RECORDS
With the Go-Go’s gone-gone, none other than the Purple Prince has tapped these L.A. ladies as their gurl-group successors, pop division. To seal the coronation, Minneapolis’s King of Rock has helped crown the Bangles queens by providing them with the jaunty, “Raspberry Beret”-like nursery rhyme hop of “Manic Monday,” the first single from their second, and latest, LP, Different Light.
RECORDS
HONKING OFF DUDES
BANGLES Different Light (Columbia)
Roy Trakin
With the Go-Go’s gone-gone, none other than the Purple Prince has tapped these L.A. ladies as their gurl-group successors, pop division. To seal the coronation, Minneapolis’s King of Rock has helped crown the Bangles queens by providing them with the jaunty, “Raspberry Beret”-like nursery rhyme hop of “Manic Monday,” the first single from their second, and latest, LP, Different Light. Credited to the pseudonymous Christopher, it is a catchy little ditty, recalling the innocence of the pre-psychedelic ’60s through Susanna Hoffs’s wide-eyed vocal and the lilting keyboard signature (one more gift from their anonymous benefactor, perhaps?).
So far, so good. Just don’t get the idea the success of Different Light hinges on one man’s infatuation with the admittedly sultry Ms. Hoffs. There are other Bangles to be reckoned with here; the ego concerns which shattered the Go-Go’s are sublimated in a truly participatory democracy. In other words, the Bangles are a group in the old Beatles sense, complete with those heart-wrenching three-part harmonies that sound like echoes of some irretrievably lost past.