Kink

While the fact that people listen (often repeatedly) to songs without ever knowing or understanding the lyrics can hardly be said to be a positive thing, it does have at least one upside. It allows a shocking variety of experience and opinion into the very public space of mass market media and mainstream radio. I, personally, am delighted to see this; I am particularly happy when people's non-normative sex practices make it through. In other words, even if it's not MY kink, I'm glad to see that SOMEONE's kink is broadcast far and wide. This is partly because I believe it is good for the common weal in an areopagetica sort of way, but mostly just cause I take childish and prurient delight in it.

In that spirit, I begin this list of songs released for wide consumption on the radio which contain something shocking. No offense to you indie and folk rockers, but if it's not on teeny-bopper radio, it's not in this category. We're not talking about preaching to the choir here, we're talking about pulling one over. Remember that terrible sitcom from the 80s called "growing pains"? (You may know it as Leonardo DiCaprio's first appearence.) Heartfelt, mainstream, terribly terribly boring? Family centered? Well, the oldest son's best friend was named Boner. Someone was having a laugh, there. It's in the spirit of Boner that the following is presented for your inpection:

• Our earliest example to date is Toni Basil's Mickey which we may have spelled wrong. In this song, which was recently reprised on a VH1 countdown of one-hit wonders, during which countdown it was alleged to be somehow mostly about cheerleading, the woman singing offers her lover (well, probably "lover" given the circumstances) anal intercourse in an attempt to get him to sleep with her rather than the other people (probably men) with whom he spends his nights. Kinky. And the tie to cheerleaders eludes us.
  
  We welcome theories about how this may be about cheerleading, facetious or otherwise.
• Shaggy's It wasn't me. There has been some debate, actually, as to whether or not this IS mainstream male sexuality, but I present it for comment nonetheless. This song is supposedly about a man who is horrified to have been caught red-handed (though perhaps the hand was not the most important body part involved) cheating on his girlfriend. His first reaction is to go next door and tell a FOURTH person, a male friend/neighbor and ask him for advice, all of which is narrated for us, yet more audience. Over the course of the dialogue between the two men, it becomes clear that no one is really very upset about either the cheating or the getting caught, and what we have here is, in actuality, and elaborate fantasy about being watched. Evidence for this position includes that fact that the girlfriend saw him have sex in at least three different rooms, that she later examined his body for marks left by the other woman (a sort of non-normative sexual experience itself, that), and that she FILMED part or all of the proceedings. This does not sound like a woman who is upset about the situation.
• The comment below inspires us to include a classic example of this genre (category? subgenre? what the hell is it, anyway?) by the Kinks, Lola. In this tender Bildungsromanesque story, a young man comes to the big city where he is baffled by a number of big-city goings-on, including coca-cola sold as "champagne" and a lovely, and surprisingly strong, transgendered person who probably deflowers him in some unspecified way. The contrast between the narrator's understanding of the situation and our own, more savvy big-city dwelling, understanding provides much of the artfulness and dramatic tension, in that old-school new critical analysis. It's practically Joyce-ian. It is, I would venture to say, genius.
• My current fave is a fairly recent song that transgresses political rather than sexual mores. It's a stretch to call this kink, but it's just so, so, so genius that I must mention it. Eminem, Sing for the Moment has an account of economic discrepancy and its relationship to art/music/music as big money capitalism that is so pointed it might as well be called the class warfare song. He describes a kind of tokenism by which a few musicians are given obscene amounts of money and fame so that their music can become a sort of comfort to the vast majority of the people in the poor communities from which they came which simultaneously gives them comfort and keeps them from asking for something better or more equitable as a solution. That this song played repeatedly on mainstream radio, itself the medium for this exchange, is a final ironic twist. AND, while the word FUCK is edited out for this distribution, the class stuff isn't, rather proving my point that not even censors actually listen to lyrics. (There's also something lovely going on in this song with crossover music, race, and a complicated allusion to Aerosmith, but I"ve digressed enough.)
• Elvis Aaron Presley, Jailhouse Rock. "Number 37 said to Number 3/You're the cutest Jailbird I ever did see/Warden said hey buddy don't know be no square/If you can't find a partner use a wooden chair." 'Nuff said. Well, probably not enough, as here are the full lyrics.

Comments:

From rebecca - 8/15/04 6:18 PM