Finishing school

The Donnas rule

by Carly Carioli

On the cover of the new The Donnas Turn 21 (Lookout!), the girls have traded their mall-chic T-shirts for shoulder-baring haute couture, their heavy blue eyeliner for vampish crimson lipstick, huffing glue for a round of cocktails, and their old bubblegum logo for their name in neon lights. Boys beware: the girls -- sorry, the ladies -- are on the prowl. Not that the Donnas weren't getting laid on their other albums, but the first three songs here all make prominent and lascivious mention of underwear, and the fourth (a song-length meditation on pinball double entendres) declares, "I'll let you flip my flipper/if you let me unzip your zipper."

The gloves, as well as the rest of their clothes, have come off. No wonder, then, that by the fifth song Donna A "needs a doctor, kinda sorta/What's wrong with me?" Prognosis: "He said there's a skidmark on my aorta/And there's no remedy." That, of course, becomes a prescription for her to break the hearts of passive-aggressive droolers in both song #6, "You've Got a Crush on Me" ("You're all alone, your friends all left 'cause you were waiting for me/You call my phone, but you'll never get past my caller ID"), and song #8, "Little Boy" (which rhymes "Have you ever even tried to use a comb?" with "I think you might be missing a chromosome").

By song #7, "Midnight Snack," you might be forgiven for wondering whether they haven't gone back -- as was the case on their first two albums -- to having material written for them by a behind-the-scenes Shadow Morton-type svengali. Maybe several svengalis. Maybe a whole team of well-paid song doctors, some secret cabal of Diane Warrens with access to the Ramones' rhyming dictionary, a comprehensive database of Kiss and AC/DC tabulature, and a zillion dollars' worth of Gen-Y marketing research -- the kind that's savvy enough to make it a Land Rover that creases those tire tracks on Donna A's aorta. Or maybe the Donnas have just grown up, which history suggests would qualify them to write better songs about being teenagers. Still: pinball?

As declarations of sexual liberation go, "40 Boys in 40 Nights" pretty much does the trick, especially as it's sorta set to the tune of Poison's "Talk Dirty to Me." "40 Boys" amounts to the album's lead single, and it does all the things a perfect hard-rock single should do: it makes Joan Jett-like come-ons ("Sometimes I nibble and sometimes I bite"); it refers to the title of the band's previous album ("I kinda sorta wanna Get Skintight"); it makes absurd, Dictators-worthy geographical references ("Have some now, save some for later/But there's no cute boys in Decatur").

Hard rock is all about insatiable appetites, which is perhaps why straight white males have had such a hard time living up to its sexual imperatives without at least dressing in women's clothing. Even with the occasional do-it-for-the-nookie chant or Shady mother-fucking scenario, rap metal is pretty chaste. In truth, hard rock ought by birthright to be the territory of young girls and homosexuals, which it kinda is anyway -- the foremost examples of said theory being Lou Reed's Transformer, the Runaways, Turbonegro's Apocalypse Dudes, and the Donnas' cover here of the Halford/Tipton/Downing gay metal classic "Living After Midnight," which easily eclipses the band's previous covers of Kiss's "Strutter," Mötley Crüe's "Too Fast for Love," and Sweet's "Wig Wam Bam."

That point about insatiable appetites aside, it still takes balls to write a song about a combination booty-call/junk-food run where it is never quite clear whether the singer is turned on more by the root-beer float or by the boy who brings it to her. That's not true here: "Midnight Snack" makes it explicit that she's more interested in the float. (The chorus is ingeniously and unambiguously worded: "I want a little piece of you with my midnight snack," as opposed to vice versa). Given that Donna A looks like the kind of girl who enjoys as little fast food with her fast love, this is the kind of brazen and healthy unselfconsciousness that not many 21-year-olds possess. Either that or she's got exceptionally talented writers.

The Donnas don't hesitate to bite the hands of their two most reliable demographic champions -- dirty old men ("Somebody call the bouncer and get this guy off the stage/He wrote his number on his boxers, but he's three times my age") and rock critics ("You wanna meet me, but you wrote a bad review of our show/If you don't like us, what are you doing standing in the front row?"). You could also read "Little Boy" as a kiss-off to Donald M, Donald T, and Donald G -- collectively, the Donalds, combined age 46. On the cover of their novelty single "I Wanna Be in Palo Alto!", the Donalds strike a familiar pose: the photo, the typeface, the T-shirts, and even the jungle gym in the background are identical to the cover of the Donnas' debut single. But those cosmetic details are about the extent of the joke. The Donalds claim to be the world's biggest Donnas fans, but Donald T's devil lock brands him a Misfits geek, and Donald M's baseball cap and goatee are standard metal issue. The music: generic hardcore with stalkerish tendencies.

The Donnas headline downstairs at the Middle East next Tuesday, March 13. Call 864-EAST.