BRICKS ARE HEAVY
In its ecstasy over the next big thing, the music press may be pulling its punches in a misguided attempt to level the playing field: L7 may have something, but it just doesn’t live up to the hype. The grungy glow just can’t obscure the band’s flaws.
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L7 resists ghettoization as part of the “foxcore” movement, the current crop of female-led bands whose postpunk music is characterized by angry feminist content. But the scarcity of women in rock ‘n’ roll means that whether they like it or not, their gender is bound to be noticed.
The Runaways’ sex was part of their shtick, a marketing angle. Rounding up a handful of adolescent girls, LA producer Kim Fowley created the never-before-seen spectacle of leatherettes in platform boots and tube tops playing chunky garage metal. At the time the notion of an all-girl band was so suspect that Fowley included the line “All instruments played by the Runaways” on the jacket of their 1977 Mercury release Waitin’ for the Night. (He also felt compelled to take some credit himself, slapping on the brand “Produced and Directed by Kim Fowley.”) An early signature song, “Cherry Bomb,” was immortalized on the sound track of Eve Plumb’s post-Jan Brady trash classic Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway. The U.S. music press was not kind–writing the band off as a dog-and-pony show–and like the fictional Spinal Tap, the Runaways found their greatest success in Japan.
Unfortunately delivery can’t always compensate for shallow lyrics, and L7 has more than its share of clunkers. This is hardly a fatal error (if even an error) in rock ‘n’ roll. The canon bulges with dumb lyrics sung with great heart. Bit in “Pretend We’re Dead,” an admirable stab at hard-pop melody, the guitar hook and nicely underplayed backing vocal is too smart a musical package for doggerel like “Turn the tables with our unity / They’re not a moral nor majority / Wake up and smell the coffee / Or just say no to individuality.” That “coffee” line is wrestled into place with all the subtlety of a Hallmark reject. And presented in Sparks’s monotone, the volatile issues of censorship and activism never rise above mere abstraction.
In both their lyrics and their weak delivery, L7 hang back, circling their subjects at arm’s length. In the September issue of Vanity Fair, Hole’s Courtney Love accuses L7 bassist Jennifer Finch of stealing lyrics. It’s hard to decide which notion is more absurd: the idea of someone plagiarizing such inferior lines, or someone admitting to having originally written them.
