“Johnny Are You Queer?” by Josie Cotton

"Johnny Are You Queer?" came to Josie Cotton secondhand, and its backstory is as tangled as a soap opera. Bobby and Larson Paine, then managing the Go-Go's, took the music of "Fetch Me One More Beer", a number by the Los Angeles punk outfit Fear, wrote new lyrics over it and handed it to the Go-Go's, who were the first to play it live. After the two camps fell out, the Paines barred the band from performing it and passed it to Cotton instead. She put it out as a single in 1981 and again in 1982, and it landed on her album Convertible Music.

It's new wave power pop with a bubblegum grin. When Fear came calling about the publishing, the two sides settled the matter with a coin toss, and the Paines won. The soundtracks to Valley Girl and, much later, Jackass Number Two gave it fresh legs.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.