Shangri-Las :: Give Him a Great Big Kiss
When I say I’m in love you best believe I mean love: L-U-V.
For everyone who like boys or bois—good bad not evil ones, like the girl says—a song for spring now that we can see their backs and shoulders proper. Where I work, locked-up girls crowd near the windows on the yard and watch the boys on rec pretend to ignore them. They hoot and bite their hair when the boys remove their shirts—you know, for less restrictive pseudo-obliviousness. Caged heat indeed, and we’re all like this, the adolescents and people like me, forever young at heart. It’s all sarcastic talk and gum popping while we fantasize that someday the horns and vocals will drop out and our girls will handclap us a strut right up to the heartbreaker upon whom we lay A Great Big Kiss.
For some people it goes like that: Pinkie Tuscadero, John Cusack, Italians. For the rest of us, here’s the least cool of the obscenely cool Shangri-Las’ songs—a theme by which we’ll reclaim that precious adolescent mix of awkwardness and heedless, groundless, nearly delusional self confidence!
As a special L-U-V bonus, I direct you to Nation of Ulysses’ Today I Met the Girl I’m Gonna Marry. The Sassiest Boy in America kicks it off by flipping the Shangri-Las line from “best believe” to “better believe”—perfect, since Nation of Ulysses is better but the Shangri-Las are best. I suggest we put these songs together, put on our shades, tighten up our pants and pretend we’re tuff enough to get close…real close.
Give Him a Great Big Kiss
Shangri-Las (fansite)
Today I Met the Girl I’m Going to Marry
Nation of Ulysses (label site)
Nice! Thanks for posting this. I do love the Shangri-Las so very much. The first time I heard the L-U-V was in the beginning of a New York Dolls song as a teenager ("Looking for a Kiss"). It didn’t make any sense until I heard the Shangri-Las later.