The Schla La Las - 1, 2, 3, 4 (Sounds Experience)
2/5
By: Christiana Spens
Fifties prom dresses for female guitarists continue to make rock 'n' roll a prettier place. Yet they're becoming as uniform as skinny jeans and as ironic as New Rave. Lily Allen is the most famous prom queen, spending last summer looking like an extra from Grease. Christina Aguilera is trying to erase the whore image of her earlier career by inhabiting a fifties starlet alter-ego, and Paris Hilton wears cutesy dresses all the time now, to distract from the fact that porn made her famous. So basically, if you see a girl in a prom dress, (unless she's about seventeen) then you can pretty much assume there's a double entendre.
It all goes back to Madonna's 'Like a Virgin', and Blondie's 'Sunday Girl', and is designed to confuse perception of the dress-wearing girl, so that in the end she can do what she wants and not get caught in the net of a bad reputation. However, as everything's meant to be post-feminist now, it is even more confusing that girls wear prom dresses, which are pre-feminist, and conjure images of baking cakes and dancing to Elvis. It suggests a yearning for a time when things were simpler, prettier, and everyone was more like a virgin. So wearing prom dresses amid rock settings may in some sense be a cover-up for a tainted past, but it is also yearning for a purer present.
You may wonder what any of this has to do with the Schla La La's new single. Well, the dresses are also a metaphor for the music. Their sound is vintage as the clothes they wear and illuminate a musical trend towards the good old days, songs that could have been written half a century ago. They evidently wish to introduce some girlish charm and more roll for the rock, some good clean fun, much like the Hussy's, Moterettes, OkGo and Opera House. I do like them - like I like prom dresses, fairies and laughing gas - but I can't listen to them for long without craving something a little less sugary.
It's all very well to imitate times gone, but there is also something to be said for expressing the present with honesty and compassion, rather than ignoring it for a distant reverie. As the Libertines sang, "It chides my heart to always hear you calling, calling for the good old days. Because there were no good old days. These are the good old days".
And they'd be better if we lost the prom dresses.
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