As a young pimple faced heterosexual teenage boy, as with all pimpled faced heterosexual teenage boys, I discovered that half naked women and naked women for that matter aroused the “hormonic broth” in me and made me do things that later I would discover was not as bad as certain adults made out.
Inevitably I discovered the Porno but at the same time I developed a “cultural taste” for the cheesy soundtrack while I was bopping along to such memorable moments as Debbie doing Dallas and Linda Lovelace blowing bubbles.
I don’t know whether it was because I watched these Pornos over and over again that the background cheesy soundtracks became ingrained in my brain or whether there was some kind of psychological association thing going on to do with sex like Pavlov and his dog.
However, now, when I see a Porno the anticipation is more towards the cheesy soundtrack then the actual acts contained therein. WTF!
And I wish the soundtracks could be erased, nay, obliterated with the fury of an angry desert god. More than once, I’ve turned away from porn because of the music.
One day my husband and I were hanging out with an old high school friend of mine who had become a music education graduate. Somehow, the conversation got on to cheesy porn movies and her criticism was “Have you ever listened to the music in those things??” It just cracked us up - of all the things that were bad about those old videos, music never even occurred to either of us.
This resurrected thread talks about the “bow chikka wow wow” soundtracks that porn is supposed to have.
As several people in that thread mention, it’s not true, at least for the 70s, when porn was made on film instead of video. Soundtracks used a huge variety of music ranging from solo piano to orchestral scores to pop songs, some of it really good. (And that’s beside actual musicals like Alice in Wonderland, which is a better musical comedy than anything done in straight films at the time.) As they note it’s significant that nobody talks about “bow chikka wow wow” until the 80s, when it became a stock reference in comedy.
Nobody really knows where the cliche came from. Maybe by the 80s some people were using that type of music because somehow the audience expected it. There might even be some minor examples from the 70s because nobody other than Robert Rimmer (real name: look it up) ever saw all of it. That supposed groove is a bizarre case of myth becoming reality, even retrospectively. Nobody in the 70s would know what you were talking about, though, and they’d be as offended as the filmmaker in Boogie Nights if you suggested it.
The soundtrack music for Emmanuelle includes two themes plagiarized from King Crimson’s “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic Part Two.” Robert Fripp, who composed the original, sued successfully.
I remember reading about the interior design department at a college that had a huge porn collection. They used it for reference rather than Hollywood films because porn films were shot in real locations because they didn’t have the budget to hire designers. Hollywood would always show an idealized version of a place. If you wanted to know what the 70s really looked like, check out a Swedish Erotica short.
