This Year's Girl - The Modern Man Considers the State of the Modern Woman, Identifies Areas of Concern

Hyped about this album tbh, they're getting great copy on Vice

there seem to be a lot of new-wave songs like this, I guess as a genre it was big on both angry nerds and "social commentary"? I thought of Little Bitch by the Specials and Wait Till Your Boat Goes Down by XTC again, but both of those maybe have the anger and bitterness a little too close to the surface, possibly what you're getting out requires at least a pretence of superior detachment?

isn't there a thread somewhere on an ilm with a long acrimonious debate about whether Common People is one of these songs?

O god, the Common People thread. Yeah, it's all kinds of clusterfuck. Mostly abt class iirc.

Tori Amos - Girl would be an example of how the narrative shifts when a woman sings of objectification.

I'm not going to expand too much on this one, other than to say that it's more effective coming from Tori as she can relate to the experiences of the gender she's describing. So when she says "She's been everybody else's girl, Maybe one day she'll be her own" it doesn't read as detached cool or being observant and having her cake and eating it too, it reads like learned experience.

Tori Amos track is interesting, but yeah, very different in tone & sensibility.

In wondering about how the form would work with the genders switched, I suppose I was thinking of TLC's "No Scrubs" and Paula Cole's "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone", songs where the modern man gets called out. Not that either of those really fits, either...

Um, "Wait till your boat goes down" was about a "Yachting boy" though?

Or buoy, maybe..

xp Innocence by Kirsty MacColl maybe? possibly similar to This Year's Girl and Battery Brides in that the song's "narrator" has an insight denied to the subject, the latter being an oblivious dupe of society?

How about Marianne Faithfull - Why D'ya Do It? - it's an indictment of the cheating lovers though.

Love the Kirsty MacColl song. Never heard it before, or perhaps just never listened closely. Doesn't seem to be attempting any larger comment on the state of the world, but maybe I'm just not catching all the implications.