Tear It Up

MTV blew my mind in 1981. I would spend hours Velcro’d to the screen of my grandma’s wooden console TV waiting for my favorite videos to come on. Even then, my mom was uneasy about the sort of “messages” I was getting from this weird new music.

Adam Ant’s allusions to S&M were the naughtiest of the lot, but nothing compared to The Cramps. I actually heard them before I saw them. By 1985, I was fully ensnared by WTUL New Orleans, the student-run college radio station of Tulane University. It was there that “New Kind Of Kick” wormed its way into my eardrums.
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Aloha. . . FROM HELL

By Scary Manilow

I touched this man’s naked ass once. I really did.
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The Cramps, Smell Of Female

By Christian Lipski

“Ladies and Gentlemen, live from the Peppermint Lounge, The Cramps”
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I’d Just As Soon Stay Sick: A Tribute To Lux Interior and The Cramps

By Millie De Chirico

As a kid growing up on the outskirts of Atlanta, GA, our family had a real love/hate relationship with cable television. My parents would fluctuate between not being able to live without cable and deeming it a waste of money. Even worse: our family did not have cable when I was in middle school, which was the age where I began to really get into music, wanting to watch MTV and Night Flight constantly. It was a pretty soul shattering time, to say the least.
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What’s Inside a (Super Fan) Girl?

By Margaret Cross

The first time I heard The Cramps, I was a 13-year-old kid living in a very suburban suburb of Cincinnati. It was the summer of 1985, and a friend’s college-age brother played us his cassette tape of Bad Music for Bad People. I made him play it twice more, before he asked me to just go ahead and dub it, already! I did, and spent hours and hours listening to it, and being inexorably pulled into this land of beautifully distorted guitars, a drum beat that would drive a sane person to their knees, and the truly gleeful, terrifying, hopped-up vocals of Lux Interior.

I now believe that some of us are just born Cramped, and that’s how it is. But I’ll take you a journey so you’ll understand what I mean.
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