This is Part 2 of Lisa Germano on 4AD, an ongoing series looking at the work of the singer/songwriter from 1994-1998.
Love can be bad
—Lisa Germano, “Cry Wolf”
Love is weird
“The record is basically about the things men do to girls. It’s about how when a girl — or a guy, for that matter — hides and doesn’t know herself, that’s when she gets manipulated and abused.”
Lisa Germano, Rolling Stone, 12/15/94
Geek the Girl was released in October of 1994, capping off a whirlwind year and a half for Lisa Germano. She was dropped by Capitol Records in late 1993, just months after the release of her sophomore album. She quickly signed a new deal with the UK-based 4AD, releasing a teaser EP, Inconsiderate Bitch. On the heels of that introductory, extended play release, she re-released a re-sequencing and expanded version of Happiness. While all this contractual and marketing mess was working itself out, she was writing and recording a brand new record—a dark, angry concept album about consent, self-loathing and the invasion of privacy. She was ready to vent.
Geek the Girl, art direction and design by Paul McMenamin at V23
I have no idea what 4AD label head Ivo Watts-Russell expected to get when he sent Germano back into her home studio to record her first album of completely new material, but I doubt he anticipated such an uncommercial, emotionally brutal suite of songs. Happiness was no sunshine and rainbows, but Geek the Girl is an uncompromising delve into paranoia, pain and guilt, only broken up with the sporadic appearance of the Sicilian folk tune, “Frascilita,” to lift the mood.
That said, all signs point to this being exactly what 4AD wanted, and what they encouraged Germano to deliver. And it was a smart play. Geek the Girl is still one of Germano’s most successful records, both critically and commercially. Eight of the ten most popular Lisa Germano tracks on Spotify are from Geek the Girl. The lone single off the record, “Cry Wolf,” is easily the most played song of her catalog (that is if you ignore “From a Shell,” which got a huge boost from it’s inclusion on the soundtrack to the 2003 Kate Beckinsale vampire and werewolf film, Underworld).
Top 10 most popular Lisa Germano songs according to Spotify, February 2023
None of this darkness should have been a surprise to anyone who’d been paying attention to Germano’s discography up to this point. Her first ever single was a sub-two-minute fiddle and ukulele ditty from her self-released debut album, On the Way Down from the Moon Palace. The song is called “Riding My Bike” and it’s about little Lisa being accosted by a man in a car while she’s crossing the street on her bike. “Hey, little girl, you sure look cute,” she sings in a low, monotonous whisper over uke strums. “Something was wrong, this didn’t feel right. My heart beat fast.” Lisa’s voice drops a further octave when she sings the final lines, “he followed me home, he knows where I live, he knows my name.”
It’s a chilling song about an experience too many women likely had in childhood: the fear of strangers, the uncomfortable stares of older men, the sexualization of youth. Germano even made a video for it, which alternates between blue-filtered adolescence flashback and the contemporary Lisa singing from a pitch-black room.
“Riding My Bike,” directed by Neil Toussaint [video here]
The first track on side B of Geek the Girl, “Sexy Little Princess,” could very much be read as a spiritual sequel to “Riding My Bike.” It’s a downbeat dirge with Germano repeating the title phrase, as well as “little girl, little girl.” The character in the song is even told, “run along, little girl, unto, mommy” like the scared child who was riding her bike two albums ago. She makes it home, but stares out the window and still sees the man in his car who followed her. The threat is still there.
If “Riding My Bike” was about paranoia and fear, Geek the Girl expands on those themes with the feelings of wanting affection, and being both disgusted, and attracted, to the violent, jealous forms it sometimes takes. It’s about toxic love personally, and more generally, a near suffocating pessimism with mankind. The subject matter is personal, but it’s also political. It’s the same kind of third-wave, middle finger feminism that the riot grrrls were screaming about. The music might not be as loud as those punk rock bands, but it’s no less angry. As Germano writes at the end of the liner notes for the album, her mantra is clear:
“Fuck off and die to all rapists and stalkers”
Subsequent reissues would capitalize those first two words, making the point even stronger: FUCK OFF
For an album so intensely personal, it opens on a more universal grievance, as Germano uses global warming and childhood memories in Indiana as an stand-in for her feelings of individual powerlessness:
I don’t know much about science
My interests don’t take me there
But I know this, as dumb as I am
When I was young, and it was winter
In our yard there use to be snow there
It’s a slight feint, as the album goes mostly inward from there. “Trouble” is about smiling at a new lover, but catching oneself and pulling back, fearful of affection because it’s caused so such pain in the past.
The title track continues that feeling of trying to keep ones feelings hidden, “keepin’ the cool from coming out.” It’s one of my favorite songs on the album, namely because it features some of Germano’s black humor; it’s all about her laconic delivery of lines like “I always liked rock and roll. It kinda moves me,” which she follows up with “I’d like it more if I’d dance.” On “Cry Wolf,” decades before #MeToo, Germano was singing about consent in back seats and dirty rooms, sympathizing with the girl in the song who is told by everyone around her that she “should’ve known better…it’s all your fault.”
“Cry Wolf,” director unknown [video here]
But easily the most talked about song on the album is “…A Psychopath,” a horror film set to music. Germano sings from the perspective of a woman, paralyzed with fear, gripping a baseball bat, as she hears noises outside. She can’t sleep, she hears a scream and wonders if it’s a memory or real life. Playing underneath the song is an actual 911 call from a woman named Karen as she frantically details to the operator an in-progress home invasion.
It came from a real place in Germano’s life as well. She was plagued by her own stalker, a man that relentlessly contacted her while she was on tour with John Mellencamp. It’s still unsettling to listen to. In many ways it reminds me of the music that LA-based experimental noise-makers Xiu Xiu would make in the early aughts. Its intentions are to make you feel uncomfortable, to provoke disgust.
Even in 1994, Germano understood that it was a very different thing for a woman to be singing these distressing songs, as opposed to a man, telling Mark Kemp at Rolling Stone:
“Nine Inch Nails make me look like milquetoast. But people just don’t like for women to make them feel bad. If you’re a woman who makes people feel anger or makes people feel like fucking, fine. But we don’t want women to make us feel uncomfortable.”
Germano briefly adopts a baby girl voice on the sarcastic “Cancer of Everything” as she jokes about wanting a debilitating disease. You know, for the attention. But even that attention is fleeting, as “A Guy Like You” notes, “people just let me down.” The pain has reached a sort of zenith by this point on the record, Germano lyrically throwing her hands in the air, “all of it, a bunch of shit.” So it seems natural that the final two songs open up to something more universal. No less pessimistic, but at least less insular: the stars in the sky and our sad, shared suffering.
On “…Of Love And Colors” Germano bemoans a world filled with “fucked-up people” suffering from addictions and misplaced hate. The message is essentially “everybody hurts,” as that other song says, but this one explodes into a beautiful chorus, a kaleidoscope of dreams, “of trust and beauty.” It’s fleeting, but for that brief moment it sounds like it could change the world, or at the very least, maybe just one person’s life.
Here it comes again
—Lisa Germano, “Stars”
That uneasy feeling
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