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Friday 29 August 2008

Visualising sound

You know how when you hear a new song for the first time, you get a kind of vision of what the singer must look like in your head? Take for example the first time you heard The Gossip's 'standing in the way of control', before it was played to death. You must surely have got an image of a young raven haired seductress with one hell of a voice, unsuited to her slender frame. Then you were all shocked when you found out it was actually being sung by the 'unconventional beauty', Beth Ditto. But you still had those sexual images from before rattling around in your brain. You can't just wipe them out, so now you can't help but find Beth Ditto strangely attractive.
Well i had the same kind of experience with the song ''I'm not a juvenile delinquent'' by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. I first heard it in the John Waters film Pink Flamingos, so it was already linked to some pretty fucked up shit anyway. I loved the song, and the singer's voice. I spent ages trying to track it down so when i finally got my hands on it, i appreciated it all the more. I used to blast it on my mp3 player all the time and it would conjure up images of the female singer being a fine young 1950's temptress who basically looked like Fred Flintstone's wife. I'd been going on like this, having all kinds of 50's sex visions in my head to this song for about 3 years. Then i did a youtube search, eagerly anticipating my first sighting of what Frankie Lymon actually looked like. Imagine my horror when i found out she was actually a 13 year old boy.





Frankie can be a woman's name.

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