Worst Songs Ever: Stray Cats – ‘(She’s) Sexy + 17’

Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance. I don’t want to hate songs; to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.

The Stray Cats’s “(She’s) Sexy + 17”
PEAK CHART POSITION: #5 in September 1983

In the late seventies the kids too young for Elvis and Little Richard got Happy Days, a show that allowed their parents to feel squishy for a time about which their own feelings weren’t well sorted. Then Ronald Reagan became president, MTV took off, and bands like Stray Cats realized that gels came in stiffer and better varieties than their Ike-era equivalents. A devotee of mousse and necrophilia, group leader Brian Setzer applied both to songs that for listeners unacquainted with the Carl Perkins or Sun Studio era coded as “fifties” in the same manner that “eighties” has become in our decade a portmanteau for synth presets used by anyone from Paramore to Sam Hunt (“Paramore’s eighties beats” or some such nonsense). The biggest hit from Stray Cats’ impressive 1982-1983 streak tries to merge Chuck Berry with a modern knowingness, and the result is Setzer stepping on a rake.

While Setzer’s Gretsch was born to twang through rockabilly clichés, the tension between wearing the drag of fifties tropes and the self-consciousness of writing about “rock ‘n’ roll dream[s]” makes “She’s Sexy…” a queasy listening experience, and I bet Setzer also insists on the abbreviated “‘n’.” Swathed in David Edmunds’ echo, “She’s Sexy…” was very 1983, a cynical way to hook the kids who dug Culture Club and their parents, and it probably worked; this was the era when Stars on 45 scored a fraudulent #1 reminding listeners of a time before Quarterflash. And it took more than kids to turn 1982’s Built for Speed into one of the early Reagan era’s most unexpected hits: this miscellany re-assembled out of Stray Cats’ first two albums sat at #2 for weeks behind Men at Work’s Business as Usual.

“She’s Sexy” rests on 1983’s Rant n’ Rave with the Stray Cats, which might’ve been called Built for Sales. Behind the burbling riff is a received sexism that that gets grosser every time Setzer reminds listeners he’s not in high school no more but will still wait for Lil Marie. What he’s really waiting for himself; Brian Setzer would fuck Brian Setzer if he wore a training bra. When he sings, “Ooh baby, I like your star” and follows it up with a respond-o-riff he’s showing the kids with their Emulators how Eddie Cochran did it. Around the time Stray Cats went platinum Marshall Crenshaw and his own Stratocaster could barely scrape a top forty entry out of “Someday, Someway” while taking the most poignant parts of early rock — speed, enough space to display casual virtuosity, attitude — and applying unexpected chord changes to scenarios in which the Crenshaw character’s frustrations didn’t make him sour or pinched. On the West coast, X built their own contraptions for speed and added breakneck male/female harmonies. These acts made Stray Cats sound crasser.

Those of us who survived the regrettable late nineties swing revival felt proud to have history turn in our favor, not that it mattered: as the leader of the Brian Setzer Orchestra, the man revived in 1998 yet another genre that he thought moribund with condescension and winks and misspellings. Setzer got his double platinum and slunk off. Don’t be surprised if he shows up in a couple of years working on a nineties boy band recovery project. Everything about his career points to an ego marinating in messianism.