Jesus I wish she was just a little bit better than she actually is...

Jesus I wish she was just a little bit better than she actually is, and by closing side one with the cover exacta "Tulane" and "I Wanna Be Your Dog," she comes this close to convincing me she's made the leap. But though nobody else male or female puts out such a reliable brand of hard rock, lean and mean and pretension-free, and though being female gives her an edge in a quintessentially male subgenre, not since her start-up has she made something special of her populist instincts. It's almost as if that's the idea. B+

yeah it slightly underwhelms

Her biggest weakness was song writing, no one has recorded more covers than Joan Jett. I also think she would have done better by rejecting the music industry and leaning into punk. Kind of sad that she ended up in the state fair/permanent opening-band position after her heyday

And we didn't need to hear I Love Rock and Roll at the supermarket every time we shop there.

There was a movie I watched about her last time I was out in Oregon and the take away I got is that her manager (husband(?)/lover/spiritual manager) thought that they could do the bubble gum pop formula with punk rock and it clearly had a shelve life

listen to any X album and you have what you want

Since she started with that anyway in the Runaways it was kind of hard to get away from. That also befell Pat Benatar to an extent--hard rock but also a little too poppy and thus lightweight.

Kenny Laguna, ya interesting to wonder what would have happened if she kicked him to the curb. Her album Naked feels like an edgier/grungier album but I was surprised to see it didn't come out until 2004 not the 90s like I thought

damn, no ass

Her album Naked feels like an edgier/grungier album but

The cover of "I Wanna Be Your Dog" on OP album sounds a lot more like grunge but it also was an album track IIRC and not a single.

starting to sound closer to the 90s there on this 1988 release

I remember reading someone saying the 80s ended in '86? what?

the 80s ended in '83 with Kill 'Em All

Early 80s was an extension of the 70s and a pretty dark time with a broken economy and fear of World War III. The shift started to be in '84 when the US economy turned around and it's reflected in the many increasingly good time fun pop hits from that year like Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Ghostbusters, I Want a New Drug, etc.

she's the biggest poseur in music

Best small venue show I ever saw was Joan Jett. The woman is an entertainer.

yeah good point there was big difference in culture and zeigeist between 1981 and 88-89

I think it's safe to say she's always put on good live shows but the albums just lack some essential quality as Cuckgau pointed out.

I know a few screenwriters, and they have told me how there are more and more period-pieces these days precisely to get around the issue of cell phones, and how difficult it can be to write around them when writing something set in modern day.
Like Die Hard couldn't happen today - that, or they'd do something stupid like having Gruber's goons set up some cellphone-jamming device, but that's still really stretching things, because you'd still run into issues.

That isn’t really a new way though. They did the same thing with landlines before that.

Uh, actually really interesting, but what's this have to do with Joan Jett?

did nothing except get the shit beaten out of her by Tony Iommi while they were high as balls on drugs

I hate ILR&R, I really do.

but that was easier since there are so many circumstances where landlines aren't available. Also they could rely on "someone cut the phone cord!" with landlines.

yes screenwriters needed to account for a lack of phone service in the landline era, but that was much simpler than with cell phones.

It's a shame that the only Melody Maker Gibson sells these days is a Jett model. Not even sure they sell that anymore either.

as with any overplayed song

If you say so. I just don’t think that it’s very hard to explain why phones don’t work, when there are just so many places where they simply don't. I can’t even get service in the back aisles of my local Target and Wal-mart for God's sake. What a writer comes up with today wouldn’t be any more or less contrived than it was 50 years ago.

Up Your Alley

Didn't know she was into that...

I'd believe it.

I thought she was Lesbian, but she apparently dated Chuck Zito who's as far from that as possible. lol

those were the days

There's no real lesbians anyway, there's at most bisexual women.

Some boomer writers, novelists particularly, have said they don't know how to write about today's world.

t.never even talked to a woman before

Since the mid-'00s, when cell phones really took off, Scorsese, Spielberg and Tarantino have only done period pieces.

Now that you guys are talking about this, it reminds me of No Doubt's Spiderwebs.

I'm walking into spiderwebs

So leave a message

And I'll call you back

The point is that screenwriters need to account for an inability to connect with cell phones in places where they didn't have to worry about landlines.

Cell phones can be used theoretically everywhere, but people didn't have 100% access to landlines in the past - plenty of situations it would be difficult to get to one.

This isn't just rambling - filmmakers have often discussed how cell phones have required these changes.

According to Marian Gold from Alphaville. What do you think?

Many people like to look back nostalgically on the 1980s as the last decade without smartphones and the Internet. What positive things did Marian take away from this decade? “That the eighties were the last innocent decade of the Western world,” he answers promptly. That’s why they were already over in 1986, namely on April 24, 1986 with the Chernobyl disaster. Because that was the first time it became clear that everything wasn’t just happening in the movies, but in reality.”

I don't think the 80s were exactly "innocent" and nobody at the time thought so; they all said the innocence ended in about 1965 or somesuch.

caring about irrelevant boomers whose moviemaking skills peaked 40 years ago

Shig.