My Top 1000 Songs #948: Oh Bondage Up Yours!

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Sure, X-Ray Spex's 1977 punk classic isn't something I play on a regular basis, but it hasn't lost a drop of its visceral power nearly a half-century later. Poly Styrene, barely out of her teens, belting out a cry for anti-consumerism independence with lung-busting fury... nothing like it before or since. Throw in some unexpected sax work (from a then-16-year-old Lora Logic), and the song is simultaneously embedded withing the handful of truly definitive first-wave UK punk songs while sounding wholly original and unlike anything else from the scene.

Live 1978:

2008 reunion: