Here it is, folks--the Eurythmics's Annie Lennox, wearing a business suit, leather gloves, and a buzz-cut, swinging a dominatrix's cane and singing "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)," their first radio hit and one of probably three or four absolutely defining images of New Wave music in America. It hit the Billboard charts 40 years ago this week, and man, it changed things. Androgynous imagery and stylings are hardly unknown in American pop music, of course--Little Richard is proof of that, and this list has already featured David Bowie, who pioneered his own style of glam androgyny in the UK (and, to a limited extent, the United States) during the 1970s, a style which became a background influence to many Second British Invasion bands I'm highlighting here. But here's the thing: overwhelming--and not just throughout the history of pop music, but up through these very cosmopolitan, very gender-bending bands that I'm highlighting here--it was the men who could be androgynous, not the women. Sure, a woman wearing pants on the screen was as familiar to American audiences as Katherine Hepburn or Mary Tyler Moore. But a woman with Annie Lennox's near-incomparable pop vocals, staring into the camera with a sensual, hypnotic, both enticing and spooky synthesizer beat in the background, slowing slamming her cane into her open hand while singing "Some of them want to use you / Some of them want to get used by you / Some of them want to abuse you / Some of them want to be abused"? That, ladies and gentlemen, was a game-changer.
