Dr Frank Weakly Reader for 8.09.2019
By: Frank Portman
Tags: Politics, Songs, Music, Internet, Rock And Roll

This is the “Songs about Girls” etc. edition because Sounds Radical is doing one of their limited custom pop-up offers reviving, ever so briefly, the old design of that name, denoted a “classic” by some. Here’s the pre-order link. And/or, scroll down for more details.

As for the origin of Songs about Girls: many people who have seen my band live may have noted that I often introduce songs by saying “this is a song about a girl.” I’ve done shows where that sentence is all I’ve said between songs. I’ve said it in Italian, German, Norwegian, French, and Japanese, while in those respective countries, and I even tried to do it in Welsh once, but I mangled it. It has become a kind of ironic catch-phrase, associated with me and the band as closely as any other trope or icon.

I first started doing it to taunt and mock the hardcore bands and audiences we used to play with and for when we first started out. The general feeling among that lot was that love songs, songs about girls, etc. were horribly passé and what previous generations might have called “square.” The cutting edge song topics were limited to, e.g., El Salvador, Reagan, and other vaguely articulated pastiches of poorly understood pseudo-political tropes. They were the future people of tomorrow. And they were building a new world of anarchism and agit-prop tunelessly shouted and played too fast, about the things that really mattered, i.e., Reagan and El Salvador. And I’m not even exaggerating all that much.

There was no room for songs about girls, or for pop songs at all really. And yet, pop songs about girls was the thing I liked and the thing I was trying to do, though admittedly we weren’t doing it all that well yet at the time. So, I used to say “this is a song about a girl” as a kind of act of defiance. And it worked. The response from “the scene” was uncompromisingly hostile.

But for all that, I think it’s safe to say: I won. If you were to make a list of the greatest songs ever written, say the top 50, your list might well include a punk rock tune or two, maybe even more. (Mine would.) But I very much doubt your list would contain any songs about Ronald Reagan. Unless you really want to go for it and include that “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg” song, which is great, and a choice to which I wouldn’t dream of objecting if you really like it that much. But what I’m saying is that generally speaking and to no one’s surprise, the Love Song has stood the test of time, while the Reagan Song has not.

Anyway, after we won the love song revolution and my band and label were more settled and established, the horrors of the 1980s far behind us, the gag continued, having lost a bit of its edge and purpose, but still broadly descriptive of the songs this band tended to play. And I continued to introduce songs that way. It was part of the act.

So one day, ca. 1996–7, I was in Chris Appelgren’s office at Lookout HQ, brainstorming art ideas, for general purposes, future records, and merch. We were doing our usual meandering free associating, me pacing around the room, Chris at his desk with a notebad and a pencil trying to draw everything I said. But we weren’t really getting anywhere. Then Kepi, who happened to be at Lookout for some unrelated reason at the time, and had heard the back-and-forth of our conversation through the office door-jamb, thrust open the door, stuck only his head through, and said:

“MTX: songs about girls. That’s the shirt.”

He pulled his head right back out and closed the door, but we knew he was right. Chris drew it, then mocked it up on the computer using some font, jumbling the letters and distressing it a little and it was all done in about five minutes. That Kepi knows what he’s doing. A marketing genius as it turns out.

It was our staple design from then on, revived many times, as now once again. We did lots of touring in the mid to late ’90s, and we left many of these shirts in our wake.

As to the rest of the subtitle above, it’s from a Japanese comp. from around the same time that weirdly discogs doesn’t seem to know about:

Here’s that Sounds Rad pre-order link again. More below.