Crimson And Clover. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. 1981. Boardwalk.

 The most memorable erotic pop tunes—Monkey Man, Sister Ray, Dr Feelgood, Marvin Gaye’s I Want You—close the door on reality, confining the listener within narrowly descriptive  bounds from which only  the breathlessness of succor will issue. In 1977, Donna Summer gave us I Feel Love; four years later, Joan Jett released her cover version of Crimson and Clover. Both records portray the sexual power of surrender; Summer, by assigning it the values of longevity and ecstasy, then demonstrating in real time how its application on a public, dance floor setting could confuse the hierarchies of privileged and marginalized classes in a contradictory age of hedonism and fiercely  contested social and cultural oppression. Jett, likewise, gives herself over to studio performance without holding anything back; her delivery is all surrender, but she also signals a form of seductive aggression, asserting that eroticism may be the ultimate point to Crimson and Clover, but surrender is only half of the game. Working with former Super K Productions and Tommy James and the Shondells stewards Kenny Laguna and Ritchie Cordell, Jett quickly established herself as a rock traditionalist whose talents could synthesize three decades of pop musical styles for a coherent whole that not only charted #7 on Billboard’s Hot 100, but gave lasting proof of her strengths as a voice that challenged listeners’ assumptions about socially delineated roles. When we hear Joan Jett today, she still registers in our imagination as a former member of the Runaways, an artist unafraid to communicate the crude appeal of street hustle as theater. That crudeness mutates with arch economy, with performative maturity, into a pop erotic variant wholly committed to adolescent independence. Beginning with that great pop signifier, “aah,” Crimson and Clover leaps into our imaginations and takes hold. It’s crafted for jukebox rebellion.

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