Gimme Danger, Gimme WOW

She took chainsaws to guitars. She took sledgehammers to TVs. She blew up Cadillacs and cop cars onstage. She scared the shit out of Ronald Reagan’s America, record labels, and the police. And she did it all topless with a mohawk, with tape over her nipples and a machine gun in her heart. Her name was Wendy O. Williams, and she was my kind of lady.

Today, the Controversial Female Vocalist Sweepstakes has left us not with a Wendy O or even a Karen O, but with Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus. I’m sure they’re perfectly nice young women. For all I know, they might even believe in what they’re doing. What I know for sure is this: Wendy O was sexier, more vital, and about a thousand times more dangerous than both of them put together. She was a real woman and a real punk who challenged the public’s perception of both. Sure: she sounded like a dude, occasionally had trouble staying in tune and had her tits out almost constantly. But she wasn’t a prefab pop star doing “scandalous” shit on television to cover up the fact that her music is disposable and her real audience consists almost entirely of teenage girls and sweaty middle-aged perverts. No, sir: Discerning middle-aged perverts like myself go for Wendy O.

Let’s get this one point out of the way before everyone dies of boredom over it: Miley’s twerking, tongue-jacking duet with Robin Thicke’s crotch at the VMAs was a tepid non-event with about as much cultural substance as “Who Let The Dogs Out?” Wendy O had way better taste in duet partners: She teamed up with Lemmy from Motörhead to sing Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man.” Released as a single in 1982, the b-side featured Wendy’s band the Plasmatics doing Motörhead’s “No Class” and Motörhead doing the Plasmatics’ “Masterplan.” The recording session went so well that guitarist Fast Eddie Clarke quit Motörhead halfway through.

Did we mention that the Plasmatics were the first American band to fuse punk with metal? They were also the first to rock Mohawks. Which makes Wendy the first woman to do it by a long shot. She beat Miley’s fauxhawk by about 35 years, not to mention whatever godawful plastic bullshit Lady Gaga tried to pull off that one time. But maybe you don’t give a shit about punk rock or silly haircuts. Maybe you just want good ol’ fashioned sex jams. Fair enough: Forget Miley’s jailbait grind and Gaga’s outer-space come-ons. Wendy O gave it to us straight with “Put Your Love In Me,” “Sex Junkie” and “Fuck That Booty.”

Wendy and Miley do have one thing in common, though: They both launched their careers on children’s television shows. Miley appeared sporadically on a flaccid Christian agitprop drama called Doc before graduating to spoiled brat on Disney’s Hannah Montana. Amazing what kind of work you can get when you have a rich daddy who also happens to star in both shows. But fuck that: At age six, Wendy O was as a member of the “Peanut Gallery” on Howdy Doody. That would’ve been 1955. Shortly before becoming the high priestess of punk, she appeared in the obscure X-rated sex comedy Candy Goes To Hollywood, in which she played a performer who shoots ping-pong balls from her vajayjay. Let’s see Miley Cyrus dothat.

Our girl was tough as nails, too. In the video for “It’s My Life,” she did her own stunts, climbing out of a speeding car—a speeding car that she was driving, no less—up a rope ladder into a fucking airplane flying several hundred feet off the ground. She accomplished the feat with no safety harness. In 1981, she survived a vicious beating and sexual assault at the hands of the Milwaukee Police Department—including a face-kicking from a 300-lb cop while being held down by several other officers of the law. But that’s nothing compared to what Wendy did to herself: In 1993, she tried to commit suicide by hammering a knife into her chest. Which is so fucked up it bears repeating: She hammered a knife into her chest.

If Wendy were alive today, she’d be 64 years old. If her open disdain for 80s pop stars like Boy George and Duran Duran was any indication, it’s probably safe to say she’d hate Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga. Sadly, we’ll never know for sure: Wendy shot herself in 1998, ending her life a decade after she’d retired from music. The lesson she ultimately left us with is still a tough one for modern society to contemplate: She knew when to quit. She exited both the limelight and the world on her own terms. In the end, she did everything better than Miley and Gaga, but she did that one thing better than everyone.