THE GO-GO’S: THE GIRLS WHO TAUGHT US TO SURVIVE
They Got the Beat, Took the Fall, and Got Back Up
There are bands from my youth that I don't have to go looking for.
Their music follows me around.
I hear them in grocery stores. Movies. Commercials. Television shows. Social media. Some kid discovers a forty-year-old song on TikTok, and suddenly an entire generation is singing something we wore out on cassette before they were born.
But lately I've noticed something.
I don't hear the Go-Go's very often.
If I want the Go-Go's, I usually have to go get them.
So I do.
And the moment I hear those opening drums...
There they are.
Image: The Go-Gos. Source: Forbes.
The girls.
And suddenly I remember just how enormous they once were.
Not simply the songs.
Not simply the videos.
Them.
Five women taking up the whole damn stage.
We Got the Beat
When the Go-Go's exploded into mainstream America in the early 1980s, I didn't know the entire story behind them.
I didn't know about their beginnings in the Los Angeles punk scene.
I didn't know what was happening behind the scenes.
I certainly didn't know that I was watching a piece of music history.
I knew what mattered to a Gen X girl standing in front of the television.
They were fun.
“Our Lips Are Sealed.”
“We Got the Beat.”
The songs were infectious.
You could dance to them.
You could sing with them.
They looked like they were having the greatest time anybody had ever had being in a band.
And something about the picture itself mattered.
There wasn't a woman standing in front of a group of male musicians.
The women were the band.
Belinda Carlisle sang.
Charlotte Caffey played guitar and keyboards.
Jane Wiedlin played guitar.
Kathy Valentine played bass.
Gina Schock played drums.
They wrote music. They played music. They toured. They performed.
And in 1982, their debut album, Beauty and the Beat, reached No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, making the Go-Go's the first all-female band that wrote its own songs and played its own instruments to achieve that feat.
Image: The Go-Gos album B
That's history.
But we weren't standing around thinking about history.
We were dancing.
That's how cultural change sometimes happens.
Nobody announces it.
Nobody stops the music and explains why what you're looking at matters.
You simply see something you haven't seen very often before.
Then you see it again.
And eventually something that once seemed unusual starts looking completely possible.
Girls can do this.
Girls can play that.
Girls can start the band.
Girls can write the song.
Girls can be loud.
Girls can rock.
And Then They Became Rock Stars
Here's the part I appreciate even more looking back.
The Go-Go's didn't get some special sanitized version of rock stardom because they were women.
Oh, no.
They got the whole damn ride.
Fame.
Money.
Touring.
Drugs.
Partying.
Pressure.
Egos.
Exhaustion.
Creative disagreements.
Resentment.
Addiction.
Internal conflict.
Everything accelerated.
Beauty and the Beat became a phenomenon.
Then came Vacation.
Then Talk Show.
And behind those bright songs and funny videos, things were getting considerably less fun.
Success didn't solve their problems.
It gave their problems money and access.
Which, historically, has gone extremely well for rock bands.
😂
By 1985, the Go-Go's were finished.
Think about how fast that happened.
The band that had seemed to arrive everywhere at once had gone through the entire rock-star cycle in just a few years.
Rise.
Fame.
Excess.
Conflict.
Self-destruction.
Breakup.
Boom.
For a while, that could have been the Go-Go's story.
Except it wasn't.
The Girls Grew Up
After the breakup, life continued.
Belinda Carlisle launched a huge solo career. If you were anywhere near a radio in the late 1980s, you didn't need anyone to explain that Heaven Is a Place on Earth had arrived.
Jane Wiedlin released solo music and acted.
Image: Jane Wiedlin. Source: Spotify
The other women continued making music and building lives of their own.
But there were also consequences from those wild years.
Addiction doesn't disappear because the band breaks up.
Neither do hurt feelings.
Neither does damage.
Neither does life.
And this is where the Go-Go's story becomes more interesting to me now than it was when I was dancing to them.
Because eventually...
they got older.
So did we.
And they started finding their way back.
There were reunions over the years. Tours. New music. Stops and starts. Old tensions didn't magically vanish because everyone had reached a certain age.
That's not how people work.
They had to deal with themselves.
They had to deal with each other.
They had to live with what happened when they were young, famous and moving far too fast.
And they survived long enough to tell the story differently.
Gen X Rule: SURVIVE
We've been uncovering some unofficial Gen X rules around here.
Nobody wrote them down.
That would have required organization.
And meetings.
Absolutely not.
But they're there.
Twisted Sister gave us:
WE'RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT
Depeche Mode gave us:
DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO.
Tears for Fears gave us:
DON'T HOLD IT IN.
And the Go-Go's?
The Go-Go's gave us:
SURVIVE.
The interesting thing is that they never actually taught us this.
They didn't lecture us.
They didn't go on motivational speaking tours.
They didn't develop a coaching model.
There was no Five Steps to Getting Your Beat Back workbook.
They didn't sell us resilience.
They showed us.
We watched them rise.
We watched them fall.
We watched them break apart.
And then we watched them get back up.
Not perfectly.
Not all at once.
Not because everything that had happened suddenly stopped mattering.
They did it the way people actually survive.
Messily.
They grew older.
They recovered.
They changed.
They dealt with addiction.
They built other lives.
They came together and moved apart and came together again.
Some things healed.
Some things left scars.
But they were still here.
Image: The Go-Gos at Coachella 2024. Source: Copyright: 2024 Los Angeles Times, Credit: Los Angeles Times, Creator: Robert Gauthier
Maybe that's the part of survival nobody explains when you're young.
Survival doesn't mean you never hit bottom.
It doesn't mean you never screw up.
It doesn't mean you never lose something you thought you'd have forever.
It doesn't mean you emerge from every disaster looking fabulous while inspirational music plays behind you.
Sometimes survival is considerably less glamorous.
I screwed up, and I'm still here.
I fell apart, and I'm still here.
I lost something, and I'm still here.
I had to start over, and I'm still here.
I got older.
I got wiser.
I got back up.
I'm still here.
And Then They Walked Into the Rock Hall
In 2021, the Go-Go's were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Image: the Go-Gos at the 2021 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Source: Copyright: Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved, Credit: AP, Creator: Ron Schwane
All five of them.
Think about that picture.
The women who came out of the Los Angeles punk scene.
The women who became pop stars.
The women who had been dismissed by some people as lightweight.
The women who became one of the biggest bands in America.
The women who fought.
The women who struggled with drugs and addiction.
The women whose band imploded.
Those women stood together and entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
That's not a story that says:
See? We never fell.
Hell, we saw them fall.
That's what makes the moment mean something.
It says:
You saw us fall.
Now watch us stand here.
But Where Did the Go-Go's Go?
That's the question that started bothering me.
Because I listen to younger people discovering music from our generation all the time.
Some of our artists never seem to leave.
Their songs keep finding new lives.
But I don't hear the Go-Go's nearly as often.
Sometimes it feels as though they've been forgotten.
I don't think they have.
I think there's a difference between an artist being constantly heard and an artist remaining influential.
Sometimes influence becomes so deeply absorbed into the culture that we stop noticing where it came from.
The Go-Go's weren't the first women to pick up guitars.
They weren't the only women changing rock.
Women had already been kicking holes through those doors.
The Runaways had done it.
Heart had done it.
Women in punk had done it.
And alongside and after the Go-Go's came more women and more bands.
The Bangles.
Bananarama.
Women-fronted bands.
All-female bands.
Women writing.
Women producing.
Women playing instruments.
Women occupying spaces that had once overwhelmingly belonged to men.
They didn't all descend neatly from one another. Musical influence doesn't work like a family tree with nice straight lines.
But something changed.
The Girl Watching Became the Woman Playing
That's the legacy I don't want us to lose.
Somewhere, a girl watched.
Maybe she saw Belinda.
Maybe Jane.
Maybe Charlotte.
Maybe Kathy.
Maybe Gina sitting behind those drums.
Maybe she didn't immediately think:
I'm going to become a musician because of the Go-Go's.
Influence usually isn't that polite.
Maybe she simply thought:
That looks fun.
Maybe she picked up a guitar.
Maybe she asked for drums.
Maybe she started writing songs.
Maybe she formed a band.
Maybe she never became famous.
Maybe she did.
Maybe another girl eventually watched her.
That's how influence moves.
One generation makes something visible.
The next generation doesn't have to imagine it from scratch.
And eventually we reach a point where a girl picking up a guitar doesn't seem revolutionary at all.
Good.
That's the point.
Some of what looks ordinary today became ordinary because somebody once had to be extraordinary enough to do it first.
Don't Confuse Quiet With Forgotten
Maybe that's what I really wanted to say about the Go-Go's.
They're quieter now.
At least to my ears.
I have to purposely reach backward sometimes and pull them into the room.
But when I do?
Oh, there they are.
The drums.
The guitars.
The hooks.
The attitude.
The fun.
And five women who once looked like they were having the greatest sleepover in human history while, behind the curtain, the entire damn building was occasionally on fire.
😂
We danced with them before we understood what they were going through.
Then we got older.
And so did they.
Now I can look at their story differently.
I can see what they accomplished.
I can see what they changed.
I can see the girls who watched them and became women.
And I can see something I couldn't possibly have understood while I was dancing to “We Got the Beat.”
The Go-Go's never taught Gen X girls how to survive.
They showed us.
We watched them rise.
We watched them fall.
We watched them break apart.
And years later, we watched them walk back onto the stage together.
Older.
Wiser.
Scarred.
Still here.
Maybe that's why the lesson means something.
Maybe that's what makes their place in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame feel so right to me. The Go-Go's didn't simply make hit records. They lived the entire rock-and-roll story. They came out of a scene, broke through, changed what young women could imagine themselves doing, became stars, crashed spectacularly, broke apart, survived, and somehow found their way back to the music and to one another. They didn't just make rock-and-roll history. They survived it.
Survival isn't never falling down.
It's getting back up.
The Go-Go's got the beat.
And they survived it.
Sources & Further Exploration
For the history behind the memories, useful sources include the Go-Go's official site and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame's Go-Go's biography and induction materials. The band's documentary, The Go-Go's (2020), is also especially valuable because the members tell the rise, conflict, addiction, breakup and reunion story themselves.
Thanks for taking this trip back with me.
What do you remember? Were you there too, or did this story bring back a memory of your own? I’d love to hear it. Share your stories in the comments, and if this made you smile, laugh, cringe, or immediately go looking for “Our Lips Are Sealed,” share it with someone who remembers too.
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Until next time...
Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.
— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)
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