[1980-1984 Best Songs]
Billboard Top 100, 1982, #63
We live in an age ruled by the pre-teen girl: American Idol, Miley Cyrus, Twilight. Everywhere you look, "tween" girls are a multi-billion dollar economic powerhouse. For over twenty years now, Pop music has focused first and foremost on this group.
But not long ago, no demographic got less attention. There was a time when an 11-year-old girl was expected to be respectful, hard-working, humble, and mostly quiet. They tended to wear simple jeans or long dresses, and had lots of long, straight hair. Their favorite TV show: Little House on the Prairie. A girl this age in 1978 was the wallflower at the School Dance of Life.
Enter the Go-Go's. In a convertible. In giant sunglasses and short skirts. In big hoop earrings, and 80 pounds of costume jewelry. LOUD in every sense.
Everything changed.
To say this new image and sound captured the imagination of girls everywhere is an understatement. Girls this age have always had that penchant for fandom, but the Go-Go's (and soon after, Madonna) reflected their own style and personality back on them. In a sense, they were fanatics for themselves.
A tween girl isn't going to set the song-quality bar very high, but Our Lips Are Sealed is - surprisingly - a perfect Pop song. It's almost as if it was made by a machine. It's the right length, has hooks in all the right places, has that A-A-B-A song form, with a sweet little bridge in the middle, giving about 15 seconds to catch your breath like you might on an amusement park ride. Then one last flourish, and a little exclamation point right there at the end.
I can almost see the little heart-with-the-happy-face on the back page of my junior high school yearbook.
Billboard Top 100, 1982, #63
We live in an age ruled by the pre-teen girl: American Idol, Miley Cyrus, Twilight. Everywhere you look, "tween" girls are a multi-billion dollar economic powerhouse. For over twenty years now, Pop music has focused first and foremost on this group.
But not long ago, no demographic got less attention. There was a time when an 11-year-old girl was expected to be respectful, hard-working, humble, and mostly quiet. They tended to wear simple jeans or long dresses, and had lots of long, straight hair. Their favorite TV show: Little House on the Prairie. A girl this age in 1978 was the wallflower at the School Dance of Life.
Enter the Go-Go's. In a convertible. In giant sunglasses and short skirts. In big hoop earrings, and 80 pounds of costume jewelry. LOUD in every sense.
Everything changed.
To say this new image and sound captured the imagination of girls everywhere is an understatement. Girls this age have always had that penchant for fandom, but the Go-Go's (and soon after, Madonna) reflected their own style and personality back on them. In a sense, they were fanatics for themselves.
A tween girl isn't going to set the song-quality bar very high, but Our Lips Are Sealed is - surprisingly - a perfect Pop song. It's almost as if it was made by a machine. It's the right length, has hooks in all the right places, has that A-A-B-A song form, with a sweet little bridge in the middle, giving about 15 seconds to catch your breath like you might on an amusement park ride. Then one last flourish, and a little exclamation point right there at the end.
I can almost see the little heart-with-the-happy-face on the back page of my junior high school yearbook.
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