Crass - Penis Envy
#2
By Craig Fitzgerald
Crass
Penis Envy
Genre: Anarcho-punk
Allen’s Rating: 3 out of 5
Craig’s Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Highlights:
Beta Motel
Where Next Columbus?
“I've got 54321
I've got a red pair of high-heels on
Tumble me over, it doesn't take much
Tumble me over, tumble me, push
In my red high-heels I've no control
The rituals of repression are so old
You can do what you like, there'll be no reprisal
I'm yours, yes I'm yours, it's my means of survival”
That song was enough to get this band charged under Britain’s Obscene Publications Act, AND THEY LOST.
The conviction was eventually overturned on appeal, but the lyrics of this song “Beta Motel” were judged “sexually provocative and obscene."
In 2020, this reads like a poem your Second Wave Feminist mom would write.
It ain’t exactly “Wet Ass Pussy.”
The bottom line here is that "Penis Envy" isn’t a great record, but it’s an amazing example of how repressed society actually was in 1981.
This record caused a sensation when it was released. It was banned in HMV, the British equivalent of Tower Records. I read this before I listened to the record, which is like listening to Pat Robertson discuss the movie “Cuties” before sitting down to actually watch it. I expected scandal. What I got was a bunch of French 13 year old girls acting like 13 year old girls.
Anyway, I dug into this record and listened to every track twice. It is very basic punk, but through the lens of Eve Libertine and Joy De Vivre, the band’s dueling frontwomen. The songs all address feminist issues, and generally take a fat shit on male privilege, the institution of marriage and the way that women were still expected to act in the Thatcher/Reagan era.
For that alone, it’s interesting.
“Interesting,” I said. Not “good.”
The bass is forward in the mix. You may not like that, but this is a punk record and that's the law. The guitar tones sound like like a Teisco plugged straight into a transistor radio, to the point that I thought something was wrong with my earbuds. Nope, it sounds like that on everything.
Every song here ends up sounding the same, with two exceptions:
1. What the Fuck? is a six-minute, forty-three second masturbatory sound collage. I would like that time back.
2. Our Wedding: It’s an unlisted track, and the story behind it is way better than the song itself. It was given away as a flexi-disc after the band placed an ad in a teen romance magazine. For the price of a stamp, you got a free record, with this sappy middle-of-the-road love song on it, ostensibly courtesy of Creative Recording And Sound Services (C.R.A.S.S.). HOLY SHIT, SUBVERSIVE. That’s what got the attention of “News of the World,” which suggested that the title of the album was “too obscene to print,” which apparently meant that “penis” had no place filthying up a proper British tabloid.
There are a couple of highlights. I thought “Where Next Columbus?” was good, focusing on the great philosophers, scientists and religious leaders of the last 2000 years. "Poison in a Pretty Pill isn't bad."
But these are all songs that are uniform in their sound, their pace and their message. Pick the opener and you’ve pretty much heard all it has to offer.
Side note: When Allen assigned this to me, he apologized, and then let me pick a record I liked from 1981. I still think I made out in the deal.
https://open.spotify.com/album/04mNlzyFbBbUYwqr1PySa3?si=qGnlr8h9SoW9sXol8XNywQ
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