Sex in popular music

Erotica, an album that explores music and sexSongs about sex are nothing new. Prince may have seemed provocative singing about oral sex, but he was just following a centuries-old tradition. Ancient Greek and Roman poetry could be quite explicit. Bawdy songs have enjoyed great popularity from at least the Renaissance on. From the early days of wax cylinder phonograph recordings in the 1890s, one can find spoken word curios worthy of a parental advisory sticker. And for those who think that “freaking” is new, the 17th century sarabande — a popular dance considered “merry and lewd because it is performed with movements of the body which are indecent” — was just one among several erotically-tinged dances that were outlawed in some places.

It is true, though, that popular music in our own era has seen explicit lyrics shift from being an underground phenomena to become mainstream. That shift has introduced a subset of songs that are not only about sex but musically suggest the experience of erotic love itself. I’m going to discuss the more noteworthy songs from this genre.

The progenitor of music that evoked passion and writhing bodies was Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, in which hours of chromaticism and shifting harmony accompanied the lovemaking of the two paramours. Many critics denounced the opera as scandalous for representing “unholy passion” when it premiered in 1865, but it nevertheless went on to achieve great popularity.

A century later, Led Zeppelin scored their first hit with “Whole Lotta Love,” inspired by the Willie Dixon blues song “You Need Love” that was recorded by Muddy Waters in 1962. What was unique about Zeppelin’s 1969 recording was the improvisatory “orgasm section” in the middle of the song involving a theremin solo and the moans of singer Robert Plant.

In 1975, Donna Summer released an album with a song titled “Love to Love You, Baby.” The song is an unabashed representation of sex that slowly builds over the course of 17 minutes with moans and a driving bass drum on every beat. The song launched the music that defined the era of disco and one-night stands.

Prince’s 1981 song “Do Me Baby” includes moans and sexy talk. Toward the end, the music drops back to a simple high hat keeping rhythm and concludes with a deflating music sigh that captures the male experience of a sudden dissipation of energy. He simulates sex in a number of other songs, including the 1982 slow song “International Lover,” which uses a tongue-in-cheek metaphor of an airline with lines like “we anticipate a bit of turbulence,” and the 1989 “Scandalous Sex Suite” written for the movie Batman, which employs an ecstatic guitar solo over dissonant chords in the third section of the suite titled “The Rapture.”

Madonna devoted an entire album to the subject of sex and erotic love with Erotica in 1992. By that time, we had been exposed to two decades of dance music that provided graphic representations of sex through the use of driving drum and bass, a certain style of singing, and instrumentation. The song “Erotica” is one of the more interesting from this genre, with its notable use of dissonance, a drum pattern mixing traditional and “exotic” drums, a mixture of singing and spoken word, and wordless singing in a non-Western style. Also deserving of mention from the album is “Where Life Begins,” a lusciously sensuous song about oral sex.

Janet Jackson’s “Would You Mind?” uses instrumentation very effectively to express sex. This song, released in 2001, also uses a sophisticated rhythmic pattern in the chorus melody where every second note of the triplet is accented. The rubbing against each other of two different rhythmic patterns, coupled with the graphic lyrics and breathy singing, creates a highly charged effect.

Of all the songs that have attempted to represent sex, the most musically satisfying example is MeShell Ndegeocello’s 2002 song “Trust” from the album Cookie. There is nothing vulgar or contrived in this beautiful song. The drum beat is quite minimal: a slow alternation of bass and snare on the beats. A piano, backed by strings, plays arpeggiated chords just after the beat, creating a sensuous pull in the rhythm. Meshell talks/sings the explicit lyrics in the verses, and Caron Wheeler adds ecstatic, improvisatory flights of wordless melody in the choruses. A sixteenth-note electronically manipulated rhythmic pattern weaves through the music and subtly evokes sounds like lickings and slurpings. After the second chorus, a rhythmically free guitar solo interweaves with Caron’s wordless singing. As both rise to a climax, the music morphs into an ecstatic melody over indigenous African drumming. It is the most sensuous and elegant evocation of a sexual climax in the entire music repertoire.

With 40 years of such songs behind us, it seems there would be nowhere else to go musically. But as each generation wants to create a repertoire anew, don’t expect to see interest wane anytime soon.

1 Comment

  1. Yo!, I was looking around for a while searching for exotic guitar and I happened upon this site and your post regarding Music and sex, I will definitely add this to my bookmarks!

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