it's not animosity

From the March 1978 issue of Pizzazz, Marvel Comics' attempt to crack the tweener mag market:

Writing music reviews is easy when your target audience is a bunch of starry-eyed twelve-year-olds who think that a Big Mac constitutes haute cuisine. Nice work, if you can get it, though I suspect the psychic toll involved in writing lines like "an infectiously appealing little charmer that rocks, rolls, shakes, and boogies" in regard to such musical luminaries as Jimmy Osmond, Leif Garrett, and Cassidy the Younger on a regular basis would inevitably lead to a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the roof of one's mouth and parts beyond.

Here's the "smash single" that the reviewer issued the severe groove damage warning over...

Shaun Cassidy - Hey Deanie (from Born Late, 1977)

This Eric Carmen cover (three words I never imagined having to string together) did peak at #7 on the Billboard Top 100, though my wife, who briefly participated in the Shaun-o-mania craze, claims that she doesn't recall it at all. That's not surprising, as the music, along with running around in the dark with Parker Stevenson on prime time television, was just one facet of the teen idolatry package -- scaffolding by which best to display the dreamy, marketable image.

What shouldn't astonish me so much, but does, is that the song and album were released around the same time (the second half of 1977) as this track:

Wire - Mannequin (from Pink Flag, 1977)

It's a loaded comparison -- disposable teen pop product versus a phenomenally influential piece of art punk -- but it amazes me how well "Mannequin" has retained its freshness over the past three decades while the shelf life of "Hey Deanie" can be measured to the picosecond. It's as quaint a historical artifact as a shellac 78 RPM recording of Flip Pringle and His Liberty Orchestra's "Let's Set Fire to the Kaiser's Mustache," while the hooks and jangles of "Mannequin" retain a sense of immortality.

It's not simply a matter of being a work "for the ages." There are many classics pop songs -- including quite few songs I like more than "Mannequin" -- that have endured, yet operate within clear historical moments. "Mannequin," apart from its association with the early British punk scene, exists outside history. It could have been released in 1983, 1995, or five minutes ago and still sounded fresh and of the present age, immutable, eternal, and radiant.