Looking for a Kiss

If "Trash" is a provocation, "Looking for a Kiss" is a proposition — sleazier, more insistent, the guitars locked into a riff that feels like it's circling a fire escape at 2am. Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain trade rhythm parts that blur into a single buzzing wall of cheap amplifier heat, and underneath it all there's a piano that sounds like it came out of a Times Square bar that lost its liquor license. Johansen here is at his most theatrically hungry, his delivery a masterclass in practiced desperation, the kind of want that performs itself. The song has the structure of a simple rock and roll number but the emotional temperature of something far more complicated — there's humor in it, self-awareness, a knowing wink at the artifice of desire itself. This is music that came out of the Lower East Side drag bars and art spaces of early-seventies New York, a scene that was intentionally too much, maximalist in its presentation of marginal identity. The Dolls were pulling from girl groups and Rolling Stones and Stax simultaneously, smashing it all together with broken equipment and borrowed eyeliner. "Looking for a Kiss" is the song you put on when you're getting ready to go somewhere you probably shouldn't, when the night feels like it contains genuine risk, the productive kind.