Upon hearing the news, I fainted. Not (just) because I live in the Midwest where such a concert billing would likely make the front page -- and charge an admission -- but because The Knack is monumental.
I'm no music expert, so I wouldn't even try to discuss "their sound" and it's place in Music History; but The Knack holds a very important place in my music history.
You see, like most high school girls in 1978, I ran out and bought My Sharona. First, it was the 45 single (for you young pups, that's a smaller vinyl recording played at a faster speed); but as soon as it was released, I went to Get The Knack (that's the LP, dearies). And when Good Girls Don't hit the airwaves, well, things changed.
In that flushing-heat sort of way.
While My Sharona was full of euphemisms enough to embarrass my virginal self, Good Girls Don't was much more explicit. "Wishing you could get inside her pants" was bad enough, but "Til she's sitting on your face" moved past an idea to the very threat of action -- and one that was loaded with fears.
It wasn't just that my adolescent insecurities had me thinking my too-thick-thighs (which, by the way, I would love to have back -- I only imagined they were huge) would result in suffocation should I attempt such a position; but I knew something else.
I may have been a virgin, but I'd been masturbating long enough, well enough, to know that I was not a girl, good or otherwise, who could get off from sitting on a guy's face. Unless he had a tongue like Jim Carrey in Earth Girls Are Easy (sorry, that wouldn't be for another decade) a giraffe, no face was gonna please me.
Somehow this self-knowledge disrupted the song. And my mind.
I flushed with the naughty heat of sexual knowledge, and blushed with shame that I wouldn't like to do what I was supposed to do. Too bad to be The Good Girl; somehow defective or otherwise unable to be The Bad Girl.
Back then, labels weren't bad things -- quite the opposite, labels were identity. Without one I was stuck in no woman's land.
The notion that it was only a song, that coming by clit or g-spot was really irrelevant, these things escaped me. Like the idea that my thighs were too fat, such beliefs colored my world.
And that color was red.
But not the cool red of a scarlet letter that I could wear with some sort of pride, but the awkward flushed red of shame.
I have outgrown such strange beliefs. I may say that I'd kill to have those "fat thighs" again; but really, I'm happy with the even larger ones I have now. I may not enjoy sitting on my husband's face; but I do know that I won't suffocate him if & when I would. I may still be of the hotly debated no-clit-coming women; but I do know how to please myself, with and without partners. And while all of this makes me neither "good" nor "bad", I no longer worry about such things. Those labels, like many others, simply do not matter.
Anymore.
But still, whenever I hear Good Girls Don't, I become red again. Colored in the memory of an age & time where labels were more than comforting, they were the knowledge of where I fit in -- the public acknowledgment of me. That was more important than self knowledge.
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