To the extent that we mean anything at all by Girl Power, as something separate from People Power, Woman Power, Lesbian Power, or any other related cause for which there is no serious musical shortage of effective advocates, then surely Shampoo are the British girl-group who carry the flag. They are manufactured icons, and their trumpeted independence exists only within the carefully delineated borders of their producers' pre-fab dioramas. Shampoo, too, rely on their producer to provide most of their music, but in Shampoo's case his work no more undermines their essential quasi-pubescent impudence than the writhing women in a Whitesnake video somehow make that band less masculine. Regardless, Shampoo occupies an important place in my cartography of recent music, and Kenickie initially gets theirs by reference to it. They have begun to sense, I think, that the power to make every night a glittering spectacle merely by imposing your fervid restlessness on it fades with age, and even shoplifting is starting to lose its thrill, but they perceive, at the same time, that life only gets to slot you into a mold if you hold still for it.
Youth is too frantic.
Integral to Shampoo's version of Girl Power, far from the Spice Girls' camera-conscious strut, is the idea that girls' courses hardly intersect with the rest of the world's. True Girl Power freedom is the independence of photons skimming through nuclei untouched, or of hummingbirds nesting behind the ears of ineffectually irritated giants. What moves too fast to be seen can never be crushed. I want to see your room. The adult world is like Charlie Brown's parents, making inarticulate sounds from somewhere always offstage.