BDSM MEDIA NEWS!!!!
23 june 2011
Readers recommend: songs about fetishes - results
High heels, whips, even a chocolate Jesus. You got down and dirty with kinky songs
Source: www.guardian.co.uk - Guardian - UK
UK - Some of your suggestions were brilliantly clever and witty: Duke Ellington's Rubber Bottom; Olivia Newton John's Hopelessly Devoted to You; the Ronettes' I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus; Amen Corner's Bend Me, Shape Me; Mud's Tiger Feet; Rolf Harris's Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport; and Jess Conrad's This Pullover ("I simply wrap it round me/ and I feel I'm holding you so tight … so tight"). I'm a sucker (as it were) for innuendo.
Myself, I'm more M&S than S&M. Though you didn't have to be straight-laced to baulk at some of this week's more outre suggestions. Some were genuinely nasty, such as the Crystals' He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss). So I did my best to assemble a misogyny-free playlist.
In any case, songs about fetishes aren't just a male preserve. And there's not much doubt about whether Grace Jones is in control. Her hyper-stylish version of the Normal's JG Ballard-influenced Warm Leatherette is ice-cool. On its 1980 release it defied genre classification and was one of the defining sounds of the ensuing decade.
Entire careers are sustained by repeated association with sexual perversion. It makes artists look excitingly liberated and daring. Lady Gaga, Madonna - where would they be without The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight? It's a fizzing 1984 electro breakdance club hit by Dominatrix, largely the work of New York hip-hop pioneer Stuart Argabright of Death Comet Crew. Its video was initally banned - and now resides in New York's Museum of Modern Art.
The Byrds' Triad has similarly been reappraised. But is a menage a trois a fetish? Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn certainly thought it rude enough to be an unacceptable subject for a song lyric - even for a west coast rock band during 1967's summer of love. Triad was damned as a "freak-out orgy tune" and omitted from their Notorious Byrd Brothers album - too notorious, evidently - and contributed to its author David Crosby's ejection from the band. Don't let the awful prospect of a threesome with Crosby put you off - he sings Triad gently and beautifully.
There's more loveliness in Pale Saints' cover of Nancy Sinatra's Kinky Love, a song that leaves the specific kinkiness to the listener's imagination. A similar ruse is adopted by Sonic Youth on Bull in the Heather, wherein an apparently excited Kim Gordon lists various peccadilloes as she urges a lover to talk dirty to her. Its stop-start pace and ringing guitars add to the mysteries of arousal.
Another song with thrillingly opaque lyrics is Goldfrapp's 2003's erotic anthem Strict Machine. "You know just what I want," coos Alison Goldfrapp. "Wonderful electric, cover me in you." Oh, all right. Hard to resist any record that sounds like Donna Summer, Suzi Quatro, Gary Glitter and Norman Greenbaum while still sounding modern - and yes, sexy.
Whip It isn't really sexy, maybe because Devo wear flowerpots on their heads. They claimed it was about then-president Jimmy Carter, though I can't say the lyrics make that clear.
But when a lyric spells out an explicit sexual act, it often sounds daft. Jake Thackray, a master of the comedy song, understands this. Isobel Makes Love Upon National Monuments is a fabulously absurd idea, taken to hilarious extremes, but Thackray's resolutely deadpan delivery ups the LOL count. Like many fetishes, it's subversive, too.
Bootsy Collins cohort Roger Troutman and his brothers formed the basis of Zapp, whose More Bounce to the Ounce is a mammoth disco monster, a sacred G-Funk text, and the last word in synthesised vocals. Fetish qualification: he likes to bounce. Fair enough - a reminder, perhaps, that unusual preferences can amount to perfectly innocent pleasure.
But let's finish with some filth: Andre Williams's Whip Your Booty is mean, diseased swamp rock, down and dirty. Just the way you like it.
Here's the A-list:
Warm Leatherette - Grace Jones
The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight - Dominatrix
Kinky Love - Pale Saints
Bull in the Heather - Sonic Youth
Strict Machine - Goldfrapp
Whip It - Devo
Isobel Makes Love Upon National Monuments - Jake Thackray
More Bounce to the Ounce - Zapp and Roger
Whip Your Booty - Andre Williams and Velvet Hammer
Here's the B-list:
Love More - Sharon Van Etten
That harmonium sends shivers down the spine in a Nico's Marble Index kind of way, which is no bad thing if you're singing about bondage. It's woozy, queasy. But she's having pleasure. Right? The uncertainty provides the frisson.
Back Door Man - Willie Dixon
I prefer Howlin' Wolf's version, but this still presses the right buttons. Loose and pervy.
Taiwanese Boots - Fujiya & Miyagi
"You look ridiculous" is the frank conclusion of pretend-Japanese Brighton band in this uncharacteristically funky highlight of their 2010 album Ventriloquizzing.
Beat My Guest - Adam & the Ants
In which Stuart Goddard and panto-clad pals yelp and writhe like Suede hadn't been invented. Which, in 1981, they hadn't. And as Vastariner notes, you have to admire "the boldness of putting a paean to masochism as a B-side to a single [Stand and Deliver] that was going to be bought by hundreds of thousands of 11-year-olds".
High Heel Shoes - The Moderates
This is charmingly jerky: Scouse new wavers affecting ennui at footwear-related admiration. From their 1980 Fetishes EP.
He was a Big Freak - Betty Davis
Miles's scary, funky missus spills the beans. "I used to say all kinds of dirty things," she confesses. Quite convincingly, I'd say.
Sex (I'm A) - Berlin
A few years before their power ballad par excellence Take My Breath Away, poodle-permed LA synth-pop combo had a sizeable hit with this heavy-breathing electro workout.
Short Shorts - The Royal Teens
Saxophone-driven New Jersey rock'n'roll from 1957.
Cadbury's Flake advert - Ronnie Bond
I resisted readers' calls to construct a historical analysis of fetish psychology. But consumer fetishism is worthy of a mention, and this one's indelibly printed on the minds of anyone with a TV in the 80s. And how about this for a fact: Ronnie Bond used to be drummer in the Troggs.
Chocolate Jesus - Tom Waits
Consumer fetishism, religious fetishism and dodgy sex get all confused in Ole Tom's barnyard blues.
*
Here's last week's blog, from which I've selected the songs above
* Here's a
Spotify playlist, containing many of these songs
* There'll be a fresh theme at
guardian.co.uk/readersrecommend, on Friday
See this article with Youtube links.
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