Crash. The Primitives. 1988. RCA.

 All momentum and no complaint, Crash sets its musical tempo analogous to sexual desire’s irresistible pleasure, the all consuming pulse of its ravenous persistence. It’s a musical tension similar to what Chrissie Hynde proclaimed was so painful on the Pretenders’ great track The Wait, that liminal space between fulfillment and all of its myriad opposites. Expressed with new wave radio acumen, Crash is major label popcraft practiced with girl group brio, a declaration of sexual independence so direct and immediate that you find your senses responding to its powers long before you can decode its lyric. The Primitives’ vocalist, who sometimes goes by the name Tracy Tracy, issues her warnings and calls for moderation in a wonderfully controlled tone that suggests a refusal to surrender, an icily sober resistance to the seductive demands of lust. The obverse aesthetic is the late seventies model exemplified by Blondie’s Deborah Harry, whose visage alone is enough to conjure our playfully willing submission to the ecstatic. Almost a full decade after Blondie’s breakthrough takeover of commercial pop, American musical culture began its move from the full body sensual imperatives of rock and roll towards those which focused instead on a cerebral project of self-determination and cultural empowerment. An attitude that gained popularity among marginalized groups as we moved into the new century. Rock and roll’s paradigmatic focal shift from the hips to the brain in order to expand consciousness advances social visibility and representation, but as for mass equality; rock and roll shrank in its broad reach after American culture lost its taste for overt sexuality. We were never so free as when the dance floor beckoned, and we all shook our ass.

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