Bow Wow Wow

Depending on your point of view, Malcolm McLaren is either one of today’s greatest impresarios, or one of modern music’s most opportunistic swindlers. After a visit to New York in the mid-70’s, he brought the look of the burgeoning “punk” scene back to London. He put the torn t-shirts and bad hair together with some bondage items from the fetish clothing shop he was running called Sex. He grabbed a couple of the disaffected youth that liked to loiter about the store, put them in this new fashion, encouraged them to sneer and gob, and named them The Sex Pistols. Bang! Punk, at least the British variety, was “born”.

For a brief time, he managed another popular British band, Adam & the Ants – who chose the pirate look as their fashion statement. Then he stole the Ants out from under Adam, took a 14-year-old girl he met at a laundromat, and created Bow Wow Wow. They are easily best known for their cover of the Strangelove’s I Want Candy, but that was after many of us (by us, I mean cool people) lost interest in them. Their original sound was very tribal, propelled by Dave Barbarossa’s masterful Burundi-style drumming. They also have the dubious distinction of producing the album with the longest title in my collection, 1981’s See Jungle, See Jungle, Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over Go Ape Crazy, from which this track was taken. This cut is actually an instrumental version of an earlier song, Prince of Darkness, and I think the loss of words greatly enhances this track. There’s a note on the soundtrack to the Talking Heads' performance film Stop Making Sense that says that singing is a trick to get people to listen to music longer than they normally would, but for me, the opposite is often true. I almost always prefer instrumental music, and more often than not it’s the lyrics and/or singing style that get in the way of my enjoyment of the music. Of course, it is easier to sing along when there are words, and that is a pleasure that should not be underestimated.

After graduating from Interlochen and deciding definitively that the life of a dancer was not one that I wanted to pursue, I decided to see if I could get fired up about my academic interests by going to college. Applying to three – University of Michigan, Northwestern, and University of Chicago – I ended up choosing U of C because of its location (in a big city that was not too far away from home), its reputation as an Ivy League caliber school, and the fact that they gave me the most financial aid. It remains the single worst decision of my life.

A lot of students who come to Interlochen are shocked at the caliber of their peers. Used to being the star actor or writer or musician in their home town, many students found that they were merely mediocre at Interlochen. The same thing is true with academics at U of C. Everybody who goes to U of C was at the top of their class, so the scale is completely different. While I was an exceptional academic student at Interlochen (which has a fairly intense college-prep program), I was definitely in the middle of the pack at U of C, and had to struggle mightily to keep up. I made the mistake of being a particularly good guesser on the incoming placement tests and got put into a level of calculus that was way over my head. But the worst thing about the U of C were the students. I am a self-admitted geek, and proud of it, but U of C harbored a whole new level of geekdom. Intensely intellectual with close to no social skills whatsoever, the student body in general gave great support to the notion that you can’t be smart and pretty at the same time. Creative pursuits were openly mocked and I quickly found myself a stranger in a strange land, cut off from all that had become important to me in high school. I tried to soldier bravely on and adapt, but I knew I was in big trouble after the Halloween dance. Dances at Interlochen (and, later, at Hampshire) were very freeform affairs, where any clothing, dance style, or choice of partners (even no partner) was perfectly acceptable. I went to the Halloween dance by myself, wearing, among other things, part of an American flag (I was going for a real mixed-bag piraty sort of look), and danced alone in my inimitable style for a couple of hours.

The next day, I got into a heated argument with some of my hallmates about wearing the flag and how it’s a symbol and blah blah blah. I didn’t take it seriously, nor did I budge from my position that it was a perfectly acceptable thing to dance in, but it immediately set me in stark contrast to everybody else on my hall. Then I got an anonymous phone call from somebody saying that if they ever saw me dance that way again, they’d come kick my ass. I laughed out loud at the absurdity, sure it was a joke, but whoever it was repeated their threat and spat it out with such venom that it gave me chills. Where the hell was I? I had apparently fallen through the looking glass and ended up in uptight conservative land. And it all went downhill from there.

In the spring, U of C held a dance in one of the cafeterias to help students blow off steam. There was plenty of steam built up by this point, but a school dance wasn’t really what that crowd needed. Or, rather, it was what they needed, but not what they wanted. They really just wanted to get back to those books (at U of C, the libraries were open 24 hours a day and there were sleeping pits in some places were you could take a quick nap without having to actually go back to your room, saving you half-an-hour of valuable study time that otherwise would’ve been lost by going outside and walking around). I was on the verge of committing academic suicide and had started letting all my classes slide. So, even though I was buried under a mountain of homework and was teetering on the edge of failing all of my classes, I happily blew off my paper to go to the dance, although this time I left my flag at home. Besides, whom did U of C get to play the spring dance? Why, none other than Bow Wow Wow. I had to go.

I was stunned that such a (relatively) hip band would be playing such a square venue, but apparently I wasn’t as stunned as the band was. It’s true that it was cool to appear bored and disaffected during shows at that time, but Bow Wow Wow carried this principle to an extreme. They were practically yawning and checking their watches in the middle of the first song. The musicianship was excellent, the execution flawless, and the performance absolutely lifeless. I did jump up and down for a few minutes until the overwhelming ennui of both the performers and the audience got to be too much and I joined everybody else in just standing around looking at our collective shoes, waiting for the “fun” to be over so we could go back to the library and study.