Joe Jackson – "It's Different for Girls" (1979)

Don’t you know

That it’s different for girls?

Yes, I did know that.

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My original plan was to end this post there.  I’d add the customary links to YouTube (so you could listen to today’s featured recording) and to Amazon (so you could buy that recording, earning a few pennies for me), and leave it at that.  It would have been the shortest 2 or 3 lines ever.

In other words, I was planning to phone one in.  

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In case you’re not familiar with that idiom, “phone it in” means “to perform a task, job, or performance with minimal effort, low enthusiasm, or lack of care, often just ‘going through the motions’ rather than engaging fully.”

(To the wiseacre in the back row who just whispered “Doesn’t that describe most 2 or 3 lines posts?” to his neighbor, I would reply – respectfully, of course – “F*ck you and the horse you rode in on.”)

I admit that I do phone in a post from time to time.  I mean, why not?  After all, I am the master of the 2 or 3 lines domain – I don’t have to answer to anyone when I choose to do that.

But I try to avoid picking up too many bad habits.  I’ve fallen prey to booze and young women already, and I don’t think it would be healthy for me to overindulge in phoning it in as well.  

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Joe Jackson is one of the very best songwriters of the late seventies and early eighties.  (My personal Mount Rushmore for that era would be Elvis Costello, Chrissie Hynde, David Byrne, and Jackson.)

In “It’s Different for Girls,” Jackson flips the script on the assumption that men are more likely to be satisfied with no-strings-attached sex than women: 

It was something that I heard somewhere that struck me as a cliché. . . . I thought, What could that be about?  And that maybe the idea was to turn it on its head and have a conversation between a man and a woman and what you'd expect to be the typical roles are reversed.

That’s all well and good, but I don’t think that concept is particularly inspired.  It just goes to show you – a record can be very good – and I think “It’s Different for Girls” is a very good record – despite having somewhat lackluster lyrics.

Click here to listen to “It’s Different for Girls,” which was released in 1979 on Joe Jackson’s second album, I’m the Man, and went on to become his biggest UK chart single.  (It didn’t do as well in the U.S., failing to crack the Billboard “Hot 100.”)

Click here to buy “It’s Different for Girls” from Amazon.