624 The Crystals “Then He Kissed Me” 1963

“Female pop culture had a particular trashiness all its own. In the early sixties, women who made it to the pop charts were expected to radiate a single overriding characteristic: innocence. Girl groups such as the Shirelles, the Angels, and the Crystals wore starched skirts and impeccably manicured do’s and came in convenient matching sets of three, four, or five…But the world changed. In 1963 the number-one crush of all time, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated, and American girlhood suffered a fierce collective heartbreak…Overnight, the girl groups grew up into swinging, single pop chicks with a wilder, woozier kind of bedroom angst” (Karen Schoemer in Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock, 1997). 

The Crystals “Then He Kissed Me”