Go Girl Crazy

I can hear went they hung out with Blue Oyster Cult and the other punks. Beach Boys and 60s garage punk in there too. Great stuff.

That last song is what raging incels sound like to me

This obviously is not needed. We do not need a "this is the first real punk album!" that isn't Ramones. The Stooges, New York Dolls, even The Velvet Underground (though for different reasons) deserve to be on here instead of this (thankfully all of those albums are on here, deservedly). This... is good enough as far as music, but necessary listening? Even for a punk fan I wouldn't say so.

As for quality, it’s decently scant on that too. Boring riffs. Sufficient vocals. Early drum tones. Everything good on this album was done way better two years prior on the aforementioned eponymous New York Dolls outing. Everything bad on this album was worked out a year later into the rougher edges of the eponymous Ramones outing. Everything not punk on this album are the likes of things that both bands either brutalized (in the case of Ramones) or sleazified (in the case of New York Dolls), and what is left is something that is decidedly much worse than both of those albums.

The distinct characteristics of this album are its hedonism and its lack of seriousness. Both of these are heels. The best punk music is angry, hard, and if it’s silly at all, it’s often combated by being heavy to the point of being near-unlistenable to the mainstream. This is not that. Consequently, I do not like it much at all, and it is of no importance to me.
3.9/10
DOES IT BELONG ON THE LIST: NO
REASON: NOT SIGNIFICANT ENOUGH
WHAT WOULD I REPLACE IT WITH: IDK THROW HOUSES OF THE HOLY ON THIS BITCH

With a band name as ridiculous as The Dictators and a cover featuring Handsome Dick Manitoba dressed like a professional wrestler, 𝘎𝘰 𝘎𝘪𝘳𝘭 𝘊𝘳𝘢𝘻𝘺! practically dares me to take it seriously. I didn’t, and I suspect that's exactly the point.

Musically, it’s a rowdy mixture of garage rock and hard rock, full of simple riffs, deliberately stupid humour, and the bad manners that would soon become part of punk. The band sounds like they’re having a great time, and there's something charming about how little they seem to care about musical sophistication. Unfortunately, the songs themselves don’t always make as much of an impression as the attitude.

An entertaining piece of proto-punk history, even if the music doesn’t quite live up to the glorious absurdity of its presentation. I enjoyed the racket, but I suspect I’ll remember the cover long after I’ve forgotten most of the songs.

This is amusing proto-punk. At times it reminds me of the Flo and Eddie era of The Mothers of Invention - irreverent goofiness mixed with competent playing, especially the faux-naive cover of “I Got You Babe.” Some of the lyrics didn’t age well, but I doubt they had a classic for the ages in mind when they wrote them. This isn’t one of those records that I want to listen to over and over, but it definitely is part of the lore, and therefore belongs in the book.

Already knew from the album cover this was music for hot aesthetic girls, and was proven right one second into the first track. I'm too shook to play any more.

I’m not wowed by this by any means, especially with the vocals. The instrumentation and back track is slightly keeping me alive and that’s what’s saving this from being a 1

sucks mad balls

Dictators are usually spectacularly unfun, so kudos to The Dictators for bucking the trend and giving us an unspectacularly fun album!

I like a band with a sense of humor. This album isn’t amazing but it’s not terrible. I also like that they said goodbye at the end of the album, I thought that was nice.

The perfect example of how punk can be both smart and stupid at the same time.

Ashamed of myself for not knowing about this gem. I’m not the only one I’m sure. Good to finally see where the Ramones stole their ideas from! Glad to have heard this and now I can finally see why critics claim a straight line from V.U. -> The Stooges -> New York Dolls -> Ramones and how that is how punk rock happened. They all forgot to input this before the Ramones. And it’s all New York art rock really anyway, like rap many years later, a lot of regional scenes erupted. Was NYC ground zero for this shit? Maybe, maybe… I might be starting to come around.

This bit from the Wikipedia article says what I think far better than I could write it: “ funny, brilliantly played and hopelessly naïve masterpiece of self-indulgent smartass rock'n'roll".[10] Entertainment Weekly wrote: "Go Girl Crazy's junk-generation culture and smart-aleck sensibility did provide an essential blueprint for '70s punk. With its TV references and homely vocals, this ground-breaking and long-unavailable album continues to inspire underground groups everywhere."[7]”

yeah it was fun

Listened before? No

Familiar with the artist? No

Thoughts:
- What is this? Why is it on this list? Why are they covering Sonny & Cher?
- It's not terrible, but it's definitely not for me. Some of the songs are kind of funny I guess.

It’s a fun listen with a few cracking tracks but as an overall album it’s not one that’s gonna knock your socks off.

Top Track - California Sun

3/5. My thoughts on this album were constantly swapping between good and bad but in the end I think I’m leaning a bit more positive on it. It’s a record that spends a lot of its time taking the piss out of rock and roll machismo, though sometimes it commits to the bit so hard that it just kinda becomes the thing it making fun of. The part of the album that ended up winning me over though was the guitar and bass playing on this thing, which are genuinely pretty great throughout. But the songs themselves are a mixed bag for me, some good, some very much not good.

Like they saw The Tubes play " White Punks on Dope" and thought, "Like that, but dumber."

Pretty much inadequate on every level.

Better than Coldplay

'I knocked 'em dead in Dallas / & I didn't pay my dues / Yeah, I knocked 'em dead in Dallas / They didn't know we were Jews.' The New York Dolls had already gone there two years prior, but '75 is still ancestor-time for punk in NYC, & shoutouts must be sent the way of The Dictators, whose debut Go Girl Crazy, tho no masterpiece, does the heavy lifting that would allow for a don't-give-a-fuck genre to flourish. The Dolls were better b/c they wrote better songs - it's really as simple as that - & b/c Andy Shernoff is no David Johansen qua vocalist/frontman. 'I don't want music, I want pain.' Still, the music lives & is alive, fresh, hard, uncomfortable: 'I Got You Babe' (one of the better covers I've heard), 'Teengenerate,' 'Two Tub Man,' all excellent.

For a "forerunner" of punk rock this is pretty slow by today's standards. It has the hard sounding guitars and anthemic vocals but the drums just aren't feeling it.

I do like the "I Got You Babe" cover, it's effortlessly simple, which I find is the foundation of punk. But the rest of this album comes off as more hard rock. "California Sun" and "(I Live For) Cars And Girls" is pretty punk though. The latter has aged pretty well with that Beach Boys vibe, although I'm not sure if I'm listening to an updated mix cause it just sounds almost modern (3-3.5).

This was a fun and energetic rock album. Like one of the past reviewers said, the music did indeed remind me of KISS (in particular the vocalist's exclamations). My favorite song was probably "The Next Big Thing".