New York City was in decline when Rupert Murdoch sat down at Kate Fagan’s desk at New York Magazine in the late 1970s and fired her and some 80 colleagues. It was a classic case of stock market downturn; six-figure earners were losing jobs while graffiti writers scrawled on subway cars. The cultural scene was shifting, too. Originally from Rockville, Maryland, Fagan had arrived in New York at the height of punk in the early ’70s. The hottest spot on the Lower East Side was CBGB: a rock venue born out of the post-Nixon cultural crisis and the home of the Ramones, as well as a community invested in the myth of authenticity.
By the time Fagan lost her magazine job, CBGB’s popularity was rivaled by the glamorous velvet-rope culture of uptown’s Studio 54. Both venues were, in a sense, gentrification projects. After years of financial devastation brought on by suburbanization and deindustrialization, city government was hungry to attract a young, professional, tax-paying crowd. Nightlife—whether it presented itself as populist as CBGB, or as cliquish as Studio 54—drew an emerging creative class who flocked to refurbished Manhattan neighborhoods. Studio 54’s culture of disco exclusivity simply mirrored a changing reality. Disillusioned, Fagan departed New York for good.
In 1980, she visited a friend in Chicago and stayed for a few decades. In the unpretentious Midwest music scene, she felt she’d rediscovered CBGB’s inclusive spirit—at least for a moment. Then she noticed people starting to wear shades at the club, to shop for more expensive clothes. Exclusionary “cool” threatened to creep in again. In retaliation, Fagan picked up a bass guitar she hardly knew how to play, tracked a frolicsome five-note riff onto a rudimentary drum machine, and sang about the bitterness she felt toward “cool.” “I don’t wear the hip clothes/I just shop at AMVETS,” she sneered on “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool.”
The tiny punk-run label Disturbing, which Fagan helped form, released the single in 1981. After the original run sold out, Fagan self-funded another 1,000 copies, which, along with most of her belongings, were destroyed in a house fire. In the decades since, the single’s original pressing has become a collector’s item. In 2016, Manufactured Records, an affiliate of Brooklyn’s Captured Tracks, reissued the single, which sold out, too. Now, Captured Tracks have released an expanded and remastered LP version of “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool,” featuring the single, its original B-sides, four tracks from a romantic new wave rock opera in which Fagan plays a socialite seduced by the post-industrial nightscape of rock and disco, and a previously unreleased ska track.
The songs are lumped together unsystematically, which feels appropriate for someone with a musical career so far-reaching and slipshod as Fagan’s. In her early years, she covered the breadth of the ’80s—new wave, pulsing disco, arch post-punk, ska—spinning through a Rolodex of musical trends without committing to any one sound. In her later career, she would turn to Tammy Wynette-inspired country. Today, she continues to make music in her new hometown of New Orleans, performing locally and releasing the occasional Christmas album. The songs collected here, though smudged with a distinctly ’80s schmaltz, carry intergenerational DIY appeal: high hooks and low production values.
Fagan’s nervy delivery tinges every song. She frequently whoops and yelps as though she’s falling off a staircase to nowhere. The music itches. The percussion sounds less like a supporting structure and more like a tower collapse. And, aside from that phlegmatic five-note riff on the lead track, the bass buzzes with anxious energy, frantically trying to take up space. The mix is sky-wide and reverberant up until the record’s last song, the previously unreleased “Say It,” which sounds as though it were recorded through cardboard. The bubbling 2 tone is reminiscent of Fagan’s later role as co-founder and lead vocalist of Chicago ska band Heavy Manners, though “Say It” achieves greater emotional range than anything in their catalog. Fagan places a shaken soda can of tension right at its center, allowing the chorus to fizz as she delivers a heart-in-throat performance. It’s her best song since “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool.”
