounds do to
me? Doo lang, doo lang, doo lang.
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