Angie Baby. Helen Reddy. 1974. Capitol.

Of all the kinks that made the nineteen seventies so garishly memorable, the commercialization of young girls in distress may be the one remembered as genuinely disturbing. The spectacle of Linda Blair’s appearance in The Exorcist revealed that not only were movie audiences ready to break with the past for a more intensified experience of fictional horror, but also that, nationwide, ticket buyers were willing to endure queues of cumulative miles to see the torture of a privileged, twelve year old white child. The Exorcist, and its slew of imitations, was soon followed by the major studio releases of Carrie and The Fury, Brian de Palma’s tour de force depictions of psychic energy, both of which feature teenage girls in trouble who turn the tables on their malefactors. Finally came Halloween, a movie so popular and influential it birthed a commercial genre. Broadcast television offered comparative programming. Another controversial role for Linda Blair came in 1974 in Born Innocent, in which her character endured a memorably violent attack by peers. Teenage witches, a longtime American subject of fascination, were featured in a pair of boarding school thrillers, Satan’s School for Girls and The Initiation of Sarah.  Finally, in a pièce de résistance of exploitative victimization, there was Little Ladies of the Night, about teenage prostitution which, airing in 1977, was awarded by viewers of American television the distinction of highest rated TV movie of that time. America’s reliance on violence as its ultimate agency in securing for itself unprecedented global power has long been the Minotaur of our national subconscious, so when Helen Reddy released a single about a deranged high school student with the power to shrink young men to the size of transistors, hide them in her radio, and then use them to satisfy her sexual desires as her favorite songs play, pop audiences promptly sent it to number one. Angie Baby is power camp delirium, released to a country that was processing the effects of the Vietnam War, minority uprisings and the systems of oppression they exposed, and corruption in the executive office. It mutes its sense of kink just low enough to be a hit at both the roller rink and the neighborhood singles bar, while Reddy confidently makes pathological illness sound sexy. If the song were recorded today, Angie would be granted tools of esteem to achieve gifts of empowerment and realization of the self, but in 1974, symptoms of neurological distress were only beginning to be called by what were to become their proper, recognizable names, and our primal relationship to them still caused us excitement when they appeared in popular culture dressed exotically in veils of the occult and superstition. Titillation caused by our discomfort with reality was once the essence of art, but we now consider ourselves far too sophisticated to be surprised anymore by art’s mysterious properties. “Knowledge is power” was a popular of slogan of the nineteen nineties. No one told us it was the numbing power to deaden our senses.

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