The Modern Lovers - Girl Friend
Like the Beatles, so much has been said about the Modern Lovers and Jonathan Richman that it’s hard to really appreciate how much of an effect they’ve had on modern music. It’s still pretty crazy when you do, though - when you put on the Modern Lovers album and it still sounds fresh, despite being released almost 35 years ago now. The influence of “Roadrunner” on punk has been widely discussed (or, uh, at least extensively discussed by Greil Marcus, man), but you can hear precursors of everything from indie-pop to emo in the details or gestalt of the Modern Lovers album. There’s the overall romanticism, the young-kid tendency to simultaneously idolize and demonize women (which Richman himself disavowed later in his career), the insistent weirdness of “Pablo Picasso.” And then there’s “Girl Friend,” with that wonderful chorus:
That’s a girl - friend
That’s a G-I-R-L-F-R-E-N
That’s a girlfriend, baby
It’s hilarious - that is how pop singers pronounce “girlfriend!” - and it’s no accident that Art Brut’s Eddie Argos built a song around a reference to that joke. There’s something about this song that takes the nerd view of the world and makes it seem unutterably cool. That joke is simultaneously dumb and knowing, sincere and sarcastic. The way the song musically embraces an outdated form is key too. It shows how nerds can use their otherwise-worthless body of cultural knowledge to pluck out an old way of expressing a sincere emotion, free of the taint of modern society. (“Old World” and all that.) In songs like this, Jonathan Richman invented a way to turn all the distancing techniques that mass-cult nerds have built up into a vehicle for romantic expression, and the value of that shouldn’t be underappreciated. The yearning here is real but knowing, self-conscious but seeking a way around it. The world disappoints us, but we still believe we can find a part of it worth understanding.
