One of the best things about doing this blog is that I hear things from 30 years ago, which eventually end up having resonance in 2023.
I would have liked to do the Barbenheimer double feature this summer, but my wife had no interest in seeing either Barbie or Oppenheimer. And I only really wanted to see Oppenheimer providing I could see Barbie as the second part of the feature. Furthermore, I was adamant that I wanted to do it at the Ultimate Picture Palace, near Oxford, so I could support an arthouse venue rather than a multiplex. But the days when they showed Oppenheimer first and Barbie second always clashed with other things, so in the event, I ended up seeing only Barbie down at The Poly in Falmouth, so that I could support one of my old venues. The venue where Equus was staged, no less.
I enjoyed Barbie, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s screenplay managed to effortlessly sidestep every potential criticism that the movie could have been accused of falling into (too frothy, too woke, too sexist, promoting unrealistic body expectations etc), while also managing to tweak the nose of everyone who could have found something to get upset about over the principle of a Barbie film by acknowledging the problems without allowing any of them to capsize the film. The problem was that because I could see their skill in managing to keep all of the balls in the air, I ended up admiring their technique rather than fully falling in love with the movie. But, that’s nit-picking on my part, as there was a lot to enjoy about it.
If you had told me in 1993, that when I was 47, I’d be going to see a movie about Barbie on my own at the cinema, I would have a) told you, you were lying and b) panicked about my future middle age. I went into the Barbie movie with no real frames of reference beyond Barbie herself and Ken, who I’d blithely assumed was her boyfriend, only to find out that this isn’t the case. The end credits play out over a montage of different Barbie and Ken lines which Mattel had brought out over the years. It was during this sequence that I discovered that the character of Allan, Ken’s friend, was a real doll, as were most of the other non-Barbie dolls that popped up during the film. Among them was Barbie’s younger sister, Skipper, who in 1975 was given a line called Growing Up Skipper, whereby she could go from a pre-pubescent doll to a teenaged one. All you had to do was rotate her arm and she would both grow taller and grow breasts. The concept of this is somewhere between mildly icky and impressively progressive and it clearly stayed with a trio of American female musicians when they came together to record a one-off 7-inch single in the early 1990s….
Signed to God is My Co-Pilot’s label, The Making of Americans, the Growing Up Skipper band released one 3 track single under the catchall title, Use Only as Directed. As the video thumbnail shows, the sleeve design acknowledged the doll origins in typical punk style.
Abby is quite a pleasant song, albeit with a melancholic feel to it. We’re told that Abby is expecting a baby and that the narrator, Kate Kindlon, would like to write a song both for Abby and her baby. While Kindlon reflects that she’ll write a lullaby for the baby when it arrives, she inadvertently ends up doing something similar for Abby. It’s a supportive song which looks both at Abby’s short-term future (becoming a mother) and encourages her to think long term (going back to engineering school in the future).
The 3 tracks from Use Only as Directed are all on YouTube and listening to them, I couldn’t help but think that Peel missed a trick by not having Teenage Boyfriend lead into Abby, as they seem to be both thematically linked and stylistically different. The former being an explosively, angry broadside against sex obsessed boys who force their girlfriends into sex regardless of safety or consideration of the girl’s feelings and end up leaving them pregnant and alone; while the latter is a gently supportive hug of a song as the reluctant mother prepares for the change to her life while being reminded that her own life and future is not necessarily over. In the sleeve notes to the record, Growing Up Skipper also took the opportunity to include a short essay on their own thoughts on the matter, and their words resonate as powerfully now as then. It’s in this context that their choice of name makes perfect sense. They weren’t just talking to the Abbys, but also to the Skippers who were growing up and finding that by doing so, there was a whole new world of complications and expectations to try and manage.
Video courtesy of Simon Williams.
