Seven-year-old Sally plays the soundtrack from Chipmunks 3: Chipwrecked constantly. (Amazingly, the film was not nominated for a single Oscar this week.) Her favorite track, most days, is “Vacation.” Unlike the blissfully ignorant younger brothers of some of my friends back in high school, who thought Van Halen wrote “You Really Got Me,” Sally at one point openly asked if “Vacation”
was a Chipmunks original.
I found the Go-Gos video of “Vacation” on Youtube and showed her that. Sally liked it fine but we didn’t even get through the whole thing before she started asking if there were any Ramones videos we could watch. The image of a girl group flailing fakely on water skis before a blue-screen ocean simply doesn’t have the staying power it did in 1984. And even Jane Wiedlin, Gina Schock and Belinda Carlisle can’t compete cuteness-wise with Brittany, Jeanette and Eleanor.
Meanwhile, midweek I usually wake up the girls with some melodic pop-punk, which tends to happily hasten the get-dressed-for-school process. On Wednesday I arbitrarily chose the 1990s Canadian “cuddlecore” band Cub, with which the girls are slightly familiar. (Archie comics artist extraordinaire Dan DeCarlo did the cover art for a Cub EP, which cements the band’s coolness in our house.)
“I wasn’t sure if this was Cub, or that group that did the ‘Vacation’ song first,” were Sally’s first words upon waking. Which led me to a buried memory—I went and grabbed a different Cub album, and there on track ten was Cub’s own cover of “Vacation.”
Small world, though clearly a nice own to take a vacation in. It’s one which Sally, who’s developing some pretty great pop-punk instincts, is keen to navigate.