X-Ray Spex - Germfree Adolescents
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Music CD Cover
Artist: X-Ray SpexEdition: Music CD
Published: 1991
CD Release Date: 1992-06-05
Music Label: Caroline
Soundtracks:
- The Day The World Turned Dayglo
- Obsessed WithYou
- Genetic Engineering
- Identity
- I Live Off You
- Germfree Adolescents
- Art-I-Ficial
- Let's Submerge
- Warrior In Woolworths
- I Am A Poseur
- I Can't Do Anything
- Highly Inflammable
- Age
- Plastic Bag
- I Am A Cliche
- Oh Bondage Up Yours!
Free Music Notes for Germfree Adolescents
Free Music Review: Essential punk rock: X-Ray Spex--no cliches here
Hit: 5 Stars
With a stage name that is surely one of the finest in punk rock, Poly Styrene was born Marion Elliot and, like many teens of that era, found herself an outsider. Being female and of mixed heritage didn't help either, so what'd she do? What all good misfit kids should do--start a punk band. Except, of course, she did it in 1977, when no one really knew what the hell they were doing and the whole world seemed up for grabs. X-Ray Spex did their best to see through all the phony materialistic crap of contemporary life and produced some of the coolest, most exciting three-minute punk classics you could ever listen to.
Virtually all of their songs have the basic, Ramones-style straight-ahead two-chord guitar bashing, but what sweetened it all was Laura Logic's distinctive saxophone--almost heresy in punk, but it works brilliantly. Their only album gets off to a roaring, apocalyptic start: "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" is riotous, visionary, potent. She "peers through perspex window panes" and drives her "polypropolene car"--depicting the "day-glo world" as transitory and disposable. It works marvelously. Poly's voice may take some getting used to--it's unlike any other woman's in rock'n'roll, and probably will turn off more listeners than it will attract. Their loss.
"Identity" is a corker, all wailing sax and intensity, with a vicious chorus that can be seen as both attack and compassion:
"When you look in the mirror
Do you smash it quick
Do you take the glass
and slash your wrists?
Did you do it for fame
Did you do it in a fit
Did you do it before
you read about it?"
Talk about setting the template for a future generation of rockers (male and female). These lyrics could've been written yesterday; and probably were, ripped off by some tenth-generation "punk" band who just doesn't know any better--or maybe they do, and realize this good stuff shouldn't be ignored.
What's great about Poly's lyrics is that she is at once criticizing and embracing her surroundings. Like the Sex Pistols in "Pretty Vacant," she takes other people's attitudes and perceptions towards her and turns them into virtues. "I Am a Poseur" and "I Am a Cliché" are perfect examples of this approach, which I really think is at the heart of punk rock. Almost every song here is sharp and on the mark, no wasted words, no wasted notes:
"You are just a symbol
You are just a theme
You're just another figure
for the sales machine"
The record concludes with their most famous song, "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" Excoriating, unintelligible, exhilarating, overwhelming, with Poly's voice squealing painfully, this is punk rock at its finest. It gets no better; this goes up there with "God Save the Queen" and "White Riot" as punk classics, songs that just make our shallow and decaying world more tolerable, if just for two and a half minutes.
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