Winamp Wednesday: I Sit Here Alone
Time to go absolutely Wilde...
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
The Muffs, “Kids in America”
So is this a Noxeema commercial or what?
The Donnas, Foo Fighters, MxPx, LEN, JER, Bloodhound Gang, Billie Joe Armstrong, even the dang Jonas Brothers: “Kids in America” has been covered over and over since Kim Wilde hit the Top 40 around the world with it in 1982. The original recording may as well have been engineered in a lab for how catchy it is, from the sweeping-TARDIS sound effects over the intro to the “whoa-oh-oh!” backing vocals that repeat until they’re rock-pounded into your brain. So why this version over the Kim Wilde original?
Ugh, as if! Of course the entire reason is Clueless. That soundtrack was an inception point for many of my faves. How many of us got their first taste of third-wave ska with Dicky Barrett’s perfectly-trapazoidal grimace fronting the Mighty Mighty Bosstones during the party scene? I’ll have a lot to say here about Jill Sobule eventually, but it’s not unfair to say her giant impact on Generation Y was and continues to be “Supermodel”. You can play Supergrass and Lightning Seeds and Smoking Popes in a room full of thirty-somethings and they may not remember the band names but they’ll sure as hell sing along.
And then there was this cover of “Kids in America”. The Muffs were the perfect choice to take over this anthem to unbridled youth. Kim Shattuck’s vibrating hum of who-cares slacker self-consciousness replaced Kim Wilde’s waifish terrified optimism, but the melody lost none of its enthusiasm. It is still a call to arms, but the shift from 1981 to 1995 couldn’t be more jarring. We’re not trapped inside the Cold War anymore, and every call to the youth doesn’t have to end with “and also you may all die in nuclear fire tomorrow, so just kidding!”. Clueless itself revolves around characters who would now be classified as late-GenX and Xennials and Elder Millennials; Cher would have been born in 1980, Josh in 1977. These are characters born into a world that was startlingly different than the ones they now inhabited, even at their young ages. So long the threat of the bomb, here come the Nineties with every bit of optimism disguised as uncaring pessimism that denotes.
Yeah, whatever-with-hand-motions, it’s “cool” not to care or so the stereotype went. We could fool the media and the olds but we never fooled each other. We cared a lot and there was no better place to hear that than in Kim Shattuck’s voice. The Muffs made a rare cover that is leagues better than the original, and it’s all in the build.
“Look closer, honey! That’s better…”
There’s a rave up and then a bit of quiet and then you can hear the whole band gather us around. Okay here’s what we’re going to do we’re going to sing this one last verse and then we’re going to go crazy are you ready LET’S GO—
Kim Shattuck knew how to control a song and control a line and control a crowd. (And destroy gropers in the most punk rock way possible.) She knows the story of this song and is going to get you to care no matter what. The only thing missing from this astonishing performance are those sound effects from the Kim Wilde recording, and the opening credits of Clueless restore those to make sure you sat up and paid attention at the start of the best satire of the 1990s. I’m sure it was one of the many reasons I’ve seen Clueless as many times as I have, and I know this recording was the reason I fell in love with The Muffs.
I could talk about “Sad Tomorrow” which sounded like perfect 90s summers or Really Really Happy which is a late-career stunner that forever dwells among my favorite albums, but mostly I want to say one more thing about Kim Shattuck. She died in 2019 of ALS, a grueling and unfair disease that has no cure and barely has treatments. She was fifty-six. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about death and dying, and how both rob us of our dignity and rob us of our ability to create and give back to the world. What else could have been? How many more great performances, how many more calls to arms? It’s horrific. Trying to fight entropy is all we can do.
Here’s what I wrote on the morning of her death, a tribute to an artist who gave me endless hope:
She’s dead at fifty-six from ALS and the absolute scum of the earth get to keep living into their nineties? Where’s the goddamn sense in that?
The Muffs have a huge back catalogue and you probably know them from that killer cover of “Kids in America” that opens Clueless but you owe it to yourself to dive into this sound that defines my weirdest strangest often-forgotten usually-bittersweet sun-blotched California year. I loved this fucking band and maybe even more than Gwen Stefani or Kathy Valentine or Shirley Manson I wanted to be Kim Shattuck. It’ll break your heart.