good-bad, not evil.

or: confessions of an ex-swiftie, a reckoning with "universal girlhood" and how mary weiss of the shangri-las changed my life.

The most trouble I’ve ever gotten in online was responding to someone’s question about Taylor Swift. More specifically, after I’d offered a slight criticism about the decline in her songwriting quality now that she has no one to question her (as well as the rabid fandom who will call anyone who critiques her a misogynist), someone asked “Wasn’t there ever a time when you liked her though?” to which I answered, “Yeah, when I was 12.”

Now, on paper, that reads like me trying to be snarky — and trust me, I could go in on Taylor on a semi-personal level here, beginning with producing more CO2 in a year to see her boyfriend than I will produce in my entire life, but I won’t — but I wasn’t, because that’s at least around the real age I was when I fell out of love with Taylor’s work. I’m not sure if the youths know (and the youths in question surely don’t follow this newsletter), but I remember when “Teardrops On My Guitar” was serviced to pop radio. I remember reading through the liner notes on the CD of that self-titled record, when the secret messages were a fun personal touch instead of an all-consuming national obsession. I was gifted every CD up through Red as they came out and tended to enjoy each release thoroughly. I had nosebleed seats to see the Speak Now tour (promoting what is still her best record, for my money). I am not speaking as an older person who wouldn’t have ever gotten the chance to be swept up in the zeitgeist. I was the zeitgeist, diva.

Asking me then why I liked Taylor Swift then and asking me now why I did back then are two completely different questions, given that Taylor Swift is now the most famous person on Earth, whereas she used to just be an extremely popular musician — she exists on a different plane of celebrity now that didn’t exist at that same scale then. And you all know that.

Back then, the reasons I liked her are probably simple to clock: I loved, and still love, female songwriters. I love women’s voices. My listening diet from birth was a strange mix of pop radio and my parents’ alternative-leaning CD collection — my earliest memories of music in the car are that angelic breakdown in the bridge of Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women, Pt. 1” and the specific way Frank Black sing-screams, “I break the waaaahhhlllls and kill us alllllll,” in “Gouge Away.” This juxtaposition still pretty much sums up my music taste to this day. Taylor was an album artist who wrote her material — it wasn’t weird or particularly daring, but it was well-crafted and catchy and interesting to listen to. In her specific lane of young singer-songwriters, there was no one like her. She was like an older sister who’d send you a mixtape of songs every two years. I understand the Swiftie calling at its core, in its tamest form. That feels important to establish before I get into when and how we both changed.

Speaking of Beyoncé, it’s worth wondering — in a musical sense — why I continue to love Beyoncé’s back catalog and almost never revisit Taylor’s, despite both of them playing a major part in my pop music upbringing. From a media/parasocial personality/reputation standpoint, it’s never been more clearly spelled out to us than it is right now: Taylor is worth more money that god and can never get a moment’s rest or privacy for the rest of her life because her whole business strategy is letting everyone know they’re her best friend, whereas Beyoncé whole business strategy is to not say shit to us and keep up the illusion that everyone is her friend so that she can keep us out. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m saying in an artistic sense, in terms of a career’s worth of work — and that answer is also intrinsically linked to the age I was when both Taylor and Beyoncé completely revamped how we would perceive them as artists forever.

Beyoncé’s career Act III, if you’re counting Destiny’s Child, begins with her 2014 self-titled record, which transformed the way major artists release and promote albums and whose reverberations are felt culturally to this day. This was also the moment Beyoncé claimed her title as Madonna’s true heir by flexing her skills as musical curator — getting the best of the best co-producers and co-writers and pulling from underground music and culture to executive produce this vision bigger than herself. I wrote about this a bit when I tried to explain my love of RENAISSANCE — this is the reason the Beyoncé records of the past decade have not just been consistent, but completely locked in with the broader cultural moment. Much of her ability to do this rides on the distance at which she holds us. Because she’s decided it’s none of our business how the sausage is made, and when she makes a movie about it, she has final cut privileges and will not show us anything she doesn’t want us to see. She is one of the few pop artists left who does not have to sell herself as a personality in order to sell out stadiums. She is not our friend. She will not act like she is our friend. She is very consciously not a “person” to us.

Taylor’s career Act II, which kicked off within the same few years, played out in the complete opposite fashion — going from Nashville-star-machine country-pop superstar to full-on pop superstar, employing super-producer Max Martin (who, as of last week with the new Ariana single, has more credits on US #1 songs than anyone else in chart history) to produce a few monster singles and finally taking the throne as the pop supreme. She very shrewdly did not change her method of working, continuing to write first-person narratives about love with only a co-writer or two, if not by herself, and a few producers of her choice — just because she’s disavowing country doesn’t mean she isn’t still your older sister who sends you CDs of her songs, this move says. However, as she eventually delved deeper into that straight-pop world, she didn’t have enough people on hand to check her taste level or instincts, leaving her (arguably) artistically stagnant and too big to criticize once her army started fighting her battles for her.

And to be fair, I really liked several songs on that last Taylor Swift album I bought — I haven’t listened to them in a minute, but “State of Grace” and “Holy Ground” were ones I remember returning to pretty often. And if I had been a little bit younger, I might’ve been fully on board with the shift, who knows? But I was 13 by the time that year was out, and — as discussed in prior entries of the newsletter that I recommend you go read now for context, especially this one — Taylor and I were on different sonic and emotional pages.

This all ties back to another point I’ve made in this newsletter: the recent terminally-online “girlhood” problem. There’s been tons of social media chat about “universal girlhood” and how no non-woman could ever understand the “softness” of girlhood, saying, “look how soft we are because we buy a bunch of shit we’re socialized into thinking we need, look how soft we are when lipstick gets on a straw, look how soft we are when we have scrunchies on our wrists, you all just wouldn’t understand.” Yes, everything surrounding these conversations deals in consumption. It’s gone beyond a corporate psyop parody-of-advertising at this point. I am running out of ways to explain to young girls that the majority of men already naturally think we’re all idiots, and this is pretty much just playing into what they expect. They don’t need this kind of help, believe it or not.

It feels like saying “you’ll never understand” to a group of people who are oftentimes just other women, only othering themselves from men who have no interest in these women as people to begin with.

To literally quote myself from my newsletter about The Craft: “On the apps, “girlhood” is talked about like it’s one defined, universal thing and isn’t just…individual human experiences. Because we’re…you know, our own people who happen to have certain shared knowledge because we’re socialized the same way in the same world. There’s no nuance to these conversations in these spaces where we’re having them.”

So, yeah. “Girlhood” for these people is defined by our socially-acceptable clown mouth makeup getting crusty or running or smearing, apparently. Sure. As a regular makeup buyer and user myself, I struggle with the moral dilemma of liking to work with makeup as an art-form but never being able to separate it from our socialization into “requiring” it to go outside or be viewed as acceptable, because there is simply no separating them — but I have never once thought, this makeup thing I’m doing right now is soft and delicate. Lipstick gets all over my hands and my face and I look insane and that’s what tells me I’ve had a good night. Nothing is “soft” about it.

Aside from just feeling like product placement in social posts, it also reads as self-infantilization. As we’ve established here before, I’m not a psychologist or a sociologist, but I simply cannot find it in me to find myself to want to be babied or cared for like these women yearn to be. It makes me sick to my fucking stomach. I’ve spent the last few days watching some of this group cry about Barbie not being nominated for enough Oscars and talking about how the only true depiction of “girlhood” they’ve ever seen, the “only” movie they’ve ever seen about women, was snubbed — though, laughably, they were complaining about Margot Robbie being shut out of the Best Actress category and how everything would be different if she was a man, despite…you know, no men being nominated in that category.

No one is saying you can’t enjoy Barbie — I enjoyed Barbie (a movie that made a BILLION dollars by the way, they’ll be fine, that’s their prize), but to act like this is the only thing representative of what feminist art lives and dies by? To call it the “only” movie about girlhood? It’s not even the best movie Greta Gerwig has made about girlhood!!!! To then not acknowledge Lily Gladstone’s nomination for Killers of the Flower Moon — a movie that has not been mentioned by these same accounts because they seem to view it as a “serious” movie, despite it arguably being a more truthful, complicated depiction of the power imbalance in heterosexual (and interracial) relationships. Why doesn’t that read as “feminist” to them? Why didn’t they have anything to say about the director of Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet, being nominated? Why is the movie that holds up motherhood and the loss of self which comes with it as the peak of womanhood — with color-coded good guys and bad guys — the more “feminist” work? Again, I really liked Barbie when I saw it. It looks beautiful and I laughed a lot. It has a broadly anti-sexist message that mainstream audiences can understand, but it shouldn't be where your investigation into oppression ends. It’s a movie about how gender essentialism can be damaging, and you’re now all reacting to that with…..overtly saying “yes, we like gender essentialism.” Got it.

For a minute, I think the real problem is that people don’t consume enough media that they aren’t spoon-fed or that challenges them (something we’ll get into momentarily with the Taylor dilemma), or at least don’t spend enough time offline and having real conversations in the real world. As someone joked on Twitter the other day, so many of our issues with people understanding any kind of feminism would be solved if everyone was forced to listen to at least one Hole song. In other words, there is so much art out there that captures the complexities of being a woman in our society, but we are so busy running in circles like chickens with our heads cut off arguing about this bullshit that doesn’t matter that we can’t even get the chance to scratch the surface of any of that.

There is a tweet I will always retweet when I see it which goes around every so often that reads, “A man could be laughing and here comes a swiftie saying shit like “a man is allowed to laugh, while a woman has to chuckle.”” I mean!!! That’s pretty much the strategy her literal PR team has been taking for the past few years: pick something that is a straight-up non-issue and yell “misogyny” while real misogyny actually impacts everyone else in the background.

It is a daily source of frustration for me, seeing this shit about “clean girl aesthetics” and whether someone should fucking wear bows in their hair or not, when my whole life has been centered around trying to scorch this specific conception of “cleanliness” from my brain, how does not have to be brutally and violently synonymous with “femaleness” if I don’t want it to be. All of this genuinely feels like a broader distraction from real issues that plague women at large — listen, I work in PR. I would not be surprised if any of this was an actual campaign or under-the-table push from a conservative think tank or something. It’s gotten that reductive and upsetting.

So, here’s the tweet that stuck in my craw and which everyone has been arguing about for the past few days (I refuse to link it here): “the thing about taylor swift is that she so perfectly encapsulates through her lyrics, the interior lives of women. It's why we all can't stop listening. We're all saying, ‘wait you felt that way? we were all feeling this way?’ do men have someone like that?”

I don’t even know where to begin picking this apart. I think it pretty much encapsulates the problem with saying “all women” about any media. When I was a young girl with who liked catchy pop songwriting about fairytale love, Taylor was fine. But the second my womanhood morphed into something uglier — the second I was considered undesirable and called angry and made to feel disgusting and was told to stop talking — it felt like she and I had nothing in common. Meanwhile, it felt like someone like Fiona Apple beamed straight out of my brain, transcribing my literal internal monologue and putting it to music. It felt like Courtney Love was (and kind of still is) the closest thing I had to Christ in the sense that she contained all genders and all expressions of the grief and rage I continue to feel and all versions of fucked-upness and felt too much to know what to do with it. I think of someone more contemporary like SZA (who is also one of the biggest stars in the world right now, mind you!), whose musical messiness and expansiveness and vulnerability felt like the one thing so many teenage girls I knew could collectively connect with when Ctrl first came out. I have a very sinister feeling about why this specific demographic we’re talking about has not claimed her in the same way.

And I’m not trying to “not like other girls” myself here, I’m saying this because SO many other women have voiced something to this effect over the past few days. Other people’s adolescence might have sounded like what Taylor was bringing to the table, but mine didn’t. Does that mean my girlhood wasn’t real? Does that mean my womanhood isn’t real now?

I can acknowledge her talent, but she is not every woman. In fact, I would argue that she typifies the current “ideal” of white cis straight womanhood — something so many women struggle to fit into. That’s not her intention or fault (and she and Beyoncé have certainly fucked up in the same ways recently, so it’s not like she’s the only clueless pop star who uses surface-level, centrist feminist language and then says nothing about crises that are killing women in record numbers every day), but it’s true. Her songs represent the lives of many, but not my life. Her experience being hailed as the only experience is such a narrow representation of what womanhood encapsulates, and it feels like it’s strangling me in real time. I do not give a fuck about the optics of awards season or the stan wars or the charts. I care about my friends not fucking dying. The noise she makes is not enough to quiet that constant, gnawing anger within me.

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Now of course, because I’m me and because my whole life revolves around the significance of pop music and how it helps us reframe and understand the human experience, I’ve been stewing on how much music defines “girlhood.” If you’re reading this post, I’m assuming music was your whole adolescence — if not your whole childhood, full-stop, as it was for me — and you already understand the soul-tie connection to music that you feels speaks to you at that age. Now, because the universe and I are completely intertwined and co-dependent or whatever, I had, in tandem, been thinking a lot about The Shangri-Las — who were aged 15 to 18 at the peak of their fame and who still feel as weird, somewhat cheesy, scary and endearing as I’d imagine they felt in 1965.

If you know or love me (or even hate me, probably), you know that The Shangri-Las changed my life. If I had to put together one of those little Twitter prompts that was like, “top 20 bands of all time, go,” they would probably have to be on my list. If this playlist is accurate, they only released 39 songs in their life as a band, and that simply doesn’t matter, because at least a handful of those 39 songs spurred your favorite artist of all time into action, either directly or indirectly. I have such a deep affinity for these shitty YouTube clips of the fuzzy outline of four (or three, we’ll get to that in a second) girls’ straining, untrained voices over haunted house sound effects, stuck under a spotlight as they sing about the boy they’re letting go, or the boy who died for them, or their mother who died for them, or the sheer lack of anybody following as they take off on their own — a cold, cruel world waiting, even for them. Almost every Shangri-Las song is a demand, if not a threat or, rather, a prayer card set to music. I do not know where I’d be if I didn’t have them.

To be honest, I struggled with how to even begin framing this or delving into what I love about this band right after I heard the news that their lead singer — Mary Weiss, the voice on maybe all but a few of the key tracks you need to know — passed away this past Friday. I was already in a car headed to a birthday dinner for my mom and proceeded to get ridiculously drunk in the most bittersweet sense on plenty of free alcohol provided by bartenders with fancy beards. I wrote a typo-addled Instagram caption and worried — not about the accuracy of the spelling, but the fact that I already knew no one would care about any of it, which is a stupid thing for me care about, but I did anyway. So (relatively) few people seemed to care when Ronnie Spector died, and she was actually a name they might actually recognize. These women who indirectly invented alternative music — served as the tipping point for entire subcultures, entire modes with which to understand popular music — keep dying and there is no one there to mourn for them. In my woozy walk to the bathroom, I just thought, god, I’m going to have to explain. I’m going to have to mourn loudly to convince people that my volume is warranted. I don’t even know how to begin.

So, very hungover the next morning, I started by pulling from my past self. I have inserted The Shangri-Las into a number of essays in which they only slightly relate to the subject matter, but for this piece I wrote for the 50th anniversary of New York Dolls, I knew this breakdown was my starting point. So my brain full of mush will give you this:

Though he mostly grew up on Long Island, songwriter and producer George “Shadow” Morton holds a special place in the Dolls’ lore as well—as he went on to produce their often unfairly maligned second album, Too Much Too Soon, in 1974. The thought behind the choice doesn’t require too much digging; Morton had primarily worked with The Shangri-Las—perhaps the Dolls’ most obvious source of inspiration—during that golden era of New York pop during the decade prior.

The band’s most obvious tie to The Shangri-Las comes at the beginning of “Looking For A Kiss”: The opening call of “When I say I’m in love, you best believe I’m in love, L-U-V!” is cribbed directly from the Queens girl group’s 1965 single “Give Him a Great Big Kiss,” a song that almost matches the New York Dolls’ attraction to the comically grotesque. Even Johansen would have trouble beating lead vocalist Mary Weiss’ delivery when she describes her crush: “Dirty fingernails / Oh boy, what a prize!”

The girls’ back catalog not only conveyed teen angst with the heart-wrenching drama it deserved, but gave said angst a literal body count across their mini-operas that masqueraded as pop songs — all of which were delivered in emotive voices that leaned into their vowels and softened their r’s. They, too, walked the line of absurdity and toughness, of tenderness and grit, all while introducing the highest stakes possible to often-maligned tales of girlhood. It has the New York Dolls written all over it, especially on the tracks where they elevated their own tales of love and loss in the city to similarly perilous heights — those topics are serious, their feelings should be taken seriously. You can almost picture The Shangri-Las gathered around the mic to sing the “Hush!” refrain on “Private World,” or yelling along to the smattering chorus of “Subway Train.” They were the type of girls who, when they first heard Mickey & Sylvia ask “How do you call your lover boy?” on “Love is Strange” in 1958, may very well have rebutted with “Trash!!!!” The last minute or so of the Dolls’ song with that title is the finest pop coda the Brill Building never wrote.

The girl group connection feels like the final key to understanding the tradition the New York Dolls were grounded in. Yes, these were boys who’d witnessed The Beatles’ arrival in New York during the girl groups’ peak, but in all of that footage taken by the Maysles brothers during that stop on their first US visit, there are girls so clearly from the outer boroughs — all teased hair and dark eye makeup, thick accents heard even in their screams, dressing and speaking the way those girl groups did on the national stage — everywhere. In the footage of the four twisting in the Peppermint Lounge, these girls match them step for step, just as charismatic when the camera turns their direction. Girls like them — just in their attitude, musical ability or interest was secondary — shaped the New York Dolls as much as The Beatles did, if not more. After all, who do the Dolls emulate more on the cover of the self-titled album? In whose image did these boys make themselves over?

Sometimes I need to catch myself in the way I talk about this band — because obviously, here, it was relevant: they directly inspired the artist I was writing about. But in other cases, I feel myself needing to prove that they’re important by saying, look at all these men you love who loved them. I mean, they certainly provided the partial blueprint for that first Blondie album (the deluxe editions of which feature a cover of a Shangri-Las song we’re going to talk about in a minute), and they got a little lyrical nod on Cut by The Slits, one of my favorite albums of all time, so it’s not like they didn’t inspire women musicians too. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with citing the way they shaped the reference points of punk and post-punk and new wave, let alone the blueprint for girl groups in decades to follow, but I’m not sure I really want to do that here. You can go read about that a little bit elsewhere. Just know they’re pivotal to the music that shaped all the music you love — that’s the key.

Still, if in 1979, The Slits were being harassed and spit on and literally stabbed in the street and sexually assaulted when they were separated from each other, you have to imagine what the world of being a touring woman musician looked like in 1964. Mary Weiss, who passed away at the age of 75, said it was lonely and dangerous — claiming to have carried a gun and most of the band’s cash with her when they didn’t have a chaperone — which was a major factor in her mostly abandoning her music career between the ages of 19 and 58. “Pop stardom,” as we now know it, wasn’t a lifetime gig yet.

She started working for an architectural firm and only took brief glances back, stepping up for occasional band reunions — one of which included a one-off gig at CBGB at its peak in 1977, having tapped their old friend Seymour Stein on the shoulder after he coined the term “new wave” and started working with artists who loved the songs those girls from Queens had sung for him years before. Supposedly, during conversations about recording a comeback album, Mary came into meetings raving about the women now performing at these punk clubs in New York — they could now be what they couldn’t be back then. The suits didn’t see it the same way, and the second the phrase “disco album” is mentioned, things go awry. No one was happy with the material the sessions produced and the girls went their separate ways again.

The frustrating thing about The Shangri-Las’ history — and my wanting to be the person to carry it forward into what we highlight as formative pop texts — is that you can tell no one else cared enough to publish a sizable deal of the history. There are a few interviews which make up the bulk of my knowledge, as well as the occasional book on the history of the girl groups which will contain a section about them. The 33 1/3 book series is a little bit hit-or-miss, but I would highly recommend Ada Wolin’s edition on the compilation Golden Hits of The Shangri-Las — she says so many of the things I’m about to write here, but in much more intelligent, thoughtful language, and manages to squeeze worlds of history and theory into roughly 109 pages. It’s certainly worth your time, but even that book fails to sufficiently highlight what is most important to me in my little written passage above: The Shangri-Las are a uniquely New York band. And so, my love for them flows on endlessly, as is my way.

The Ronettes are cast as their sister band in music history until the end of time mainly for this reason — an accent that cuts through any convention of vocal technique and only further bends the sound, striking my heart with its arrow every time, without fail — aside from both having their own eccentric, older songwriter/producer/mad scientist they answered to (though Shadow Morton, I’m relieved to say, was truly just eccentric and didn’t reach the horrific, abusive measures Phil Spector took to control his given group). There are stories of inspiration striking in Morton’s shower — what about one of those death discs about a boy who rides a bike? — and him running out naked to reach the piano, planning for how they can get a real bike to rev and record in the studio.

In an interview later on, he says everyone always asks him about how he wrote “Remember (Walking in the Sand)”: “They say, ‘that’s so weird, how’d you come up with that?’ I don’t know! South Oyster Bay Road in a Buick!” Apparently, a seven-minute version of the song exists — this man was not just churning out carbon-copies that would ape a trend and chart, he was creating these doomed operas starring a 15-year-old girl that were startlingly unique for their time (and really, as we hear now, any time). These two sets of Jewish sisters from Cambria Heights (right where the borough turns into Long Island, two neighborhoods south of where my dad grew up) who came into sessions looking, as one person remembers it, “a little tough, chewing their gum and they would have stockings with runs in them,” were the exact vehicle he needed to see his vision through.

Here is where it is necessary to point out the racial aspect of why The Shangri-Las — one of the few prominent white girl groups of the era — were allowed to be the “bad girl” group, though it feels pretty self-explanatory to us now. Every written history of Motown will tell you that those young girls were dressed to the nines in evening gowns any time they went on television because, otherwise, young Black girls weren’t allowed to be on television. The whole ethos was dressing up for white America because they had to. This, albeit for upsetting reasons, sets the New York girl groups apart — they’re weirder in both sound and look. The Ronettes dressed in the short skirts they had worn when they were hired as dancers at the Peppermint Lounge, and you have to imagine that was shocking to see on television in 1963 if you hadn’t been to the Peppermint Lounge. The Shangri-Las would dress it up in those leather jumpsuits they wear in some of their most famous images, but mostly, they were allowed to wear……what most 15-year-old girls at the time wore: white blouses and black school skirts or pants. They could still be “bad” and have that tag follow them because it wouldn’t kill them commercially. The Ronettes were just kind of being themselves, and it was a tag that followed them anyway. The pop public loves an archetype and the double-standards that come with them.

There’s one documentary clip I found where music critic Greg Shaw refers to The Shangri-Las, in archetypal terms, as the “tough sluts” of the girl groups. I watched that a few nights ago and, at 11:23 PM (according to my phone), wrote the following in my notes app: “what do sluts dress like? like boys on bikes? like the boys you wish you were? are they better boys than you are? because you wish you were them? do they dress with that protective layer to scare someone like you off? are they sluts because they love a boy? are they sluts because they don’t love a boy? are they sluts because they’re children? are they sluts because they don’t want you?”

It’s just interesting, if you want to play the game in 1964’s language, because each song is about the terror of devotion — knowing the way your devotion might terrorize the one you love, the paralyzing sorrow of turning someone down when they’re terrifyingly devoted to you, the unbearable loss of making the wrong choice. Is that what sluts do, Greg Shaw? Do sluts carry guns to keep men away from them? Do sluts stay locked in hotel rooms, unsure of what state they’re in at any given time? Do sluts sing about melodrama that speaks to so many young women of their time and place — as well as scores of people of all genders in the years to follow? Do sluts not have tender hearts? Do you have a tender heart, Greg Shaw? If she stuck her pocket knife into it fast enough, how effortlessly would the blade cut through? How much will we have to push? Tell us when.

The glorious thing about those Shangri-Las songs is that even when the boy dies, the focus is hardly ever the boy himself, is it? When the girls first started recording, the eldest of the group, Betty Weiss, was tasked with singing lead — she attempted some early originals and the obligatory versions of “Twist and Shout” and “Shout” every “beat”-adjacent group of the 60s had to attempt. The first song Betty doesn’t sing lead on is “Remember,” which ends up being their breakout hit, with her younger sister Mary pushed to the front. Aside from “Dressed in Black,” which I would argue is essential to the band’s canon and which Betty takes the vocal on, Mary sings lead on every important Shangri-Las song going forward. Her voice is not as distinct or controlled as someone like Ronnie Spector’s, isn’t particularly refined or professional-sounding, but it has a striking, open quality the other girls in the band’s voices don’t. It makes a difference when she’s there. Our boy is in the ditch, but it’s Mary who’s changed by the incident. It’s Mary whose voice twists us around.

Her strikingness is only exacerbated when Betty falls pregnant and leaves the group for almost the exact 12-month period when they are most popular — this is why so many widely-used photos of the band only have three girls in them — rendering each twin Ganser sister a bookend to stand on either side of her, framing her as their center.

“We made demands of Mary Weiss that were extraordinary,” Shadow Morton remembers decades later. “When you listen to her records today and imagine that this is coming from a 15, 16 year old girl…I was asking her to be an actress, not just a singer.”

Mary does not remember her sung acting engagements being all that difficult: “I had enough pain in me at the time to pull off anything and get into it and sound believable. You can hear it on the performances. The studio was the place you could really release what you were feeling without everyone looking at you.”

For all the theatricality and heartache she puts into these mini-operas of teen angels and bleeding hearts and switchblade tears, Mary Weiss was fairly undemonstrative in most of the interviews surrounding her solo comeback in 2007. Her expression is not stern, per se, but definitely serious when she says, “I liked the music. I didn’t like a lot of the things that came with it. I think it was very, very hard in 1964 to be a woman in the music business. It was very difficult back then, because I truly believe that a lot of men were considered artists, whether or not other people wrote for them, and women were considered products. And I always found that difficult to accept, because rock and roll has no sex to me.”

“Maybe my thinking’s screwed up,” the face is still solemn, “but I don’t think so.”

I almost think I can hear an echo of the devastating delivery of “I Can Never Go Home Anymore”’s last line, “And that’s cawlled saaad.” The last word is stretched out, sounding like Queens in the air she lets into it.

I’ve always been interested in the proximity between The Shangri-Las’ lifetime as a band and the release of Kenneth Anger’s landmark short film Scorpio Rising — which, for those of you who don’t know, you can single-handedly thank for the way both Scorsese and John Waters and probably a million other directors use music in their movies. (Was Kenneth Anger a slut? He probably would’ve said “yes,” bless his heart wherever he is now.)

Scorpio Rising, the mother of all art house films, doesn’t necessarily have a plot, but revolves around gay, (probably) white nationalist bikers prepping for a group ceremony (According to Anger, the American Nazi Party attempted to have the film seized: “They thought I was insulting their flag, which was very true, not that you see very much of it.”). The filmmaker used real bikers he’d met in Coney Island — making it another indelibly New York piece of art — and filmed them “prepping” for this event, editing it with a contemporary soundtrack which distorts the sound of the pop charts to (literally) divine effect.

The most famous of these moments comes while Little Peggy March’s “I Will Follow Him” plays: as this young girl yelps “I love him! I love him! I love him! And where he goes, I’ll follow! I’ll follow! I’ll follow!” with almost crazed constancy, punctuated by sharp string hits, Anger cuts between images of Jesus and Hitler. It’s a 61-year-old movie and it’s still shocking — how many things in any medium can you say that about?

“Leader of the Pack” was still a year away from release when the movie was first screened, but a similar strain of bad boy songs by girl groups — The Angels’ “My Boyfriend’s Back” and the Spector-produced Crystals classic “He’s a Rebel” — are featured, their inclusion allegedly inspired by what Anger heard the people on the beach in Brooklyn playing on their radios. My favorite music-related story about Scorpio Rising is that Anger needed an extra song for a certain section of the movie, so he turned to his radio and “exercised his will.” He turned it on and “Blue Velvet” was playing — he later described this discovery as “magick” (yes, with a k — Kenneth Anger was arguably the most interesting person to ever live and I beg you to research him as soon as you’re done here). Chintzy pop songs are finally allowed to reach for the divine. They are summoned and shake the walls. They kill the biker on film, leave tattoo ink bleeding down your arm.

Obviously, even with Shadow Morton’s grand schemes of creating pop theater, The Shangri-Las were hardly avant-garde in this sense. Still, they (and their contemporaries) pull from that same place of holiness — I don’t believe in marriage or a traditional idea of god, but the last minute of The Ronettes’ version of “So Young” is maybe one of the things I hold dearest on this wretched earth. It’s what I think the angels’ descent must sound like. I usually can’t listen to it without bursting into tears. These magnificently-arranged expressions of these young girls’ desires is the closest thing we have to light from the sky, reaching towards the holy spirit with all the intention the voice can muster. With The Shangri-Las, this stretch towards god comes out in middle waltz of “Past, Present & Future” following Mary’s offering of “shall we dance?”, the processional, almost concussive beat of “Paradise,” the harmonic eruption of those “Give Us Your Blessing” choruses.

And it sounds like a deity calling to a specific time and place as well — it behooves us to think, in 1964, about how girls’ teenage years are their last chance to be independent, to adventure, to have a million loves, to taste freedom. Their obligation is to marry, and the second they’re married, that all stops. They won’t work, they’ll have adult responsibilities and children and a husband who likely does not see them as someone worthy of independence or danger or eruption, let alone a divine lightning strike of sound. It’s still something we do now when we depict young girls’ stories — and I enjoyed Priscilla, but I’m specifically thinking of that movie here — the “story” is over the second the man makes a move to either enter or exit the frame. The second “suffering” is over, what do we have to be there for? What else could move women to be meaningful, we ask? Mary might as well be dead the second this boy whose name could be any name decides she’s his, so why not drive the bike past the detour sign? At least our finish will be dazzling. At least god will look down to find something gorgeous and free splattered across the pavement.

I do, however, think it’s worth noting that Shangri-Las songs — at least the ones I would consider essential — are rarely gentle pleas for attention, or light, sighing hints that maybe it’s not working out anymore. “Right Now and Not Later” marches with the force of its saxophone and organ backing and punches you straight in the gut with its exuberance. “Never Again” is stormy and furious in its bombast — telling you that you better think it over, we have nothing left to consider. Maybe my favorite Shangri-Las song, “I’ll Never Learn,” is a cockeyed half-stringed ballad and half-echoing funeral waltz. Mary’s eyes burn, everything worth anything is gone forever, the single word “help” lingers as it fades out. It sounds more like she’s reaching ambivalently, hopelessly towards purgatory or even hell — what do we have to reach towards heaven for anymore? (Also, I said I wasn’t going to bring up The Indie Boys here, but “I’ll Never Learn” was The Shangri-Las song Johnny Marr asked to play during his BBC Collector’s Choice radio set in 1984 — “because of the strings in it, and it’s just really, really sad.”)

I think maybe The Shangri-Las — and Mary’s — closest brush with the divine comes with “Out in the Streets,” a story of a boy who “used to act bad, used to, but he quit,” who Mary decides she has to break up with because she’s robbing him of who he truly is. There is no death explicitly mentioned (aside from that of their relationship), but it feels the most holy of all 39 entries to the catalog, entering the soundscape with a high, sustained note that sounds like one-half train whistle and one-half organ note — held at a mass to help a choir get in tune — and closes with a discordant, reverb-soaked refrain of its outro, repeating like the main line of a psalm and performed by the ghost of their love. The dream dissipates the second she sees him losing his edge, losing what she adored about him so much in the first place, what made her say — in their own words in another song we’ve mentioned — “Mmmhmm, he’s good-bad, but he’s not evil,” and chase that sensation. She loses someone she can see herself mirrored in, who can be just as much. She’s devastated when he shrinks for her, when he flinches and steps away.

It’s not quite “Yeah, my boyfriend’s pretty cool, but he’s not as cool as me” — maybe slightly more “He killed a policeman when he was 13, and somehow that really impressed me, and it’s written all over my face” — but it’s the hyperbolic longing for something bigger than yourself, something bigger than the world will allow you or deem you worthy of. It’s the type of high drama that encapsulates all shades of girlhood — that is scorned and maligned and mocked. It’s gnarlier and bloodier than most things involving teen girls then were allowed to be at the time, marking a last gasp of freedom before a ring ties you to a bed — a simplicity a certain sector of the population clearly feels young girls should be returning to. They yearn for items over delirious, angelic screams of grandeur, for collecting a million thermos-y-looking water bottles over blood on the pavement. As if that trade-off is everyone’s choice, or is what everyone’s youth looks like.

Maybe “viscera” is the word I wanted……but isn’t it still? Isn’t that what pop music is for? We have so much to be angry about, where should I shove all of that weight? Whose wall should my voice be echoing against? What about yours? What will all of that make me? Easy? Silent? My own?

I clatter and gnaw, all smeared lipstick chin, all watery black streaks. All sharp edges. Maybe he should try louder, cleaner. Maybe prettier, while you’re at it. Try killing the biker and filming it. Try summoning our devil to replace you. Try stalking up to him with dark, bloodied legs and show him how proud he should be. Tell it all toothy. Tell him I killed the other three he gave me, I need one more. Stand real still, then. See how fast you can pull the knife out, I don’t have shit here to mop you up. Spit it back up or don’t. Pin me or don’t. Stuff your mouth and be good and hold it or don’t. Just pick one.

Now, now. The boy I’m forcing to hold my phone up so I can see my reflection probably has a name.

Good for him. Maybe he should touch the divine and let it color his fingers. Maybe you fuckers should try spitting fire like it’s nothing. Then, I’ll try remembering.