Winamp Wednesday: Subtle Innuendos Follow
A fantastic groove and a found theme song.
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...
Adam Ant, "Goody Two Shoes"
Up and at 'em! It's Adam Ant!
With its rambunctious drumbeat and giddy guitar riffs, "Goody Two Shoes" would have been irresistible to me at any age. It sounds like a party coming through the speakers, with more than enough people on drums and horns to make one feel like you're in the middle of a social stampede. Here comes everyone and they're here to have a good time. "Goody Two Shoes" was a staple of those Big 80s compilations that advertised on every cable station back in the Early 90s, so my first exposure to it was in stuttering scant seconds. "Goody-two-goody-two" with those blaring horns and then it was gone. It was a look into a hip past that still felt like my hipper future.
I found this track divorced from its history, only knowing that Adam Ant was English and that his stage makeup felt rather bangerang. It matters not that he was in the midst of going solo when this record was released nor that I didn't connect that Buckaroo Banzai-looking fellow that sang "Room at the Top" to this same artist. "Goody Two Shoes" existed for me in essentially a vacuum. I only wanted to hear those drums.
Which made the lyrics a fortuitous accident! They were the best statement for the rambunctious teen looking to shed their previous guarded personality. At fifteen I had only just started going to parties where upperclassmen brought purloined liquor, where if we were lucky one of the seniors had found an outer-borough store that didn't card and loved money, letting each of us discover a new favorite beer. (I liked Red Stripe, because it was flavorful and did the job.) It felt like I was discovering everything at once, love in forms from fraternal to romantic to that overwhelming desire to run about town trying anything that's put in front of you. Life was a head rush and it needed a theme song.
That kid that I was couldn't quite get that Adam was singing from a straight-edge perspective. "Don't drink, don't smoke? What do you do?" were mocking questions directed at him, ones that he shoved off with aplomb. Adam Ant was more than fine not indulging in rockstar excesses. But for me, for the opening credits of my every day as a teenager, those were pointed existential questions. If you didn't drink and didn't smoke, then what did you do? That life made up of nothing was one for a little baby, a child I was a scant few years ago but who didn't feel like me anymore. I had to be somebody else, a Goody Two Shoes no longer.
So how did it go? That's for a future Winamp Wednesday, but let's just call it mixed results. I never fully became some kind of main-character hedonist, and I think that's for the best. But there were very good times ahead, and this made for one hell of a theme song. It must be something inside...