There’s More to The Go-Go’s Than Peppy Hits

“You have no idea how barren the landscape was in ’81,” Rolling Stone’s Chris Connelly remarks at one point. “The idea that women would tell their stories in these kinds of songs, and do it the punk way, finding their way in a very difficult environment? It was unheard of.”

“All-girl band writing their own tunes?” asks Lee Thompson of ska band Madness, whom the Go-Go’s credit with their first significant exposure. (In the early days, they opened for Thompson’s group.) “I mean, outrageous.”

Outrageous, indeed. And not just because of the baldfaced sexism behind the group’s initial inability to get signed, even after they had a hit; they were rejected explicitly, as they were told in label rejection letters, because they were women. They’d eventually get picked up by IRS Records, run by Miles Copeland, brother of The Police’s Stewart Copeland. Opening for that band worldwide would cement their success.

Even more incredulous is how their talent has been overshadowed by their bubbly image. We Got the Neutron Bomb, an oral history published in 2001 of the L.A. late ’70’s punk scene, briefly mentions The Go-Go’s, but not without caveats about the band’s careerism, poserdom, incompetence, and worst of all—gasp!—ambition.

But those songs! Take “We Got the Beat,” the band’s first proper recording, released on British punk label Stiff Records in a one-single deal at the start of their career. Written by Caffey, it’s drawn from a Motown-meets-Brill Building template, fusing punk, a dash of surf, and The Shangri-La’s buoyant aesthetics. It’s cheerleader punk. In the doc, we see it come together when Caffey’s bounce meets Schock’s jolt, catapulted straight into the sun by Carlisle’s raspy soprano.

For “Our Lips Are Sealed,” we see Wiedlin take a few scant lyrics in a love letter from The Specials’ Terry Hall and turn them into a glossy new wave reincarnation of sparkly, gossipy, teen-love odes. It’s in the spirit of Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want to be With You;” it’s celebrated, by musicians generally and by this documentary, for its inventive chord work and dreamy middle eight, or bridge.

But sure; they couldn’t play.

Ellwood’s doc takes great care to show us how ludicrous it is that the Go-Go’s have been overlooked for so long. They rose to the top of a notoriously sexist industry—with a female manager (Ginger Canzoneri, whom they would eventually regret ditching when fame called), and even, at first, female roadies—and without the aid of a controlling male figure, unlike ’60s girl groups and their scene peers in all-female bands such as The Runaways.

The Go-Go’s isn’t just a feminist love letter that humanizes the group and highlights their talent. Ellwood ultimately shows the group as a proper rock band without the female asterisk; you’re left seeing more than some all-female blip in musical history. Like so many bands before and since, we also see them living the same so-common-it’s-cliche experiences we’ve been gawking at since (male) rock was born—yes, drugs; yes, sex; yes, constant touring; yes, exhaustion; yes, infighting and creative differences; yes, how the hell will we split the publishing. Their story is, in that sense, remarkably unremarkable.

That said, it’s fair to walk away from the film with a question: why hasn’t another all-female band achieved this sort of success, either before The Go-Go’s or since? Ellwood’s respectful portrait doesn’t really concern itself with that larger answer in the big-picture sense. Instead, she seems intent on leaving us with a more important question about their legacy and recognition: why hasn’t this band, with all its contributions to pop, been invited to the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame? And for that, she lets Police drummer Stewart Copeland give the only possible response: “What the fuck?”

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