There's a moment in the '80s movie classic, The Breakfast Club, when Judd Nelson, playing the school's resident juvenile delinquent,
approaches Molly Ringwald's prissy prom queen and leans over her menacingly.
"Are you a virgin?" he whispers with obvious pleasure. "I'll bet you a million dollars that you are."
The prudish Ringwald's face reacts with equal parts curiosity and disgust.
"Have you ever been felt up?" he continues, "...over the panties, no bra, Calvins rolled up in a ball on the front seat, past
eleven on a school night?"
The leering sense of sexual control that Nelson wields in the scene is startling. He's pushing the envelope, dancing around the
edges of decency, and Ringwald is enraptured. She's engrossed in the idea of a world beyond her experience-- one that Nelson only
hints at. Even when she interrupts him to say, "Do you want to make me puke?," it's obviously nothing more than an act, intended for
the benefit of three bystanders. Nelson is a frightening predator, a hungry lion on the prowl.
Watching that scene, it's impossible not to feel a little voyeuristic fascination. Judd Nelson's obviously being an evil bastard,
but there's more to it than that. His seediness is spiked with a sense of self-absorbed fun which can be felt as he eyes Ringwald
seductively. Girls Against Boys lead singer/guitarist Scott McCloud draws on a similarly complex psycho-sexual tension when he asks
in a deafening whisper, "Do you still dream?/Do you still dream like me?/Infectious, corrupted dreams," to open the band's major
label debut, Freak*On*Ica. And it's just as fascinating.
"I totally believe that, for better or worse, you've got to let yourself go," McCloud says. "Let yourself do all those things that
you want to do, that you think, 'Maybe people are going to think this is stupid.' Fuck that! Who cares?"
McCloud and the rest of Girls Against Boys-- bassist Johnny Temple, drummer Alexis Fleisig and singer/ bassist/keyboardist Eli
Janney-- have been chronicling their predatory instincts for the better part of the '90s, playing the role of indie rock's favorite
Judd Nelsons. Rising out of the independently-minded Washington D.C. hardcore scene in the late '80s, GVSB formed from the remnants
of D.C. band Soulside, where McCloud, Temple and Fleisig played with singer Bobby Sullivan (currently of the Sevens). At the time,
Eli Janney was their sound engineer.
Despite two moderately successful albums, the Soulside crew was getting tired of playing all-ages afternoon matinees, and
eventually began to unleash a startling after-hours persona. The first GVSB EP, Nineties vs. Eighties, recorded by Janney, McCloud
and Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty in 1990, was the initial vinyl incarnation of that persona. Canty dropped out of the picture when
it became clear that this was going to be more than a Soulside side-project, and Temple and Fleisig were brought aboard to replace
him. Soon after, the band uprooted and moved to New York City.
"New York doesn't really have the same kind of musical scene that Washington did," McCloud says. "At the time that we were in D.C.,
it was a small-knit musical community. There were a lot of different bands and the same people would be at every show, and most of
the people in the audience were also in bands. There was a healthy exchange of musical ideas and a really healthy competitive
spirit. D.C. made things seem really important. When you come to New York, you feel this overwhelming sense of being completely
anonymous. No one here gives a fuck about what you've been doing, and that can be a healthy thing. I think for me it felt healthy to
be kicked back on my ass like that. Everything was really incredibly daunting, and that did give us a sense of purpose."
After releasing one album, Tropic of Scorpio, on Adult Swim Records in 1992, GVSB signed with the influential, Chicago-based Touch
& Go Records. Two albums (Venus Luxure No.1 Baby, Cruise Yourself) and tireless touring found the group's strutting, hardcore
grooves developing a serious following. By 1995, some of their most ardent followers were major label A&R men, who were sure the
quartet's funked-up rock would play well to the masses. The group signed with Geffen in late 1995, but made good on their handshake
agreement with Touch & Go by delivering a third album, House of GVSB, to the independent label in 1996.
"Part of it was just the massive amount of interest that had built up over the years," McCloud says of the decision to sign with a
major label. "The interest came to a head and we realized we could get what we wanted in a contract and were in a good position to
do that. We thought, if we ever want to entertain the idea of doing this, we should probably do it now and put in our contract that
we can do this last record for Touch & Go."
Despite the band's surprising forthrightness and integrity, the deal was cause for much whoopin' and hollerin', especially in
D.C.'s staunchly independent music community. For a band raised on the do-it-yourself post-punk ethic pioneered by their friends in
Fugazi, it was hard to ignore the cries of "sell-out," even all the way up in New York while they readied themselves to record
Freak*On*Ica.
"Some people look at this album very cynically, and part of me feels like
that's good," Janney says. "That's fine. I think there should be people who are strongly supportive of the independent scene. It's
what got us to where we are."
Despite the considerable flack they got from the indie-rock community, recording for Geffen had considerable advantages. A bigger
label meant a much bigger budget, which allowed the band to record at a much more leisurely pace than they had been accustomed
to.
"We had enough time that we were able to completely lose our minds and still have time to come back," McCloud says. "To me, every
song starts with a fundamental vibe-- its essence-- that we can talk about. It's a viable thing. Then, within that, there's lots of
different things you can do with that in terms of its arrangement and everything. We had time to pull all of our hair out and then
go back to Hair Club for Men. I think that we found that you have to constantly keep stepping back into that one moment when the
whole thing clicked the very first time. If you analyze things too much, you just lose it."
With more money and more time, GVSB worked actively to expand their sonic palette into more, uh, modern directions. Freak*On*Ica,
they hoped, would reflect their burgeoning interest in-- you guessed it-- electronic music.
"When we were touring on House of GVSB," Janney explains, "it was a time when everyone in America, including myself, was getting
really sick of alternative rock as it was being marketed. The whole scene was getting a little boring, and a lot of friends of mine
were getting into 'electronic music,' as they call it now, though at the time it was just 'techno' or 'dance music.' When we were on
tour, that was all I was really listening to. So when it came down to writing the next record, I already had all these sounds and
ideas in my head about trying to make a very aggressive sounding record like we always do, but to have these sounds that were very
artificial."
Okay, so we've heard this all before from people like U2 and Madonna, and frankly.... well, it can be a little embarrassing to
watch. Here's the difference with GVSB: it works. Rather than hire Howie B. or some equally trendy "studio wizard" to produce and
engineer their album, GVSB hired Nick Launay, whose past credits don't include Kraftwerk and the Chemical Brothers, but rather the
Birthday Party and Gang of Four. Instead of simply sticking some programmed beats behind GVSB's hard-edged rock sound, Launay and
the band honed in on the things that have always been part of GVSB's appeal-- thundering drums, murky basslines, swaggering guitars,
and attitude... lots of attitude.
"Nick's an incredible engineer," says Janney. "He was very enthusiastic about trying to incorporate the new sounds into what we
do. We're not an electronic band, [and] we didn't want to become one. The way that people create that music is very mechanical; it's
all done either on computers or by machines. We recreated that feel that sounded like loops, but it was us playing it live. So we
would write these things that sounded like loops, but it was actually Alexis and I playing it together. We'd even put in little
pauses so it sounded like a loop. [But] what we found is that it's kind of hard to prevent Girls Against Boys from coming through,
no matter what."
There's no question that the suggestive sneer of "Roxy," the pounding beats of "Park Avenue," or the hip-swivelling guitar fury of
"Pleasurized" are about as Girls Against Boys as Girls Against Boys gets. On Freak*On*Ica, GVSB dive headfirst into the grooves of
electronica without relying too much on electronica's standard tools-- samplers, sequencers, drum machines, etc. The result is a
dense, swirling mix of sound noir that is only accentuated by McCloud's verbal foreplay. He plays lovingly with double (and triple)
entendre, whispering things like "I'm only on this ride/to see if I'm lucky" and "I don't care what's real/I only care how it feels"
into your ear and letting you draw your own sordid conclusions.
"I think one of the interpretations, lyrically, is that it's so dark and oppressive," McCloud says. "I've never really seen it that
way. I've always seen the humor in it; even if it's dark, there's kind of a sense of humor in the wordplay. I tried to concentrate
on letting that stuff come through a little more than it has in the past."
The music, the words, the new label, the old label, the new sounds, the old sounds, the band's incredible power of suggestion-- it
all comes through together in one spectacular moment on Freak*On*Ica's centerpiece, "Speedway." Amongst a roaring din of driving
electro-funk, McCloud sneers, "Can you do it like a machine?/Do it better than a machine?" Is he wondering aloud if their
non-electronic electronica will cut it on the dance floor? Is he asking the band if they really need the machinations of a major
label in order to better themselves? Or maybe he's just asking all the little Molly Ringwalds of the world if they can, well....
y'know.
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