Curious and curiouser. The heavenly punk lezza Beth Ditto has gone Madonna. Circa 1990. Where Madonna shocked and awed in the early 90s, Ditto’s foray into pefectly coiffed hair and sexy dancers seems tame and muted compared to her previously rad self. OK, she is still rad and easily the coolest woman in rock, she has just taken the disco-punk furey down a few notches. The early side of the 90s were my salad days. They were spent largely in a ramschacked old Victorian house in downtown Denver (once rumored to have been a funeral home) all wine coolered and keg’ed up on Nirvana and college grunge, so I don’t have a natural affinity with dance raves or C+C Music Factory brigades of the decade. However, in the hands of Simian Mobile Disco (UK producing duo James Ford and Jas Shaw) ’I Wrote The Book’ from Beth’s self-titled solo EP is slick reconnoisance work into the heart of the 90s. It is a cool and classy floorfiller where Beth can set her divamater off the scale and shine like the supernova that she is. Punk goddess, fashion designer, agony aunt, Jean Paul Gaultier muse and now disco superstar… there’s no stopping this dynamo from Seracy, Arkansas.
