Pat, You Are A Pillar!

"A lot of women singers today seem to be saying, ‘If you love me and then hurt me, I’ll die.’ I say, ‘If you love me then hurt me, I’ll kick your ass.’"
-Pat Benatar (June 1979)

This is a little of the fallout from a mild brain lapse that occured last year. I got this job where myself and my fellow employees would come to blows over what radio station should be playing. One guy refused to listen to my choice of "yoof" music and I threatened to blow up when a song was played for THE TWENTIETH FUCKING TIME THAT DAY on his commercial puke-choice. So, for the sake of everyone's sanity we made a comprimise.

We eventually settled on an oldies station playing mostly rockin' tracks that re-packaged nostalgia and dreams of past youth specifically for the daily grind. But the station had a love for music which is uncommon for most Australian commercial arse-waves and was pretty endearing.

Oh, and the songs!

I would come home after a large day of nothing and fill my housemate's computer with the massively fake, over-emotive 80's tracks, get drunk and wail along with Flock of Seagulls, Foreigner and - most emotive of all - Pat Benatar.

Pat was born Patricia Mae Andrzejewski in Janurary 1953 to a Polish family in Brooklyn, NY. She was discovered at an open mic nightin the late seventies, playing run-of-the-mill songs dressed in Catwoman costume, showered with praise, shown a record deal, won best female vocal grammys for twenty consecutive years in the early eighties and was generally loved by everyone.

Her obvious massive songs aren't the ones that get me, though. Yeah, "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" is fun and brash and does deal with the main idea that runs through pretty much all of Benatar's songs: that of, "Try it on if you want guy, but I've been through enough shit to know what you're about, if you fuck with me I'll find something else like you never happened," etc.

The songs that get me are the ones with ridiculously over the top chorus, huge arena rock guitars and straining layered harmonies. "Shadows Of The Night", "We Belong", "Heartbreaker".
All of them paint Pat as this immovable pillar, this tough and world-weary chick that has been fucked over, shat on, spat up but doesn't want anything similar to happen to any dude she meets. She warns us about it but is never out for scalps. She still seeks and strives for love regardless of previous histories.

It seemed a common theme for popular women singers in the 80's. Women no longer striving for liberation; women realising they've found it, have been living that way for years and reveling in it, falling in love with it.

"Love Is A Battlefield" was the soundtrack to last year - the song that best describes all the idiocy of bringing previous history and ill communication into relationships, which of course is impossible not to do but fucks things up nevertheless. Its one of Pat's more relaxed and restrained songs but could be - maybe because its what I want to believe and take from the plasticity of the eighties - her most sincere and heartfelt that I've come across.

I think Pat's doing a bit of TV work these days. "I Was A Celebrity, Now Pieces Of Me Are Being Fed To The Wolves" reality-type swill and selling songs for toothpaste and travelcase commercials. Nevermind. For a good chunk of last year she was a rock when I was a flabby piece of fetid fat being drunkenly blown around. Pat, you are a pillar!