MovieChat Forums > The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) Discussion > The Stooges

The Stooges

posted 8 years ago by Yinky
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The scene where they are dancing and screaming along with the Stooges...how precious. I liked this movie, and thought was very well done, representing the weird 70s sex-and-drugs scene. But the idea a 15 year old in 1976 would be listening to the Stooges is pretty much impossible. The Stooges didn't really start getting popular until the 80s. I know because I was around the same age that she was and we were all listening to Elton John and Paul McCartney and Wings. We listened to AM radio, where you heard the same songs every hour. We all got hip to the Stooges much, much later. My first Iggy album was New Values, which was released in 1979, and the reason I even knew about it was the song Five Foot One was getting radio airplay (after everything changed with AOR FM stations). There is an instance in the movie Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore where Alice and her son are living in BFE Iowa or something, and the son's around 10, and he's listening to T.Rex. I'm not sure why, but this really BUGS me.

[–] lazarillo 8 years ago

Uh, actually I know that's not true. It's not because I'm that old, but SOMEONE was obviously buying Stooges albums and attending Stooges concerts from the late 60's on. You can't compare YOUR experience to other people's. What your more "hip" older people were doing in San Francisco and NYC in the 1970's is very different from my experience as a small child in Cheyenne, Wyoming. All I knew of glam rock back then was when AM radio would play David Bowie's "Young American". Of course, the Stooges didn't exist--FOR ME.

When I was an older more "hip" college student, I really liked the Replacements and Sonic Youth and Social Distortion. They're STILL not well known, but I was certainly listening to them. That's just a fact. You might be right about AM radio in Iowa not playing T. Rex, but the radio stations in San Francisco and NYC played Iggy in the 70's. Hell, I have an album of a DETROIT station broadcasting a live New York Dolls concert.

"Let be be finale of seem/ The only emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream"

[–] Yinky 8 years ago

Well, I AM old. And I was a huge music person (still am). I am female (and from Detroit) and the posters in my room when I was around the same age as the girls in this movie were Robert Plant, Jim Morrison and Steven Tyler (the poster I had showed PUBES!!!). I used to pretend to blow them to make my friends laugh. My taste in music changed when I heard the Pistols and the Pretenders, but that was a couple years later. I believe I had a poster of Iggy, but it was when he was a solo act (one of the best concerts I have ever seen, too).

I don't know what they were doing elsewhere at the time. Well, actually I do, because I've read a whole lot about the time period in art & music, but I'm talking about just your average teenage girl, not the actual bands. Detroit isn't exactly a backwater, and you could find that music if you wanted to, but the typical girl at my high school wasn't into the Iggster until later. And then, of course, we pretended we'd been into them forever.

That's what this thread is about--the writer "hipped-up" their characters' taste in music to something that is considered really cool NOW. That's all. This is really a pet-peeve of mine in movies. It's nit-picky, I know. I guess I have the need to prove how cool I am by objecting to their portrayal of musical taste!

One of the funniest things I've ever heard was when Courtney Love was talking about musical influences, and how everyone was such a poseur about it in the 90s. She said, "Oh yeah, Leonard Cohen, yeah, been listening to him since I was kid....yeah, bullsh*t. You have every GD Psychedelic Furs and know every word. Snort. Admit it." Now that's some funny stuff.