Rock Songs and Sex: Beyond the Usual Commentary

GET IT ON (BANG A GONG) | WOOLY BULLY | LET’S STICK TOGETHER | SEX CRIME (1984) | ÉTIENNE | REAL AND DEFINED ANDROGENS

EGON SCHIELE
Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant, 1912 (detail) | Portrait of Wally Neuzil, 1912 (detail)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Couple in a Room, 1912

COMMENTARY

Sex is as intrinsic to rock as rain is to London. ‘Get It On’ is a celebration of the leisurely fuck, free of all hang-ups, and as such its appeal is immediate. For both the guy and the girl the pursuit of pleasure is their only concern. Which is why the girl—adolescent and insouciant, endowed with the gift of lust—needs to be young, free of the baggage that encumbers a woman who has lived. It is also why the guy needs to be older, free of a boy’s physical and emotional clumsiness. It is this dynamic that ‘Get It On’ captures so magnificently. It is an evocation of sex in which the joy is shared. Let’s consider two contrasting examples. ‘Gloria’ (Van Morrison/Them), while an ecstatic celebration of sex, is limited to the guy’s experience, and that experience is so imperious that Gloria, the girl, has no place in her own song. In ‘Little T & A’ (Keith Richards/Rolling Stones), the guys sings of ‘my little rock and roll, my tits and ass with soul’. Nothing imperious here, just something nice on the side: the girl is clearly as disposable as the bikini she strips off when the ‘pool’s in’. ‘Get It On’, then, is a song evocative of fucking that, anecdotal evidence suggests, is loved equally by girls and guys: its lascivious groove, its elixir of lewdness, strikes a chord in both sexes, demeaning neither, elevating both. And in rock, that is extremely rare.

Otto Mueller, The Lovers, 1919

COMMENTARY

If the organ and saxophone give ‘Wooly Bully’ its distinctive sound, if its relentless rhythm is underpinned by the walking bass, it is the ‘nonsense’ lyric that seals the song’s appeal. The unconscious is filled with ‘nonsense’, and much of that ‘nonsense’ has to do with sex. Seen in this light, the ‘thing’ Matty saw is the ‘shaggy genitals’ of an adult.¹ The animal image—Plains bison or woolly mammoth—is literally a cache-sexe, a fig-leaf: the ‘monster’ is sex in its dimension of the uncanny and the abject. Hatty tells Matty to take a chance, to ‘learn to dance’—to explore sex—and Matty responds affirmatively: ‘That’s the thing to do / Get you someone really / Pull the wool with you’. The joyous ‘nonsense’ of ‘Wooly Bully’, then, is all about sex: overcoming repression and defence. Most listeners, of course, will not be conscious of that, but their dancing bodies will be. The jubilation of ‘Wooly Bully’ is the jubilation of confronting and overcoming a screen memory.²

1 – ‘Shaggy genitals’ is the term used by the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles in his critique of anthropomorphic accounts of the gods. God, he argues, is singular, and he has ‘no feet, no swift knees, no shaggy genitals; he is mind alone’. See Giannis Stamatellos, Introduction to Presocratics: A Thematic Approach to Early Greek Philosophy with Key Readings (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) p. 63.

2 – Screen memory: A childhood memory characterized both by its unusual sharpness and by the apparent insignificance of its content. The analysis of such memories leads back to indelible childhood experiences and to unconscious phantasies. Like the symptom, the screen memory is a formation produced by a compromise between repressed elements and defence. [Jean Laplanche & Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1974) pp. 410-411]

Edvard Munch, Two Human Beings – The Lonely Ones, 1905

COMMENTARY

There’s a bedrock of optimism in the bouncy appeal of ‘Let’s Stick Together’; there’s an undertone of faith that the couple can ‘work it out’ and endure. As such, the song is perfect for a party: its aesthetic is carnivalesque. And yet, everybody knows love stories are fragile and rarely recover when discontent sets in. It is the knowledge of this fact that makes listening/dancing to ‘Let’s Stick Together’ a poignant experience: We want the girl to heed the guy, but we know she probably won’t. We suspect, moreover, that she has very good reasons not to heed him. And yet we want to believe that the carnivalesque can persist, that differences can be dissolved, barriers broken down. We want to believe that happy endings are not confined to fairy tales. Still, when the party’s over and our shiny clothes have lost their glitter, we realize that our ideal is as elusive as the horizon. That’s reality: the oblivion of the night was but a respite. As for our theme, marriage, it seems, has evacuated sex. Let’s stick together! Yeah.

Otto Mueller, Couple at Table, 1925

COMMENTARY

‘Sex Crime’ is a very effective transposition from literature to rock of Orwell’s concept of ‘sexcrime’ in Nineteen Eight-Four. In all regimes that seek to subject citizens to total control, sex is a threat because fantasy and pleasure, being amoral, resist ideology. Rebellion against Big Brother feeds the fire of ‘Sex Crime’. And yet, for the sexually aware listener/dancer, the song can be more than an affirmation of rebellion against an oppressive external force. Indeed, as Camille Paglia argues, ‘the serpent is not outside Eve but inside her’.¹ Internal struggles, from both a personal and artistic standpoint, are more interesting than external ones: contending with Big Brother is a black-and-white battle; contending with oneself involves a spectrum of greys. ‘A couple is a conspiracy in search of a crime. Sex is often the closest they can get.’² That is what I mean by ‘sexually aware’: the knowledge that ‘the ego is not master in its own house’,³ no matter how much we may pretend it is. Sex, for the sexually aware, is the royal road to liberation from the prison-house of ‘dead’ personae, the playing of roles alien to our individuality. The ‘crime’ the couple conspires to commit is precisely the act that serves to break them out of their prison-house. ‘Sex Crime’ can be a thrilling song, then, not only because it affirms rebellion against an external oppressor, but also because it can affirm us in our fight against the forces of repression within us. In so doing, it reminds us that there is more to sex than Saturday night relief: taking responsibility for our individuality implies assuming our sexuality in all is subterranean meanderings.

1 – Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale University Press, 1990) p. 11

2 – Aphorism 21 in Adam Phillips, Monogamy (London: Faber & Faber, 1996)

3 – Freud

Tracey Emin, Spending Time with You, 2015

COMMENTARY

‘Etienne’ is an instance of creativity’s ‘magic synthesis’, the coming together of an ingenious lyric, the raw nobility of a superb band, and an arrangement that sculpts the song in time, giving it, paradoxically, both definition and ambiguity: exactly what the evocation of sex requires. The words and phrases of the lyric are aural equivalents of the gestures of sex, which is why a sensitive ear can decode the sense even if the listener lacks French. Guesch Patti sings the song brilliantly; her voice hints at a taste for submission while the words assert domination: that is exactly the kind of dynamic that makes sex exciting. Compare ‘Etienne’ to ‘The Only One’, a song by the Cure. Like ‘Gloria’, discussed earlier, ‘The Only One’ is an ecstatic celebration of sex, but exclusively from the guy’s perspective. My conviction is that when the pleasure is shared the song attains a higher state. Both ‘Get It On’ and ‘Etienne’ ‘share the pleasure’ implicitly. The implicit approach is in line with the dynamics of lovemaking—the push-and-pull between self and other and oneself-as-another—since to narrate explicitly is to risk being reductive: precisely what sex is not, for, indeed, sex is that which exceeds. Ambiguity, then, insofar as it is an invitation to explore, is a spur to sex. ‘Tiens-le bien’, the woman sings, ‘grip it good’: the ambiguity about what exactly is going on stirs our imagination and enlarges the song. That’s one reason why I find ‘Etienne’ the finest evocation of fucking in rock.

WATCH EXCELLENT VIDEO OF ‘ETIENNE’ IN A NEW TAB (DAILY MOTION)

LYRICS

He makes the scene
Vaseline
Sometimes conscious and packaged androgen

Perhaps he finds a kind of purity
Preferring not to wait, her petals flowering too hot
Refusing her garden, betraying his home

And oiling his machine, he works it hard
Ride, rides himself to foam

A magazine in the other hand betrays
The airbrushed dream of perfection
A connection which demands that the soul of femininity
Supplant itself into the shell which offers itself to the fancy
But man betrays himself with the seductiveness of media
Until to the (?) distortion becomes a thrill
And the responsibility to reality is too real to be a turn-on
And burn-on

And he’s oiling his machine, he works it hard
Ride, rides himself to foam

Impervious, he ponders his seed of no destiny
And not only that but a detached understanding of the significance
Erotically

And he cannot see past the tip of his own knee
His creature’s proclivity exists to attend it
A debauchee to this deed

The oiling cannot conclude the behaviour of Sisyphus
It (?) nor can the mountain defend it

He half-dreams her, reams her taut (?) body

Caught at the wrists, helpless, unresisting
The twisting thrusts to the rhythmic beats
Like the sound of a whip drowning in the waves of sensation

Abandoning himself to the abstract contact takes him closer to his senses
Further from defenses to the absolute surrender he craves

We are all slaves to the ceaseless (?) we reach
We got no (?)

 Brancusi, Princesse X, 1916

COMMENTARY

In ‘Real and Defined Androgens’ a woman is watching a man masturbating, cock in one hand and porn mag in the other. The lyric consists in a running commentary on what she sees. She filters her observations through a variety of lenses—psychological, philosophical, anthropological—delivering her lines with breathy aplomb against a sonic ground of textured ostinato (guitar, saxophone, piano). A tour de force both artistically and intellectually, the song could only have been created by a woman.¹ Let’s consider a few lines. ‘Perhaps he finds a kind of purity’: masturbation as a flight from alterity, from the reality that interferes with fantasy. ‘Her petals flowering too hot’: her pursuit of pleasure is out-of-synch with his. ‘Refusing her garden, betraying his home’: Is it his own wife he is seeking refuge from, preferring solipsism to intimacy? ‘The shell which offers itself to the fancy’: The woman so alienating herself into an object that she becomes more like an inflatable doll than a flesh-and-blood creature. ‘The responsibility to reality is too real to be a turn-on’: the difficulty of integrating fantasy into reality, of assuming complementary roles in sex-play; reversion to reality a form of surrender, disloyalty to oneself. Masturbation as revenge for such frustration. ‘The oiling cannot conclude the behaviour of Sisyphus’ / ‘We are all slaves to the ceaseless’ / ‘The absolute surrender he craves’: The narrator has a certain empathy for the masturbator, recognizing that, structurally, desire is insatiable and sadness inevitable. ‘He half-dreams her, reams her taut (?) body / Caught at the wrists, helpless, unresisting / The twisting thrusts to the rhythmic beats / Like the sound of a whip drowning in the waves of sensation’: Except for the neurotic, the only remedy for frustrated orgasm is greater transgression. To conclude, Annette Peacock’s achievement in ‘Real and Defined Androgens’ is to have transported us far from the tawdry clichés that typify rock-song sex: she has transported us to our deepest selves.

1 – Interesting parallels can be drawn between ‘Real and Defined Androgens’ (1978) and a text by Marguerite Duras, L’Homme assis dans le couloir (1980). And if there’s any musician who can approach the genius of Annette Peacock here, it is Fiona Apple.

EGON SCHIELE
Self-Portrait in Black Cloak, Masturbating, 1911 | Black-Haired Girl with Raised Skirt, 1911

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