Long As You Can Get It Up

The Knack : Frustrated

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On June 11, 1979 The Knack released their debut album, a brilliant Mike Chapman production brilliantly marketed by the old Beatles label, Capitol Records, featuring one brilliant single "My Sharona". Let's hold off discussing the single for another day. Get the Knack shot up to the top of the American album charts. In the U.K., it only peaked at #65. Maybe they saw through the pop sheen and manipulation. Yu see, this is an album with one major goal: rock out the teenage boys with songs about lust, lusty girls and girls who are not lusty enough. "Frustrated"? Weren't we all? 

The album scored only a B- from critic Robert Christgau who wrote:

Cognoscenti I know tend to couch their belief that this is the Anti-clash in purely technical terms -- harmonies treacly, production punched up, and so forth. Bullshit. I too find them unattractive; if they felt this way about girls when they were unknowns, I shudder to think how they're reacting to groupies. But if they're less engaging musically than, say, the Scruffs, they have a lot more pop and power going for them than, say, the Real Kids. In other words, "My Sharona" is pretty good radio fare and let's hope "She's So Selfish" isn't the next single. Face it, this is a nasty time, and if the Stranglers are (or were, I hope) Sgt. Barry Sadler, these guys are only Freddie and the Dreamers. Docked a notch for clothes sense

Even in the sexuallys aturated 70's Rolling Stone critic Ken Tucker was somewhat taken aback by Doug Feiger's lyrics . 

Infusing all the smart primitivism, however, are Doug Fieger's elastic whine and appallingly bald opinions. Legions of jaunty rockers have uttered repressed moans for their girlfriends, but Fieger comes right out and salivates with the drool of a witty satyr: "She's your adolescent dream/Schoolboy stuff, sticky-sweet romance/And she makes you wanna scream/Wishin' you could get inside her pants." 

That's from "Good Girls Don't," just one in a series of songs addressed to young women whom the singer wants to know only in a carnal sense. Fetid ideas like Fieger's are usually the stuff of panting heavy-metal bands, and easily ignored in the blare. But by couching his rampaging id in the locutions of classical pop rock, Fieger makes his callousness inescapable: he practically rubs your face in it.