Alternative folk singer-songwriter Michelle Shocked (Karen Michelle Johnston) borrows her stage name from the term shell shocked. Her mother was Mormon and she was raised in that faith. A wild child, her mother had her committed to a psychiatric hospital for a time during years of drug abuse. She went through a punk rock phase, wearing a Mohawk hairdo and squatting in abandoned buildings in San Francisco, California.
Shocked received her first international exposure after Pete Lawrence recorded her performance on a portable tape recorder at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. Lawrence released the tape in Europe as The Texas Campfire Tapes (1986) (later released as The Texas Campfire Takes). The album's success brought major labels asking her to sign a contract. Shocked was resistant to what she saw as the machinations of the music industry, and worked to retain a degree of creative control. Her first US success came with the release of her 1988 debut album, Short Sharp Shocked, on college radio rotations around the country, which was met with strong acclaim from listeners. The debut single, "Anchorage", broke into the Billboard Hot 100. Shocked put forward an ambiguous sexuality from the beginning of her career. Her music appealed to many people, including lesbians.
The second album in the trilogy, Captain Swing, was released in 1989. Described by reviewer Chris Woodstra as an album of "swing and big-band music" that "no one expected," the album was promoted with the release of "On the Greener Side", a gender-reversed parody of Robert Palmer's 1986 single "Addicted to Love", in which topless male models performed the motions made famous by the female models in Palmer's video. Her 1992 album, Arkansas Traveler. Her desire to have the cover portray her in blackface in tribute to the roots of the music featured on the album drew criticism and a change in the cover art. From: https://www.facebook.com/groups/johneinarsonremembers/posts/2148616782139798/
