I made a reference to a Zappa song in another thread and it made me think…
As the parent of three teens, I sometimes hear the outrage of parents at the horrible and explicit lyrics of some of today’s songs, and I just got to thinking of one of my favorite songs when I was in High School. I was a bit of a Jazz geek and many of us were big fans of Frank Zappa. One favorite album was Over-Nite Sensation and the song Dinah-Moe Humm.
Here is the first verse:
Couldn’t say where she’s comin’ from,
But I just met a lady named Dinah-Moe Humm
Stroll on over, said
Look here, bum, I got a forty dollar bill says
You can’t make me come. No way!
You just can’t do it.
She made a bet with her sister, who’s a little bit dumb
She could prove it any time all men was scum
I don’t mind that she called me a bum
But I knew right away she was really gonna come
So I got down to it
Whipped off her bloomers and stiffened my thumb
And applied rotation on her sugar plum
I poked & stroked till my wrist got numb
Still didn’t hear no Dinah-Moe Humm
Dinah-Moe Humm
(Mods… if this is too much feel free to clip it down to what is acceptable.)
It gets better/worse as it goes.
I hadn’t thought of this in years, but this came out in 1973. A few years ago here was controversy over the Superman song… people imagined some sexual act regarding a towel on the back (you had to have a good imagination). Now, I’ll admit that Zappa didn’t get much mainstream airplay, but it wasn’t hidden by any means from us innocent 16 year olds. Do people just forget these things in their disgust of how bad things have gotten?
How 'bout a song about a paid assassin who cuts up his victims with a switchblade; further glamorized by saying how many women are drawn to him? Number one in Billboard and Grammy for record of the year.
Oh the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear
And it shows them pearly white
That’s the key, I think. It’s not that explicit stuff didn’t exisit, or that you couldn’t find it if you were looking for it; it’s that it wasn’t mainstream. It didn’t get played on the radio or TV. It wasn’t in the “best sellers” or “top forty,” or however you define popular music.
But the thing is, they don’t have to bother with innuendo any more. Take “The Lazy Song”, which I understand is popular with youngsters these days (e.g. no.1 single in the UK):
Tomorrow I’ll wake up, do some P90X
Meet a really nice girl, have some really nice sex
And she’s gonna scream out: ‘This is Great’
(Oh my god, this is great)
Yeah
It’s not cryptic, is it? Well apart from the P90X bit, which apparently is an exercise system.
My son and his wife are way into the P90X thing. At age 40, he’s ripped beyond belief, and she’s wearing smaller clothes than in high school. It’s a very aggressive system.
I got nipples on my titties, big as the end of my thumb,/I got somethin’ between my legs’ll make a dead man come . . .
I would fuck you baby, honey I’d make you cry./Now your nuts hang down like a damn bell sapper,/ And your dick stands up like a steeple,/ Your goddam ass-hole stands open like a church door,/ And the crabs walks in like people.
Not seeing any innuendo there.
The only fair comparison is between songs that were in the mainstream then and songs that are in the mainstream now. “Negro” music appeared under a variety of names and guises, from R&B to “race records” to basic blues, but was never in the mainstream of record sales or radio play. White performers in the 50s regularly cleaned up original lyrics when otherwise ripping off black performers. Music that was made for albums and deliberately unplayable on any radio except college stations and free-form FM (and often not then: I had restrictions as a college DJ) could say lots of things that Top 40 would never allow. And there was a large underground of dirty lyric music made for parties that you could get only if you knew where to look.
There were a million songs with innuendo, from mild to blatant, but hardly anything in the mainstream was explicit. Today many songs in the mainstream and easily findable and available are explicit, or have innuendo that barely single entendre. It’s a huge difference from any older time in the music industry. Yeah, things have changed. I would argue for the better.
True enough, but I guess I’m just reiterating Thudlow Boink’s point - I’ve never heard the Frank Zappa song and yet, despite having little interest in contemporary top 40 music, I have heard The Lazy Song many times. You turn the radio on and it’s there. Going back 20 years, I don’t think the New Kids on the Block, say, would have got away with those lyrics.
No, but The Divinyls were all over the radio with “I Touch Myself” in '91. Not quite as explicit as Zappa, but blatant even in the title. And in '94 you had Green Day getting HUGE with “Longview”, which had the same exact theme as The Lazy Song but was actually even less clean:
Sit around and watch the phone,but no one’s calling
Call me pathetic,call me WHAT YOU WILL
My mother says to get a job
But she don’t like the one she’s got
When masturbation’s lost its fun
You’re fucking lazy.
Bite my lip and close my eyes
Take me away to paradise
I’m so damn bored I’m going BLIND!!!
And I smell like shit
In the mid '80s (1987?) it was a big deal when George Michael came out with “I Want Your Sex”, because he actually used the word “sex” instead of any euphamisms, even “love”. There may have been explicit songs before, but this was mainstream, Top 40, MTV heavy rotation, etc.
For me, explicit song lyrics are only fun when I make them up to bastardize existing songs. They’re less fun when they’re the actual lyrics. YMMV.
As far as popular contemporary American music goes, the song Cocaine Blues Cocaine Blues - Wikipedia, was apparently rather popular in 1948. Its lyrics tell a 1st person account of a man who takes cocaine than murders his woman because she was a “bad bitch.”
Ah upon further investigation it would appear that Johnny Cash changed a line from “woman” to “bad bitch” when he covered the song in 1968. But the rest of the lyrics, about the drugs and murdering, are the same in the original. Still, 1968 was 43 years ago. You’d have to be pretty old to consider that new music.
There may have been scattered instances of profanity in popular music in the past, but it’s really disingenuous to compare it to today. We now have whole albums where every track has a lot of swearing; this would have been unthinkable in the 60s and 70s. I know that people on this board love to say “it was just as bad back then…GETOFFMYLAWNlololol” but sometimes there are genuine changes in culture and to not acknowledge them is silly.
Agreed. To say that things haven’t changed because one example of the use of the word “bitch,” something I doubt George Carlin included in his expanded list of the words you can’t say on television, is silly. Not to mention that the music world was already changing by 1968, as long as it was outside of Top 40 radio. That doesn’t rise to the level of an exception.
There is much more open cursing - and sexual explicitness - in mainstream society today than in any time in the past that I can find. You can always find examples of these in any society of the past, of course, but they are always limited to particular segments of society. Today they are pervasive, in every aspect of society except for a few protected enclaves, like network television. Books, movies, music, all types of art, are more explicit from top to bottom than ever before. And I mean literally ever.
I am not complaining or condemning. I am stating that it is a literal fact for you to make of as you will.
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