Wordplay

THE New York Times looked like a high school dork. Back during the height of grunge, a reporter called up Megan Jasper, a rep at Sub Pop Records, to ask if there was any particular Seattle lingo -- words that only flannel crowd use. Jasper, sick of media types trying to make Seattle into what it eventually became -- the commercial epicenter of the alt-rock revolution -- made up 14 bits of slang on the spot, hung up the phone, and then promptly laughed herself into a near epileptic fit. She and all her friends repeated the tantrum when the story "Lexicon of Grunge: Breaking the Code" showed up in print a few days later. She'd screwed the Paper of Record, gave it a linguistic swirly. At the moment, I'm experiencing the same thing.

"That is such a harsh toke." That's Gina Bling talking, though it could just as easily be Gina Genius, her Team Gina partner in rhyme. They're both funny, gay and talk at warp speed; they even dress alike, at least on stage. So telling them apart when there's a phone involved: It's damn near impossible.

"A what?

"Harsh toke! That's our word for something that's really awful. Like running into a former girlfriend at a show: That's a harsh toke."

"Oh, that's a total harsh toke," the other Gina pipes up in the background. "I hate that."

"And it happens all the time," Gina 1 says. "The lesbian community isn't that big. You run into exes all the time. That's what our song 'Wife-Swapping' is about. Everyone ends up dating everyone. You just wife swap."

OK, wife swap: term No. 2. Term No. 3 is a quaalude: "A real bummer person," Gina 2 offers. OK, totally makes sense. And while those quaaludes may or may not lead to the aforementioned harsh toke, it's damn sure they won't result in Term No 4, a lansbury. "That's something that's totally positive." Gina 2 continues. "We were watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks a lot, and Angela Lansbury is really good in it, so it made sense to us."

"Really?"

"Yeah, totally."

Which, if you listen to even one Team Gina song, you'll realize she's not kidding. The Seattle-based duo -- now you see my real concern -- is as playful as a bunch of Red Bull-gulping puppies. They write songs about the ridiculousness of the '80s while rapping like Melle Mel. They lace their beats with New Wave synth lines that are both absolutely cheesy and catchy as hell. And they pump out tracks that, in the wrong Christian conservative hands, could be mistaken as lesbian manifestos -- well, except for the fact they sport titles like "Butch/Femme" and "Boobies." Lines like "if my tits were hotels they'd be four stars/ if nice tits were illegal I'd be behind bars" also help.

In fact, the duo don't seem to take much of anything too seriously -- except maybe being the perfect kind of ridiculous. "We started this band just by trying to crack each other up," one of the Ginas says.

And the two haven't really stopped. But now they're letting as many people as possible in on the joke. The duo's monthly party in Seattle has become an institution; it was even named the best party in the city by one of the local papers. The group's two discs, the Gina Gina Revolution EP and this years full-length Products of the Eighties, have been selling at blinding speeds. And while the duo never shies away from rapping about being lesbians, Team Gina's tongue-in-cheek delivery -- think License to Ill-era Beastie Boys humor, but smarter and cruder -- has made the duo a surprising crossover hit.

"Even straight guys love us," Gina 1 says all perky. "We thought we'd have a problem, but they love us, old people love us, even fourth graders love us."

Which, of course, is a total lansbury.