Germ Free Adolescents

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Due to this obsession, she sees in a boy “cleanliness,” and is attracted to him for that reason. Cleanliness in this song denotes the expectation of physical and sexual “purity” for women and girls. This could also signify the subject’s age; puberty is often thought of as gross, and society deems bodies and bodily functions as inherently dirty or disgusting. The song hints towards the girl’s abnegation of her body as it is changing and growing. MercuryPrize (15 September 2014). "FKA twigs Q&A – 2014 Mercury Prize". Archived from the original on 13 December 2021 – via YouTube. Germfree Adolescents erupts like a moralistic maelstrom, a fiery distillation of a highly-involved period, when stranded youth and socioeconomic politics ran into one another at full speed. Class warfare, sexism, ethical vacancy, a chronically-declining industry and the ensuing joblessness and ‘brain drain,’ and just about every other deficit that plagued urbanized living as Britain transitioned from the discontented Heath administration into the first Thatcher era, all get carbonized and spat out in the record’s every vitriolic line. In that, despite their sonic allegiances, the Spex would feel distanced from first-wave punks and ply closer to the Oi movement and skinhead ska, which championed the working class, all the while gnashing their teeth down against racial and gender divides and loss of identity.

NOFX – Germ Free Adolescents (X-Ray Spex cover) Lyrics – SongMeanings". SongMeanings . Retrieved 4 July 2018. In July of 1976, Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, a Scottish-Somali girl from London’s inner-city Brixton district, celebrated her 19th birthday by going to see the Sex Pistols. Marianne dropped out of school at age 15, and had spent the last few years drifting between music festivals, crash pads, and recording studios in an attempt to get her music career off of the ground. She had even released a single, a novelty reggae song called “ Silly Billy,” with Donna Summer’s U.K. distributor, GTO Records. But she was frustrated—frustrated with not being taken seriously as a musician, and frustrated by the racism, sexism, and classism that seemed to make achieving her dreams impossible. In public, Poly Styrene and her bandmates put forth a playful image of happy pigs heading to the self-aware synthetic slaughter. But in private, the band’s meteoric rise to fame was starting to weigh on its leader. In 2017, Poly’s daughter, Celeste Bell, wrote in The Guardian, “I wonder if my mum might have had a happier life if she hadn’t had that level of fame,” a question that’s all but answered by this classic introvert statement Poly made in 1978: “You feel all the time that people are draining you, draining off your energy all the time until you think, ‘Blimey, I haven’t got anything left to give. Leave me alone.’” Robbins, Ira (7 August 1992). "Germfree Adolescents". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on 17 November 2016 . Retrieved 5 September 2016. When sounding off the first classics that came to be of punk, especially ones led and forged by women, Germfree Adolescents by X-Ray Spex stands as a bit of an oddity. Never as blatantly discordant as Crass, and musically much more muscular than The Slits, the Spex carved one near-perfect album of artful revolt, a rough and turbulent lament of social inequity in the metropolis. Vexed, stylishly raw and supremely agile, there isn’t a record like it out there.X-Ray Spex weren’t revolutionary fellow travelers like the Sandinista fans in The Clash, nor were they indiscriminate nihilists like the Sex Pistols. X-Ray Spex were political in the way that Marshall McLuhan was political, less concerned with whoever’s in power at the moment than the capitalist system, and the insidious ways it controls ordinary peoples’ lives. This dystopian, almost sci-fi streak is most prevalent on “The Day The World Turned Dayglo”; opening with chugging power chords and a wailing sax riff, the song lives up to its B-movie title with Poly’s vision of a world where even the trees are artificial: “The X-rays were penetrating / Through the latex breeze / Synthetic fiber see-thru leaves / Fell from the rayon trees.” Staunton, Terry (May 2009). "X-Ray Spex – Germ Free Adolescents: Deluxe Edition". Record Collector. No.362 . Retrieved 5 September 2016.

Christgau, Robert (26 April 2011). "Poly Styrene, Punk Pioneer, Dies at 53". NPR . Retrieved 23 October 2020.In 1994, The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music named Germfree Adolescents the eighth best punk album of all time. [19] Seven years later, in May 2001, Spin magazine ranked the album at number five on its "50 Most Essential Punk Records" list. [20] In March 2003, Mojo magazine ranked the record at number 19 on its "Top 50 Punk Albums" list. [21] Germfree Adolescents is listed in the reference book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. [22] X-Ray Spex: Germfree Adolescents". Mojo. p.131. The band's entire studio output in just over an hour...