Quirk Your Enthusiasm (20)

By: Tor Aarestad
August 20, 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!

“LITTLE GIRLS” | OINGO BOINGO | 1981

What to do with “Little Girls”? On its face a pop confection sung by Danny Elfman, a man who loves children, it seems. Countless radio listeners have sung along to its relentlessly infectious chorus, mimetically loving little girls: “They make me feel so good!” The awakening of just the tiniest fraction of the critical faculties creates the uncomfortable feeling that something is up, however. Sting beat Elfman out of the gate with his moody vignette on Lolita a year earlier (“Don’t Stand so Close to Me”), but “Little Girls” plays it for laughs with a manic, unreflective Humbert Humbert singing his own story. Years later in interviews Elfman has described the Elfman of Only a Lad as a Stephen Colbert-like satirist, trying to get a rise out of everyone with songs such as “Little Girls” and the reactionary “Capitalism,” later adopted by the right as an anthem. There is a line, though, that runs from Jonathan Swift, at one end, to an adolescent Hitler skit at the other. Although the Elfman of 1981 is clearly not at the level of Colbert, it’s not clear where he falls on that line. He takes Nabokov’s pathological, but also humane and tragic Humbert and makes him flatly comic; what kind of satire is he attempting? Bret Easton Ellis did something like this with Patrick Bateman in American Psycho but did it in the interest of picking away at the empty culture of consumerism and blind ambition, or something. Perhaps Elfman’s pedophilic narrator was a reductio ad absurdum tale of American culture’s fetishization of young women as trophy partners for older men. Maybe. I still love “Little Girls” but sometimes I worry when I sing along that I’m an audience member at Sacha Baron Cohen’s honkytonk, singing “Throw the Jew Down the Well.”

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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 (20)

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