The Fantastic Ms Fox
and other anima
…the splendidly ambiguous expression fox, which emanates from the Chicago ghetto.
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, ‘Abuse’
There cannot be too many songs like Mark Lindsay’s ‘Arizona’, songs that stand as egregious examples of bad faith at one time in one’s life, to be appreciated later as the existential documents they are. I think my initial problem with ‘Arizona’, as a kid weaned on the Beatles and T Rex, was the big plagal chorus; there isn’t enough harmonic or melodic interest here for a chorus this big, and it annoyed me that the singer and arranger pretended there was, in a way so shamelessly pop as to undermine the song’s rock pretensions as much as the string arrangement did. But hearing ‘Arizona’ later as a putatively grown-up songwriter, I was intrigued the way my memory of my exasperation at its uncoolness was interacting with my new understanding of the lyric and the really-quite-good chordplay in the verses. The singer of ‘Arizona’ is the unhippest dude in America; he begins the song by pleading that his new hippy wildchild love, miraculously caught passing through his one-horse hometown, should straighten up and settle down with him.
She must belong to San Francisco
She must have lost her way
Postin' a poster of Poncho and Cisco
One California day
She said she believes in Robin Hood and brotherhood
And colours of green and grey
And all you can do is laugh at her
Doesn't anybody know how to pray?
Arizona, take off your rainbow shades
Arizona, have another look at the world
My my
Arizona, cut off your Indian braids
Arizona, hey won'tcha go my way
Mmmm strip off your pride you're acting like a teeny-bopper runaway child
And scrape off the paint from the face of a little town saint
She’s rad, he’s trad. But by the end of the song, he’s accepted that his only choice is to adopt her lifestyle and, indeed, lead her to San Francisco as her champion. His best chance is to be even more into the hippie dream than she is, at least until she gets over it.
Follow me up to San Francisco
I will beguide your way
I'll be the Count of Monte Cristo
You'll be the Countess May
And you can believe in Robin Hood and brotherhood
And rolling the ball in the hay
And I will be reading you an Aesop's fable
Anything to make you stay
‘Arizona’ is consistent with Mark Lindsay’s persona in his biggest hit with Paul Revere and the Raiders, Jerry Goffin and Carole King’s ‘Kicks’; where he’s the straight dude concerned for the girl friend who’s been taking too many drugs. Such paternalistic themes were common in 60’s songwriting: Mike d'Abo’s ‘Handbags and Gladrags’ is another fine example – d’Abo described the lyric as “saying to a teenage girl that the way to happiness is not through being trendy. There are deeper values.” I used to assume that this stuff was cringe and regressive, but the 60’s were a transitional period, with traditional family values in disarray and feminist values a work in progress, and a girl could easily get worse advice.
Arizona was written by the US songwriter and producer Kenny Young (born Shalom Giskan in Jerusalem, 1941), who’d cowritten ‘Under the Boardwalk’ while working as a Brill Building employee of Bobby Darin’s TM music. In 1968 a sunshine psych-pop song he wrote for Reparata and the Delrons, ‘Captain of your Ship’, which had been a flop in the US, became a hit in Britain, and when Young travelled to London for the song’s debut on Top Of The Pops he met John and Ringo Beatle, and decided to stay on in London.1
A couple of days ago I was searching through the LP bins in one of Dunedin’s second-hand emporiums and found a copy of S-S-S Single Bed, a 1976 compilation LP by Fox, the glam pop band Young formed in 1974 to showcase Australian singer Noosha Fox (born Susan Traynor, Fox had already recorded a couple of albums with the folk-pop group Wooden Horse and provided backing vocals for one of Young’s solo albums). On the Fox albums she sometimes shares the vocal duties with other singers, including Young, but the S-S-S Single Bed compilation wisely focuses on the songs she sang lead on, because Noosha has the most distinctive voice, described variously as “coy”, “unusual” “sultry’ and, by Dave Thompson at AllMusic, an "exotically accented purr". Noosha Fox had few precursors; her tone falls somewhere between Eartha Kitt’s oxymel and Claudine Longet’s breathlessness, but that’s quite a distance. Her voice can be hard to best effect on the group’s third single, ‘S-S-S Single Bed’ itself.
There’s a fair bit of variety in these songs Kenny Young wrote for Fox; the best of which are collected on S-S-S Single Bed. Their lyrics convey a sense of exoticism, which fits Noosha Fox’s affected voice and glam image, influenced by Marlene Dietrich and her recent purchase of three flowing silk dresses in 1930’s style.
‘S-S-S Single Bed’ itself is a slice of pop artifice, the mild Svengali Young seeing new pop potential in Fox’s voice and writing the song to expose Noosha’s charisma as a singer; though she looks nervous in videos, that was part of her act. Remember that vocoder, an analogue ancestor of autotune programs, being used by the backing vocalist? It also sounds to me like there’s a touch of processing, something like a soft phasing effect, burring the edge of Noosha Fox’s voice on that song, and some others like ‘Minor Therapy’, making a sound that’s like a preview of the autotuned babydoll voice that Pussy Riot use these days, and that’s everywhere across pop, rap and the undergrounds, the voice of the online feminine zeitgeist. In my notes towards a taxonomy of babydoll voices I find subcategories of toxic, demonic, and brat variants alongside the well-mannered and naïve, across a range of accents, real and put-on, variously expressive of coquetry, mockery, rivalry, contempt, and pain, sometimes all at once. When a woman uses such an infantilized tone in our knowing day and age her choice can embody its own commentary; she can sell us her cake and eat it too. Perhaps the purest, and most technically perfect, example recently is Angie’s ‘Here for my Habits’ (2018), where the singer sounds like she’s stroking your tie, even though the message is to leave her alone, within a dramatic, reductive arrangement of glammy electronica, as effective as the confections of the 70’s Svengali producers (and self-made stars like Bolan).
One can make a start on interpreting this phenomenon using the camp concepts that underlay glam’s heroics, mainly male artists “performing gender” and referencing what Andy Warhol called “the way women used to want to be, the way some people still want them to be, and the way some women still actually want to be”, and also note that gender bending provocateurs like Wayne County predicted some of the transgressive possibilities available to a female performer today – but camp is inherently distancing, even as it’s fun – it’s the trashy sister of cool.2
Whereas the ambiguities of ‘Here for My Habits’, as of much of the new music it exemplifies, are modern ones; its rhetorical inspiration is the theatre of thirst trap; its musical form is trap electronica and the principle of reductive originality; its simple melodies are spun from the germ cell of a rapper’s cadence, and sung with both precision and vocal fry effects. For all its glamour, its ethos is the subjective honesty of emo and trap – it’s pop music, but pop music as inspired by the US genre that Ratchet Roach described to Louise Theroux as “The truth. Factual pain music. Street poetry”. Trap all the way down, “Here For My Habits’ is even set in a trap house - a bong hit kicks it off, and the verse-chorus dynamic is that of a rush followed by a dizzying high.
Kenny Young was an environmentalist and an early activist for rainforest preservation, and one or two songs on S-S-S Single Bed reflect this – like the new age ‘Pisces’ Babies’ from Fox’s self-titled debut album
Pisces Baby get a forest visa
Let your feet fly in the rainfall
Pisces Baby see what made you
Sister Nature is still God's creature
Spiritual leader, computerised
Guiding light is losing power
All your teachers and healers and leaders with soulless eyes
Soon will fade like Venice flowers3
‘Howdja’ from the second album Tails of Illusion samples Balinese chants before launching into a harder rock groove, where Noosha’s voice, in response to Young’s, loses its coyness for a couple of thrilling lines in each verse– I’d love to hear what she could have done with a full-on belter of a song.
After Fox, Kenny Young’s interest in the environment led to him joining a rainforest preservation movement and recording and organising musical fundraising projects. Which reminds me of French New Age group Deep Forest’s ‘Sweet Lullaby’ from 1992, which Google’s AI has tagged as “New Age, Halloween music, Natural sounds” on its search page.4
The lead vocal samples Afunakwa’s performance of a traditional Baegu lullaby from the Solomon Island Malaita, ‘Rorogwela', from a series of field recordings by ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp released on a Unesco LP in 1969.5
The modern backing vocals on “Sweet Lullaby’ have been processed to sound like Afunakwa’s, hinting that there’s something atavistic about autotuned voices, which, like Afunakwa’s uncolonized tones, resist the pull of natural harmonic sequences less than trained voices do.
At the end of the first side of S-S-S Single Bed there’s a cover of ‘Love Letters’ (you know, “straight from your heart”), which is the opening track from Fox. This bluesy triple time ballad, slickly modernised, was an ideal signifier of the retrofuturist rock’n’roll revival aspect of glam, despite having been composed in 1945; an example of how rock’n’roll was able to vacuum up any song that prefigured some aspect of what it later became, so that it would be easy enough to believe that ‘Love Letters’ was written in, say, 1958. ‘Love Letters’ was written by Edward Heyman and Victor Young, so naturally it’s credited to K. Young on the back cover, The LP S-S-S Single Bed seems like an opportunistic attempt to cash in on the success of the title track, Fox’s third chart hit, ahead of Blue Hotel (1977), the third Fox album (that opens with ‘S-S-S Single Bed’). Perhaps it’s made for the Australian market, where the title track went to #1.
S-S-S Single Bed is a pop album, for all of its clairvoyant strangeness, and Kenny Young’s songs often have inanely bouncy choruses that go on a bit long before the fade, but it’s a perfect pop album, very much the Top Of The Pops equivalent of Casablanca Moon.
On the short track ‘The More’ above we hear Noosha’s multitracked voice within a string arrangement that reminds me of Chris Gunning’s work with Colin Blunstone. Fox split up in 1977, in which year Noosha Fox had a brief solo success with the song ‘Georgina Bailey’, about a coming-of-age girl sent to stay with her French uncle, until it was banned by the BBC for one of a number of reasons. Shortly before forming Fox with Young, Noosha married medical researcher Michael Goldacre, and one of their four children, Ben, has written several best-selling medical science books. From following Ben Goldacre on twitter I happen to know that his favourite musician is the witty and prolific Scotsman Momus, most of whose songs, could also be banned by the BBC for one reason or another.
Alg0r1thm1c 3x3ll3nc3 - The Cardigans - ‘Step on Me (Sped Up)’
In 1990 Kenny Young’s ‘Captain Of Your Ship’, the UK hit he wrote for Reparata and the Delrons, would be sampled by British rapper Betty Boo (Alison Clarkson) on her perky mean girl diss ‘Doin’ the Do’, giving Young yet another hit song credit (‘Doin’ the Do’ went to #4 in New Zealand). Clarkson had enrolled in engineering school at the age of 15 so that she could learn how to produce the records she was writing, and styling.
Fox was a project incubated in the glam era of camp praxis, referenced in ‘Moustaches on the Moon’ on the third and final Fox album Blue Hotel (1977):
and all my fantasies are her realities
she’s a lady, she’s a vamp
(She’s a duchess, she’s a tramp)
she is straightlaced she is camp
She is everything she seems
she is nothing but a dream
she is my love-light
Rather than the gay love ballad suggested - suggestiveness was the very essence of glam - "‘Moustaches on the Moon’ ends with the singer’s desire to merge with the anima that contains those archetypes, making it a cousin of Judee Sill’s ‘The Kiss’.
I don’t know what that “Venice flowers” reference means, but feel we should ask Lana Del Rey.
The same search program has also tagged Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Rejoyce’ as “Children’s music”.
There’s something modern in the feel of the track after ‘Rogogwela’.