STOOGE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)

By: James Parker
October 11, 2023

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of proto-punk records from the Sixties (1964–1973, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn. Also check out our proto-punk playlist (a work in progress) at Spotify.

THE MODERN LOVERS | “SHE CRACKED” | 1972

What a perfect song. Kind of a mean song.

Jonathan/the narrator (we shouldn’t assume they are necessarily one and the same) is in love with this soulful, compelling, fast-burning person, and she’s hurt him. She has left him behind, in a bowl of granola, to go off with other men and do wild unhealthy things. And now she has ‘cracked’ — cracked up, freaked out, got hospitalized, something. Jonathan’s response is ungenerous but all-too-human: he judges her, blaming her lifestyle and congratulating himself on his own mental hygiene. She’d eat garbage, eat shit, get stoned… I! Stay alone! Eat HEALTH food! At HOME! The abstemious Modernist condemns the flailing Romantic. He wags the finger of discipline. He’s in denial, of course, about the depth of his own pain, so our sympathy is all with the cracked woman, because at least she’s fucking alive. This is the broken heroine who would soon reappear — zapped by strange and terrifying currents — in Joy Division’s ‘She’s Lost Control.’

So we have these lyrics of honest-dishonest nastiness — Lou Reed nastiness, Bob Dylan nastiness — which are pretty proto-punk in themselves, and then we have the music, which is a miracle. The whole song, as the Modern Lovers play it, is a kind of deconstructed drone, chopped up and then accelerated: clanging chords of supercharged Velvets guitar, emergency pulses of organ-honk, and a planar, one-note vocal line from which Jonathan will occasionally diverge to get his point across. She CRACKED/ I’m hurt… An incredible, vicious lament. This is 1972, remember. 1972! David Robinson, on drums, is economical and thunderously propulsive. Was anybody else playing drums like this, in 1972? Maybe some motorik Germans. But not with this kind of rumble and attack. He’s basically inventing Paul Cook, from the Sex Pistols: Paul Cook, whose kit would shake “as if the earth in fast thick pants were breathing.”

Like I said: perfect.

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STOOGE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mandy Keifetz on The Trashmen’s SURFIN’ BIRD | Nicholas Rombes on Yoko Ono’s MOVE ON FAST | David Cantwell on ? and the Mysterians’ 96 TEARS | James Parker on The Modern Lovers’ SHE CRACKED | Lynn Peril on The Pleasure Seekers’ WHAT A WAY TO DIE | Lucy Sante on The Count Five’s PSYCHOTIC REACTION | Jonathan Lethem on The Monkees’ YOUR AUNTIE GRIZELDA | Adam McGovern on ELP’s BRAIN SALAD SURGERY | Mimi Lipson on The Shaggs’ MY PAL FOOT FOOT | Eric Weisbard on Frances Faye’s FRANCES AND HER FRIENDS | Annie Zaleski on Suzi Quatro’s CAN THE CAN | Carl Wilson on The Ugly Ducklings’ NOTHIN’ | Josh Glenn on Gillian Hill’s TUT, TUT, TUT, TUT… | Mike Watt on The Stooges’ SHAKE APPEAL | Peter Doyle on The Underdogs’ SITTING IN THE RAIN | Stephanie Burt on Pauline Oliveros’s III | Marc Weidenbaum on Ornette Coleman’s WE NOW INTERRUPT FOR A COMMERCIAL | Anthony Miller on Eno’s NEEDLES IN THE CAMEL’S EYE | Gordon Dahlquist on The Sonics’ STRYCHNINE | David Smay on The New York Dolls’ HUMAN BEING | Michael Grasso on the 13th Floor Elevators’ YOU’RE GONNA MISS ME | Holly Interlandi on Death’s ROCK’N’ROLL VICTIM | Elina Shatkin on Bobby Fuller’s I FOUGHT THE LAW | Brian Berger on The Mothers of Invention’s WHO ARE THE BRAIN POLICE? | Peggy Nelson on The Kingsmen’s LOUIE LOUIE.

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

STOOGE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)

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