Meet Su Tissue, n?ɬ©e Sue McLane. I’m sure some of you remember Ms. Tissue from her lead-singing duties in Suburban Lawns, or her oddly endearing cameo in Something Wild. Or maybe you’ve even seen the accompanying video, something I’m willing to go out on a quotation marks-free limb here, and call, yep…The Greatest Video Of All Time! In it, you can see New Wave Theatre host Peter Ivers (more on the beloved, much-missed Mr. Ivers in a future post) introducing the Lawns as one of “LA’s most exciting new music bands.” And then the band launches into their chart-approaching single, “Janitor,” whose title Su, with seeming innocence, sings as “genitals.” It’s a great, fizzy blast of surfpop, but what makes it really stand out, way out, is Su’s performance. Let’s face it, between her Peking Opera “blues” and her steno-pool chic, Su was an oddball. I mean, even for those times, Su was an oddball. But still, Su’s “oddness” itself isn’t what makes this, in my estimation, TGVOAT!
No, what catapults Janitor above all other videos is that it offers up a useful, 3-minute primer on authenticity; on how “those times” differed from “these times” in a way that felt not necessarily better, but absolutely more genuine. Why, though? Well, fingers can point to today’s numbingly swift corporatization of trends, music, youth culture. That’s all good and valid, but beyond that, there’s my nagging, harder to quantify sense that those times felt more accommodating to musical oddness in general.
Whether it was Wall Of Voodoo or The B-52s, oddness of a very real-feeling kind was nurtured, accepted. It was allowed to thrive, shielded from the threat posed by a sub-6 score on Pitchfork. And in the case of Su Tissue, her genuine oddness feels very different to me than the coolly calibrated oddness of Pink, Gwen, or Avril. Theirs is an oddness without any mystery at all—self-possession for the sake of self-possession. But all this, of course, is not to say that oddness and self-possession of a more authentic kind isn’t alive and well today. I’m lookin’ at you, Ms O.—I love you just the way you are!
