See them in a different light

An email exchange with Thomas last week and this ILM thread inspired me to unearth my cassette copy of The Bangles' Different Light. Great they weren't, but that their Billboard ambition kept them from greatness is touching in its way; and despite the number of failed mainstream accomodations there was something admirable about this California girl-band's determination to bring the work of Alex Chilton, Prince/Christopher, Paul Simon, and Jules Shear to shopping malls and Columbia House memberships. Critics slight Different Light because the once-is-enough gimmick "Walk Like An Egyptian" diverted attention from album tracks that failed to match the best of the preceding All Over the Place (1984); but ..."Egyptian" and "Manic Monday" coax the likes of "September Gurls" and "If She She Knew What She Wants" into revealing their considerable charms. Different Light epitomizes the mid-eighties dialectic: how do you wrest art from accomodation this brazen? As solid as All Over The Place is, Different Light's tensions -- how it revolts and beguiles -- never resolve with the satisfying click we experienced with its predecessor; it's constantly asking us to examine our relationship with the term "sell-out" (I tried to find contemporary parallels and came up with Celebrity Skin; too meta maybe?) . The title track is a tetchy manifesto, its harmonies and guitar fury compensating for a flaccid chorus. "Following" remains the album's sleeper: written and sung by bassist Michael Steele, it's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" recast as a threat uttered by a big-haired, dowdy, husky-voiced young woman who is herself negotiating a neutral space between her boyfriend's disinterest and intermittent lust.

But "If She Knew What She Wants" is a jangle-pop marvel, superior to anything on any Rain Parade album or even R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction, despite a synth part gunking the 12-strings and Debbi Peterson's drums. Hoffs has never recovered from the dismal farrago that was 1989's Number One hit "Eternal Flame," in which she overplayed the charm; she came on like the classic clinging-vine girlfriend who affected coyness just so's she could get your promise ring. But there's no distance between Hoffs' delivery and the lyrics of "If She Knew What She Wants"; she's so arch and knowing you can practically see the thought-bubble. What is on paper a rather smutty joke intended to be sung by a man becomes in The Bangles' hands a coded message whose irony indicts the writer and his locker-room bull. With Debbi and Vicki Peterson providing super harmonies, this is every bit as potent an example of we-got-the-beat female solidarity as The Go-Go's "This Town" or "Our Lips Are Sealed." (That The Bangles had the nerve to subsequently write and record "Eternal Flame" flashes anew, as Philip Larkin wrote, to refresh and horrify.)

PS: Their cover of "Hazy Shade of Winter" smokes. Simon & Garfunkel who?