REVIEWS: Sex Means Nothing When You’re Dead: Single Artist: MARILYN “Definitely the title of the week!” SOUNDS “Devastating.” NEW MUSIC EXPRESS “A classic single, Sex Means Nothing When You’re Dead, a song unmatched for sheer, self-conscious decadence… Baudelaire may have met his match in Marilyn.” EAST VILLAGE EYE "MARILYN, house chanteuse of the Mudd Club, has a cute single….The Sex side is a sharp tongue-in-hollow--cheek-heavy-metal skulk…the B-side is also quite charming. Marilyn solves the 1966 Rolling Stones problem with a great back-up chorus of eleven year old girls. Glenn O’Brien, INTERVIEW “Marilyn first sang Sex Means Nothing When You’re Dead at the Mudd Club’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Funeral for Jimi, Janis, Keith, Mama, Jim, and Marc in 1979. Steve Maas called her the next day and asked her to be the Mudd Club’s exclusive performer. ‘I said yes,’ she says, and went on to ride the Mudd Club’s ‘crest of instant fame.’ She rode the stage for a couple of years, performing her songs in a crazed, lunatic style, her blond hair wildly teased and often glowing. She jumped, gyrated, slithered, bent, crouched and gesticulated to the deafening strains of a prerecorded band.” Stephen Saban, SOHO NEWS "…Marilyn has that combination that can't miss. If you see her before you’ve heard her, you’re dying to find out what she sounds like. If you hear her before you’ve seen her, you’re dying to find out what she looks like. You could call that a double--barreled mystique. Sex opens with a few bars from Chopin’s funeral dirge and goes into a hauntingly jaded tune conjuring eroticism and extinction….The sleeve has a high contrast photo of Marilyn looking like nothing so much as the Angel of Death. When the Grim Reaper comes I hope she looks like her. These two tunes from [what Mudd Club owner Steve Maas calls] her 'songs of decadence and morality' series prove she's a major talent as well as a major personality." EAST VILLAGE EYE “A silver New Wave Peter Pan.” TOPMAN "TRIP INTO THE TONAL UNKNOWN: At 1 a.m. at the Mudd Club, a performance by the 5’9” icy platinum vision of MARILYN includes everybody's fave Sex Means Nothing When You’re Dead. Now, this is real New York." SOHO NEWS "….She signs off with a devastating 'Sex means nothing when you're dead, DOLLING! which is almost worth sitting through the whole song for. Take her home for tea with your mum." NEW MUSIC EXPRESS Marilyn, live from New York City, moving to the beat of Paris’ underground….Toward midnight in the Marais, Marilyn bursts onto the tiny stage of the Helium bar in a black mini-dress and fingerless, elbow-length gloves, and gyrates to her cult classic, Sex Means Nothing When You’re Dead….Yet more than her music, lyrics, or dancing, it is a boundless New York energy that distinguishes Marilyn. As she puts it in So Disgraceful: “I’ll take my life with all its strife. I want the shocks, knock off my socks, I sold my soul to rock ‘n’roll!” Passion, The Magazine of Paris PUNKS MOURN ROCK DEATHS A black plastic wreath hangs on the glass-paneled door. Inside, a disheveled woman in a pale pink negli-gee is sprawled on a white bed. On her cluttered night table are a loaf of Wonder Bread and a bottle of Southern Comfort. On the floor is a dummy of a woman shackled with a ball and chain. A rainbow of cheap bangles en-circles her arm, meeting a hypodermic needle. Dollar bills and votive candles sur-round the corpse. Above the entrance to the room, a white card reads: JANIS JOPLlN, DIED OCT. 4, 1970—Shrine by Valerie. The scene was the Mudd Club, the event a two-day rock-'n'-roIl funeral commemorating the untimely deaths of such youthful heroes as Janis, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Moon, Jim Morrison, Elvis Pres-ley, and Sid Vicious. The service featured a hearse, pallbearers, coffin, organ music, flowers, eulogies, hymns, and other, less than Episcopalian, enter-tainments. This "ultimate funeral," held last week, exposed the avant-garde/punk audience to one titillating morbidity after another. Following rock 'n' roll's gray coffin in from the street, the mourn-ers moved inside to hear Andy Warhol's superstar Viva, Taylor Mead, poet--playwright Gary Indiana, and transvestite performer Jackie Curtis deliver eulo-gies and tributes for the de-parted souls, whom Indiana described as "the famed, the defamed, the defiled, the dead—dead from drugs, dead from ordering cole slaw. . . ." Punk singer Marilyn, cast as the Angel of Death and armed with a huge hourglass, sang her ir-refutable lyric Sex means nothing when you're dead. NEW YORK MAGAZINE REVIEWS: So Disgraceful: EP Artist: MARILYN & THE MOVIE STARS “It all sounds a bit decadent, but it’s great!” BILLBOARD, Album Pick of the Week ”Outstanding!….Beg, borrow, or steal this record! …This band dazzles and numbs the senses at the same time. It's sensuality complete. Marilyn's absolutely the best dancer in New York and she knows it and she shows it, performing frenzied gyrations that defy gravity, all the while singing, I'm gonna make you scream, I'm gonna make you dream, I'm gonna drive you wild, I'm gonna be your child, I'm gonna make you yell, I'm gonna give you hell! Romper Room is the appropriate title of a tune that catalogs the affected man-nerisms and personalities that make up the NYC underground. She's part of it and laughing at it at the same time.” EAST VILLAGE EYE “Some very funny and weirdly original dance music…a surprisingly tasty electrodance groove with a flesh-and-blood rhythm section.” TROUSER PRESS “Command performances of So Disgraceful and Luftpause are called for on the dance floor.” AQUARIAN “Marilyn, live from New York City, moving to the beat of Paris’ underground…. Toward midnight in the Marais, Marilyn bursts onto the tiny stage of the Helium bar in a black mini-dress and fingerless, elbow-length gloves, and gyrates to her cult classic, Sex Means Nothing When You’re Dead…. Yet more than her music, lyrics, or dancing, it is a boundless New York energy that distinguishes Marilyn. As she puts it in So Disgraceful: I’ll take my life with all its strife. I want the shocks, knock off my socks, I sold my soul to rock ‘n’ roll!” PASSION, The Magazine of Paris “I do have fun sometimes. I can’t help myself. There I stand in this or that venue being characteristically cynical, judgmental, and/or just plain untoward, when suddenly, without warning, I find I’m enjoying myself. I don’t let on, though — I keep my face expressionless. I do, after all, have a reputation to preserve. (Marilyn, however, somehow saw though the guise long ago when she wrote ‘and crimson Stephen Saban who’s not really all that bored’ in her song Romper Room. Best song on the disc, I say in all humility.)” Stephen Saban, SOHO NEWS BIO: Marilyn is one of the underground stars of the fabled Mudd Club. The night after the Rock ‘n’ Roll Funeral Ball, she became the only act featured there regularly when Steve Maas, the club’s brilliant owner, offered her an enormous sum to appear exclusively at the Mudd. At that funereal gala, Marilyn appeared in black silhouette with a Miss America banner draped across her body. Only instead of the usual beauty queen drivel, Marilyn’s banner said Death. Armed with a two-foot hourglass, she sang Sex Means Nothing When You’re Dead. Evidently, Steve liked what he saw. Before striking out on her own, Marilyn had been the lead singer of Kongress, a band formed by Otto von Ruggins and Von LMO, who had already left to form his own band when Marilyn arrived. Sex Means Nothing When You’re Dead, Marilyn’s first single, became an instant cult classic when it was released in 1980. Then came the EP So Disgraceful, released by Marilyn & the Movie Stars in 1982, which charted on Billboard. “It all sounds a bit decadent but it’s great,” is what Billboard had to say about So Disgraceful. Marilyn & the Movie Stars featured Webster Smith on synthesizers, drummer Hari Viderci, who also played for the Sickfu*ks, and bassist Tommy Victor, who went on to form Prong. She played the lead in Mark Kehoe’s 1982 film, Destroy All Blondes. Marilyn also turned her mordant wit to writing—about subatomic particles, outer space, high-risk adventure, and the like—for New York newspapers and magazines, which came as a bit of a surprise to those who figured this blonde nightclubber had nothing between the ears. Marilyn then went to Paris to perform and spent the next several years appearing in France, Switzerland, and Italy. She returned to New York to pursue her writing. Along with working for the rights of pedestrians and cyclists in New York, she’s active in the civil rights movement for Ireland’s men, women, and children still under the thumb of the British invaders who have oppressed that country for the last 800 years. In 2002, Marilyn appeared in Ned Ambler’s movie Illusions of Broadway, singing her incomparable I Survived. (No relation to the Gloria Gaynor song). She stars in Ned Ambler’s movie Astin Valentinewhich opened March 2, 2004 at Film Anthology Archives in New York City. \ Her recently released compilation CD, Sex Means Nothing When You’re Dead, has all the original versions of the songs she recorded in the early 80s. For more info, plus video and photos, visit her website: www.MarilynNYC.com