Scuzzy Locals Pretend That Men Are the Same as Women

Comments (0) By Kevin John Tuesday, Jul 6 2004

Her name was Rio. Now she doesn't even have a number like my TVC 15. But she's the star in this bedroom. On Red Bedroom's cover portrait, courtesy of Fever vocalist-resident Nagel Geremy Jasper, she's a crash-test dummy with an engine-block updo and a stretching-ringed neck—Chicks on Speed's glamour girl visualized. With "the frigid skin of a mannequin" and "nothing inside," she threatens to reduce Jasper and his boys to her collage-prepped pile of limbs. When he sings "I'd give my right arm now you've wronged me," he means it literally. In short, these scuzzy Voidoids are as immature as Blink-182 were; they just have hipper ways of hiding it—like pretending punk and new wave were the same thing. Fortunately for us pods, they fetishize song form as much as the post-feminist body, stitching together their creations with hooks and bridges, ABC's and 123's. They're denying sexual difference while we're denying capitalist pseudo-differentiation, the very least inhabitants of the Matrix can ask of a pop song. But once these Von Frankensteins get over their girl problems, out will pop an eponymous testament as bland as Blink-182's. So catch the Fever while they're still cold, before they really turn into the grown men they think they are.