The story of “Our Wedding” by Creative Recording and Sound Services is a good one that bears repeating. Included in a 1981 issue of UK teen romance magazine Loving was a “Fabulous Record Offer,” a write-in coupon for a free copy of this “Wedding Day Single” sung by one Joy De Vivre. Little did the Loving staff and readers realize that Creative Recording and Sound Services were actually the anarcho-punk band Crass and Joy De Vivre one of their two female singers. Once word got out, Loving editor Pam Lyons called the hoax “a sick joke,” and told NME, “It was just a pathetic ploy by Crass to get publicity.”
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A sick joke? Definitely. A ploy to get publicity? In a sense.
But pathetic? Not at all on Crass’ part. The only thing pathetic about the ordeal is the fact that a successful mainstream publication failed to recognize “Our Wedding” for what it was: a blatant regurgitation of the magazine’s own fear mongering and propaganda. Consider that whichever dimwit passed for a music or entertainment editor at Loving really might’ve listened to the desperately pleading lyrics “Never look at anyone, anyone but me/ Never look at anyone, I must be all you see/ Listen to those wedding bells/ Say goodbye to other girls/ I’ll never be untrue my love/ Don’t be untrue to me,” and actually thought them romantic, or at least passable as such.
Crass founder Penny Rimbaud had this to say: “These are the same authorities that made Chinese women into festering hooks, that made Victorian women gasp for breath beneath their whalebone binding, that make women today distort themselves with high heels and chemical additives … They offer you cheap products that exploit you and the emptiness that we all feel; their obscene and mindless intrusions into the emptiness are tragic insults to our intelligence. It is because of their poverty of thought that they off[er] ‘Our Wedding,’ pure unadulterated shit. THEY SELL IT TO YOU WITHOUT A CARE.”
Looking back, one mainstream magazine’s embarrassing failure and perhaps more embarrassing reaction to said fail created a perfect moment in countercultural history; an instance in which the day’s tastemakers were so brazenly heartless and out of touch they mistook satire for the real thing and advertised it accordingly. A contemporary analogy might come in the form of vaporwave artists successfully pushing their hellish Muzak distortions on banks and department stores. This, of course, hasn’t happened… yet.
While “Our Wedding” parodies pre-packaged romance and the commodification of love with a voice of innocent naïveté, Penis Envy’s first cut, “Bata Motel,” offers a searing send-up of the psychosexual nightmare patriarchal society attaches to the female gender, spelling out the “she was asking for it” mentality in terms none too abstract. Man’s prototypical female is embodied by the willfully submissive sex object (rape victim?) played here by Eve Libertine, who like Joy De Vivre in “Our Wedding,” addresses her mate directly: “Burn me out, twist my wrists/ I promise not to shout, beat me with your fists/ Squeeze me, squeeze me, make me feel/ In my red high-heels I’m an easy kill/ Tease me, tease me, make me see/ You’re the only one I need to be me/ Thank you, will you take me?/ Thank you, will you make me?/ Thank you, will you break me?/ Use me, don’t lose me/ Taste me, don’t waste me.” How one reads such requests and demands in light of modern pop’s sexual identity crisis (see: domestic violence victim Rihanna singing “I want you to be my sex slave”) is another matter altogether.
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One laste note: if you’re looking for more information on Crass or at all interested in anarcho-punk music or anarchistic living in general, I cannot recommend the full-length documentary There Is No Authority But Yourself highly enough. Please do yourself a favor and take 65 minutes out of your day to check it out.