2024-01-20 15:59:09
Disappearance
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Within the Shangri-Las, an emblematic girl group of the sixties, the New Yorker recounted teenage disillusionments before disappearing from the scene at the end of the 1960s. She died on Friday January 19.
American rock to the bone, it’s twenty seconds. Those which open What is Love (without a question mark, we affirm), single released in 1964 under the label of the Red Bird label (ref. 10014) and B side of an authentic monster, Leader of the Pack, which would change the face of popular music in the United States and everywhere beyond: the crescendo at the same time as the crash, the voice of a very young girl like a death race trying to scream something she knows nothing about (what love is) but she has the stubborn certainty that it must be said all the same, and it tears her lungs out. Mary Weiss was 15 years old at the time. She died Friday January 19, at age 75.
She will be 17 when her group, the Shangri-Las, loses control in a fracas of contractual disagreements with her record company: “My mother signed very bad contracts,” she will explain. Two years to mark their time with a hot iron. And open a radical and precise path which, since then, has only prospered, spreading across all musical genres, up to metal or the darkest forms of electronic music: adolescence is death to every turn. In 1966, the Shangri-Las almost finished (two singles followed) with their most sinister production, Past, Present and Future, built from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
Its accidental, violent, open to the world
A tour de force that went almost unnoticed in the delirious musical context
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#Death #singer #Mary #Weiss #furious #path #rock #Libération