To the Stranglers

This is a sad day-I am struggling to save myself from getting drowned in a quagmire of indignation and disappointment today. I still cannot overcome the sense of disbelief which gripped me when I discovered that the press had accused you of writing a sexist song. Why did that have to happen to me? I have already spent two hours in the morning listening to the song over and over again trying to analyze its lyrics and mulling over its semantics in a desperate attempt to detect misogyny in it. But I still cannot fathom what was there in the song which made so many consider it to be disrespectful towards women-maybe, that’s because English is still an alien language for me; a mystery which tantalizes and teases me every evening that I meet her in the company of Joyce or Woolf or Banville or Poe but remains nonchalant to me every time I try to have a rendezvous with her by myself. But it is equally likely that I have been in love with you for too long to be willing to admit even to myself that you could write a misogynistic song, though there is certainly something sexually evocative about it. Well, did you intend the lyrics to be sexist? Strolling along minding my own buisness/ well there goes a girl and a half/ she's got me going up and down/ she's got me going up and down/ walking on the beaches looking at the peaches/ well i got the notion girl that you got some suntan lotion in that bottle of yours/ spread it all over my peelin' skin baby/ that feels real good/ all this skirt lappin' up the sun/ lap me up/ why don't you come on and/ lap me up/ walking on the beaches looking at the peaches/ well there goes another one just lying down on the sand dunes/ i'd better go take a swim and see if i can cool down a little bit/ coz you and me woman/ we got a lotta things on our minds (you know what i mean)/ walking on the beaches looking at the peaches/ will you just take a look over there (where?) there/ is she tryin' to get outta that clitares?/ liberation for women/ thats what i preach/ preacher man/ walking on the beaches looking at the peaches/ oh shit/ there goes the charabang/ looks like im gonna be stuck here the whole summer/ well what a bummer/ i can think of a lot worse places to be/ like down in the streets/ or down in the sewer/ or even on the end of a skewer… Well, yes I just listened to the song once again and it is indeed laden with sexual innuendos but I still cannot feel anything save perplexity as I try to understand why did it outrage women and journalists who acrimoniously alleged that yours was a band of male chauvinists and the song was distastefully sexist. It also won’t be easy to try to quit being in love with you. I have spent so many Sunday afternoons downloading your songs from the internet, reading your interviews available online and watching videos of your songs on Youtube that nothing seems to be of gloomier prospect than weekends without you. Ah! Those afternoons have been a veritable feast for my senses. Every time I listened to Hugh Cornwell sing ‘Golden Brown, texture like sun…’ I found myself being transformed into a lotus-eater enjoying the melancholia, the day dreaming which languor invokes. I on the other hand, found that my heart was replete with an ineffably exciting energy whenever I watched JJ Burnel croon ‘Something better change’; can listening to a song ever lead to the release of endorphin in the body? I am not sure; my knowledge of biology has always been rather poor. As I discovered more and more of your songs, I so much wished that I was a young woman living in England in the 1970s so that I could attend your concerts, admire your irreverence, despise the mainstream media for being hostile to you and investigate the revolutionary potential of your songs. I don’t know if I like ‘No more heroes…’ better than ‘Get a grip on yourself’ but I listen to both of them whenever I need to reassure myself that my solitude does not make me lonely. I am not sure who I think was hotter-Hugh Cornwell, the lead singer with a maddening, haunting voice or JJ Burnel, the bass player with disheveled hair but I know that their sensuality laid in the eccentricity which they exuded as they performed. I have been so madly in love with both of them along with the astonishingly strange songs which they created with Dave Greenfield on the key board and Jet Black, playing the drums that I almost loathe myself for not discovering them earlier and for allowing myself to let my taste in music remain weak due to listening to too much of Bollywood music as a child. Yet the question shall always chafe me, vex me if you actually have a sexist song or two-I am too scared to listen to ‘London Lady’ lest I should actually discover that you had, in your enthusiasm to portray yourself as bold and menacing, allowed yourself to do something as banal and commonplace as write a misogynistic song- in your otherwise brilliantly original oeuvre. It is excruciating a discovery that you who composed a song like ‘Strange little girl’ could have referred to us as a ‘piece of meat’. But then JJ Burnel said in an interview in 2011 “I think probably politically we f@@@ed it up. We made so many enemies we screwed up a lot of people…. I never got the sexist thing.” I think I will believe him. He thinks that you are still a viable band; maybe I shall get to attend your concert some day in near future. Maybe, I can meet JJ Burnel and clarify for myself if lyrics of ‘Peach’ and ‘London Lady’ actually had sexist connotations? Were you ever a votary of male chauvinism?