Pretenders – "Pack It Up" (1981)

 

I don't like your trousers

And your appalling taste in women

And what about your mind?

And your insipid record collection

That dumb home video center

The usual pornography

That all you scum lap up

YOU'RE THE PITS OF THE WORLD!

They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  

You best believe I would never, ever scorn Chrissie Hynde – the lead singer and chief songwriter of the Pretenders, who she founded in 1978.  You would have to be out of your f*cking mind to scorn her.

I have no doubt that Ms. Hynde is the one who does the scorning, not the one who is scorned – in other words, she’s the scorner, not the scornee.

Chrissie Hynde

I doubt that I will ever meet Chrissie Hynde, and that’s probably just as well.  She intimidates the hell out of me.  I’m quite sure that if I ever had to opportunity to interview her or even have a casual conversation – say we were seated next to each other on an airplane – I would be so scared that I would make a fool of myself.

You may have noticed that I quoted eight lines from today's featured song at the beginning of this post.  That's because I'm not man enough to tell Hynde that she only gets two or three.

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If you can find a more scornful song than “Pack It Up,” I’d like to hear it.  (Or maybe I wouldn’t.  I’m a pretty sensitive dude.)

Hynde’s scorn is directed at the vanity of men.  Her target in “Pack It Up” no doubt thinks that he has good taste in clothes and music – but she sets him straight.  (She even dismisses the prosaic pornography he favors.) 

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Speaking of male vanity, do you remember Tom Wolfe’s brilliant novel, Bonfire of the Vanities?  One of the major characters in that book is a thirty-something assistant district attorney who is extremely proud of his muscular physique – in particular, his "massive sternocleidomastoid muscles" (i.e., neck muscles), which he constantly flexes for the benefit of every comely young female he encounters. 

He laters sees a videotape of the very comeliest of those females making fun of his weird neck moves – he’s mortified, of course.

I guarantee you that if Chrissie Hynde had seen this preening prosecutor flexing his sternocleidomastoids. she wouldn’t have made fun of him behind his back like the woman in the Wolfe book – she would have cut him down to size by saying something snarky to his face.

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I had planned to induct twelve songs into the 2 OR 3 LINES “SILVER DECADE” HALL OF FAME this year, but I’m afraid there’s going to have to be a change in those plans.

I simply can’t pick one and only one Pretenders song for that honor – Chrissie Hynde deserves better than that.

The Pretenders in 1980

I’ve got my eye on three tracks from the first two Pretenders albums.  But it’s possible I won’t be able to stop there.  (Stay tuned . . . )

Click here to listen to “Pack It Up,” which was released in 1981 on the Pretenders II album.

Click on the link below to buy “Pack It Up” from Amazon: