Quirk Your Enthusiasm (19)

By: Deb Chachra
August 19, 2016

One of 25 installments in a series of posts analyzing and celebrating a few of our favorite New Wave songs from c. 1977–1982. Josh Glenn’s series introduction is here, and you can listen to the QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM playlist here. Enjoy!

“HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL” | ROUGH TRADE | 1980

In the summer of 1981, one of the biggest songs in Canada, and certainly the most controversial, was Rough Trade’s “High School Confidential,” the second single from their album Avoid Freud. The lyrics are about the narrator’s lust for a girl at the school (couched quite explicitly in one notorious line; the big radio station in Toronto paid for the band to re-record the song with bowdlerized lyrics), and the singer was Carole Pope. The song ended up having a huge impact; it’s considered to be one of the first lesbian-themed Top 20 singles anywhere, and artists like kd lang and Peaches cite both Rough Trade and this song in particular as an influence.

As a ten-year-old girl, I didn’t know any of this. What I knew was this: First, the song didn’t sound like much else that I had heard on the radio. It opens with now-classic New Wave synthesizers, which reappear occasionally throughout the song, but as soon as Carole Pope’s vocals come in, it’s clear that it’s something else. The song is now about Pope’s low, husky voice and theatrical delivery, set to a relentless beat that evokes a swaggering strut down the school corridors. It sounded dangerous. (It still sounds dangerous, in fact.) And I knew it was an incursion from the world of being a teenager, even though I didn’t understand a lot of the song (like, who’s Anita Ekberg?). As an even younger child, I had found myself reading Roald Dahl’s decidedly adult short story collections (such as Switch Bitch) because I had precociously used the card catalog to find more books by the author of some of my favorite books, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. As with “High School Confidential”, I don’t know how much I understood of Dahl’s stories, but I knew there was another world coming for me. And I wanted to go there.

***

QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Mark Kingwell on Soft Cell’s TAINTED LOVE | Joanne McNeil on Gary Numan’s METAL | Devin McKinney on Suicide’s FRANKIE TEARDROP | Douglas Wolk on Family Fodder’s SAVOIR FAIRE | Elina Shatkin on Marianne Faithfull’s BROKEN ENGLISH | Steph Burt on Altered Images’ HAPPY BIRTHDAY | Greg Rowland on Jilted John’s JILTED JOHN | Gordon Dahlquist on XTC’s RESPECTABLE STREET | Adrienne Crew on D-Day’s TOO YOUNG TO DATE | Jonathan Lethem on The Blue Nile’s I LOVE THIS LIFE | Josh Glenn on Tim Curry’s I DO THE ROCK | Molly Wright Steenson on Missing Persons’ WORDS | Anthony Miller on The Nails’ 88 LINES ABOUT 44 WOMEN | Luc Sante on The Normal’s WARM LEATHERETTE | Mimi Lipson on Dolly Mixture’s HOW COME YOU’RE SUCH A HIT WITH THE BOYS, JANE? | Tim Carmody on Talking Heads’ LIFE DURING WARTIME | Ingrid Schorr on Ian Dury’s CLEVOR TREVER | Adam McGovern on Lene Lovich’s LUCKY NUMBER | Deb Chachra on Rough Trade’s HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL | Tor Aarestad on Oingo Boingo’s LITTLE GIRLS | David Smay on The B-52’s’ DANCE THIS MESS AROUND | Jessamyn West on Blondie’s HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE | Drew Daniel on The Human League’s MARIANNE | Erik Davis on Tuxedomoon’s TIME TO LOSE | Dan Fox on Thomas Dolby’s EUROPA & THE PIRATE TWINS.

MORE ENTHUSIASM SERIES at HILOBROW

Quirk Your Enthusiasm (19)

Categories

Tags