Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut Read Online Free Page B

trying to clap along. He went ‘Private eyes, CLAP CLAP, they’re watching you, CLAP CLAP, they see your every move.’ ”
    “Right. How is it supposed to go?”
    “You know. ‘Private eyes, clap CLAP, they’re watching you, clap CLAP.’ ”
    “So just the one clap then, the second time around.”
    “Watch. ‘Private eyes. CLAP.’ Now you.”
    “CLAP. CLAP.”
    “OK, now again. ‘Private eyes! Clap CLAP!’ ”
    “CLAP. CLAP CLAP.”
    “You know,” Tracey said in her soothing tone. “You might just want to avoid the clapping-when-girls-are-around thing.”
    I nodded like I understood. I didn’t. This was a girl language and I was on the outside. Girls can clap, boys can’t. It was like the Nancy Drew book The Clue of the Tapping Heels where Nancy figures out the tap dancers are sending secret messages to the bad guys by tapping in Morse code.
    When you’re a kid, every step in identity is marked by a step in music. You were totally defined by which station you listened to, graduating from the kiddie station to the teenybop station to the grown-up stations. In our house, the radio was always on, whether it was my parents’ doo-wop and oldies, the weekend Irish drinking songs on WROL or me and my sisters trying to navigate our own way around the dial. WRKO was AM Top 40 for girls. F-105 was FM Top 40 for seventh and eighth grade girls or sixth grade boys. Kiss-108 was disco for girls or very secure boys. WBZ and WHDH were pop for parents. WBCN (“the Rock of Boston”) was rock for arty kids. WCOZ was like WBCN, but heavier and not as arty. It ran ads proclaiming “Kick Ass Rock & Roll!” or “WCOZ . . . [painful grunt]. . . the Rock & Roll MUTHA!” I believe the Mutha set a broadcasting record by playing “Whole Lotta Love” continuously for six years straight.
    There was a lot of radio out there, and I didn’t want to miss any of it. In seventh grade, I switched from WRKO to F-105 to WCOZ in the space of six months. By eighth and ninth grade, it was WBCN. Tenth grade introduced WHTT, the new contemporary hits radio station, which played nothing but Toni Basil’s “Mickey” and Musical Youth’s “Pass the Dutchie.” There was always Magic 106, with a heavy-breathing seductive DJ named David Allan Boucher who was always hosting Bedtime Magic , the show where he would recite the lyrics of the songs in his very sexy way, as a soundtrack to what must have been the most depressing adult sex imaginable.
    Top 40 radio was a constant education in the ways of the world. I learned what sex was from Barry White appearing on The Mike Douglas Show to sing “It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me.” Barry himself, looking fine in a green velour leisure suit, wandered out into the crowd to preach a little sermon as the band vamped on the bassline. “Is this song about one person? Is this song about three people? No! It’s about two people. Yeah. Two people.” I was grateful to the Round Mound of Sound for every scrap of wisdom he could throw me.
    One of our favorite songs was Sister Sledge’s disco classic “We Are Family,” still all over the radio in 1980, getting played like it was a brand-new hit even though it dated back to the summer of 1979. Our baby sister, Caroline, a decade younger than me but picking up all of our cool music in the timeless tradition of sassy little sisters throughout human history, loved to sing along with this one, making up her own words: “We are family! We got all the sisters we need!” Those are still my favorite words to that song, because (in our case) they were true. But it’s funny how this song never goes away, and every generation of baby sisters puts their own spin on it. Just the other day, in a movie theater lobby outside the Harry Potter movie, I heard a little Puerto Rican girl singing it as “We are family! Yeah, Mama, sing it to me!” And she was singing it to a life-size cardboard cutout of Megan Fox, which only proves there is no limit to