Hollywood Icon Angelyne Makes ’80s Bimbo-Pop for the Masses

If you live in Los Angeles long enough you’ll probably hear about Angelyne. If you’re lucky, you might see her shopping on the West Side in Maribou stripper heels or prowling the hills in her magenta Corvette like an elusive Tinseltown unicorn. The Hollywood legend began her career erecting billboards of herself around Los Angeles in the early ’80s with the singular mission of making herself famous. One after another, the billboards began popping up around the city featuring nothing but the curvaceous Hollywood beauty Angelyne and her phone number. Long before Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, Angelyne pioneered the very possibility of being famous simply for being famous. Since then, Angelyne has become a household name amongst born-and-bred Angelinos, her infamous fame-baiting billboards became a looming symbol of Hollywood’s best and worst qualities. Although I’ve always been peripherally aware of the bodacious billboard beauty, it wasn’t until my discovery of her tragically short-lived music career that I became a super fan. 

My infatuation with the enigmatic Hollywood legend began in high school while digging through crates at Pasadena’s Poo-Bah Records. It was then that fate led me to her 1986 album amidst the time-withered stacks of vintage vinyl. The title of the LP was Driven to Fantasy and featured a buxom blonde reclining on a hot pink Chevy corvette. There was something so deliciously ’80s about the cover. Maybe it was the mile-high bouffant or the retro-futurist shades but whatever it was, it possessed me to take the record to the checkout counter without further inquiry into the actual quality of the music. On the car ride home, I glanced at the backside of the record and read through the track list. With titles like “Sex Goddess” “Skin Tight” and “Flirt,” I grinned with glee and waited in anticipation to listen to an album so slathered in Angelyne’s infamously campy L.A. bimbo aesthetics. Finally home, I galloped to my record player and dropped the needle on the first track. 

Angelyne’s totally ’80s pop-dance universe is awash in bubblegum sweetness and synthesized sound. It seems only fitting that the plastic pop star in all her artificially enhanced looks, would opt to craft her musical world around the sonic simulations of ’80s synthesizers and the artificial sizzle of sampled drum beats. Angeleyne’s sonic universe is basically what I imagine 2020 hyperpop outcast Slayyyter might have sounded like if you threw her into the Delorean time machine and only afforded her the use of a Roland Juno-106 and a shitty ’80s drum machine. Much like her purposeless billboards, Angelyne’s music has no higher aspirations than simply to affirm her own good looks and status as Hollywood’s favorite bimbo sweetheart. And yet, the more I listen, the more I start to enjoy the frenzied insanity of the songs. As I listen to her sing the hook of the song “Sex Goddess,” I find my head bopping in content submission to Angelyne’s charms. 

I’m in your magazine

In shades of shocking pink

Come on and play with me

Sex goddess

Sex goddess

Sex goddess

Sex goddess

Mitski once said that the genesis of the repetitive, one-word chorus of her song “Nobody” was a hysterical episode in which she was on her bedroom floor, contemplating a kind of existential loneliness, and began repeating the word “nobody” until her vocal intonations finally took shape as something musical. In my endless musings about Driven to Fantasy, I’ve often imagined a similar scenario playing out for Angelyne in the creation of this song. In my mind, I imagine pre-fame Angelyne in her Hollywood studio, in distress over her lack of stardom, descending into a kind of manic manifestation in which she kept repeating the phrase “sex goddess” until the words finally rang true. As I listen to the album again, I realize this is a woman speaking herself into existence. 

The shallow splendors of my home city can be found in plenitude—writers from Didion to West have bemoaned Los Angeles’ shallowness, its vanity, and its epidemic of self-obsession. And to her critics, Angelyne seems to be symptomatic of everything wrong with the city to which she belongs. Her music, with its shallow subject matter and endless proclamations of her own self-importance, speaks to the problems that the intellectual outsider always seems to take issue with when it comes to sunny SoCal. And yes, Angelyne does represent everything that’s wrong with L.A.—she’s vain, self-centered, and superficial. Yet, she also represents some of its greatest virtues, too—the pursuit of beauty, personal brand hustle, and a taste for glamour in a world intent on normalizing the casual. 

Usually, single-word stage names are indicative of one of two things: talent or ego. In the case of Angelyne, I’m still not sure which category she belongs to. The one thing I do know is that Angelyne has left a permanent mark on the shared cultural imagination of Los Angeles. Driving around my city, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror. Hardly a Malibu Barbie, with my peroxide blonde locks and skimpy-chic clothes, my looks cling to the vestiges of a kind of L.A. bimbo beauty that died alongside the cultural relevance of Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton. I’ve made it to Sunset now, and still Hollywood runs amok with Angelyne lookalikes with their micro-pets and botox beauty blissfully unaware that they belong to an empire in decline. I roll the window down and the sounds of Angylyne’s “Kiss to L.A.” tumble out the car behind me. Angelyne will always be a Hollywood classic, an original unoriginal, and a pop star whose iconic bimbo power-anthems encapsulate why L.A. is at once the most coveted and reviled city in the world.

Written by Sophie St. Claire