When, after years of trying, she finally manages to assemble the band that becomes the Pretenders, she realizes she needs a stage look. But music, not sex, remains her priority and to what degree early trauma shapes those attitudes, we never really learn.Ĭan she be a rock star without becoming a sex symbol? That’s Hynde’s challenge.
THE PRETENDERS CHRISSIE HYNDE FREE
“I wanted to be them, not do them.” It was the era of free love, of the Pill, of sexual liberation, and Hynde partakes. “I can’t remember having sexual fantasies about actually getting it on with one of my rock-star heroes,” she admits at one point.
Hynde is reluctant to lose her virginity, and when she does, well into college, she treats it as a hassle. But being around Malcolm and Viv, I started to understand the meaning of glamour, that how you present yourself to your fellow man is a way of communicating ideas.”Īn ambivalence surrounding sex also comes across loud and clear. Gucci? That was for someone’s sad auntie. “Designer labels didn’t exist, not to people like us, anyway. “Nobody I knew thought about fashion,” she writes. Later, when she moves to London and gets a job working at Sex, the boutique owned by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, Hynde gets an education in the look of rock ’n’ roll. Soon thereafter we learn that little Chrissie (or Christy, as she was then known) would never have been allowed to wear blue jeans, a symbol of her parents’ conservatism. On page one, for example, we meet Hynde’s parents: her father, decked out in his Marine Corps uniform, her mother, wearing a red-and-white-striped dress. It’s a memoir of a messily lived life, but from the outset, deliberate sartorial choices loom large. (And based on the quantity and diversity of drugs imbibed throughout, it’s hard to trust those details anyhow.) I often found myself lost in which squatter’s hovel is where, which junkies die and which ones don’t, which men become lovers and which ones are just pals, which of those pals/lovers are destined for punk-rock glory, and which ones are just minor hangers-on. She proceeds chronologically, but even so, the details are tough to keep track of. Hynde’s memoir covers her life through the early eighties, when the Pretenders first rose to fame: her middle-class childhood in conformist, fifties Akron, Ohio her years as a disaffected student at Kent State in the sixties her struggle to get her music career off the ground while living in Paris, Cleveland, and eventually London, her home for the past four decades. Hynde’s strange, sartorial framing of what can lead to rape, and certain passages from Reckless, reveal that she’s always been hyper-focused on the stories our clothing tell about who we are. “You can’t fuck around with people, especially people who wear ‘I Heart Rape’ and ‘On Your Knees’ badges.”
THE PRETENDERS CHRISSIE HYNDE FULL
“Now, let me assure you that, technically speaking, however you want to look at it, this was all my doing and I take full responsibility,” she writes. But the most shocking part of this shocking story is what the singer took away from it.
On its own, this would be plenty newsworthy. Practically comatose on quaaludes, she agrees to accompany them alone to their house for “a party.” Once there, the bikers force her to strip, throw matches at her naked torso, and sexually assault her. If you haven’t been following the story, the most upsetting of those incidents goes like this: A 21-year-old Hynde meets a bunch of Hells Angels while visiting a friend of a friend at the Cleveland City Jail. Pretenders front woman **Chrissie Hynde’**s memoir, Reckless, didn't officially go on sale until today, but Hynde has already been in the headlines for more than a week, for inflammatory comments she made while discussing incidents chronicled in the book.
0 kommentar(er)
