Dirty Mind

The Pipettes released their first full-length album the other day. I've been watching this band with some interest ever since I discovered them via Pandora two or three months ago. They're sort of a cross between the Supremes and the Sex Pistols. Indeed, despite their outwardly family-friendly, rated-G appearance, they really have more in common with the spirit of punk rock than with the girl groups of the 50s and 60s.

When I first discovered them, I wasn't sure if I should jump on their bandwagon or not. I didn't want to get caught up in some Spice Girls or early Britney Spears rehash. A visit to their website, however, set me at ease. There, I found that they had a manifesto, of sorts, and I decided that any band that describes their objectives in this way:

Let us continue to expand our temporal and spatial borders in this fashion and let us do so using the tools at hand. Like a bricoleur we shall construct our histories from what we already have around us, what is available to us immediately and what we already know . . . . But we will never be limited by our own boundaries, never hypostatized into a bind from which we cannot move. We must grow and at all times be reaching out, through the personal relations we already have and that we constantly create and develop on a daily basis. Art, according to John Cage, is not a thing made by someone but a process through which everyone involved learns and experiences new things.

is certainly a band that I can support.