What is the origin of the 4-note tune “Bow-Chicka-Bow-Bow” as being the socially-ubiquitous way of indicating porn music? My wife and I have wondered about this, and turned to the internet (of course). The spelling of the phrase isn’t easily agreed upon either, so searching is difficult - but we found a lot of references to it and no sources. It’s a tune that everyone in the USA universally recognizes; you don’t have to have ever seen porn to know what the song means, but I don’t remember having it explained to me, nor seen it specifically defined anywhere. Is there a long-lost recording, somewhere, of ‘The Bow-Chicka-Bow-Bow Song’, or did this come about some other euphamistic way? People learned this SOMEWHERE, right?
It basically comes from '70’s porn, that, like Starsky and Hutch and other TV shows, made copious use of '70’s funk music in the background. The Bow-Chicka-Bow-Bow you refer to is an attempt to replicate the sound of a guitar with a wah-wah pedal playing a funk riff. When you mute the strings so they don’t make a sound, then percussively strum them while working the wah pedal, you get that sound.
It was a staple of that era.
I’d always heard it as “walk-a-chicken walk-a-chicken walk-a-chicken walk-a-chicken . . .”
Kinky is using a feather. Perverted is using the whole chicken.
No, no: “CHOKE-a-chicken, CHOKE-a-chicken…”
I am pretty sure a stand up comedian got it going in the 80’s as he poked fun of 70’s porn.
Aired originally as bow chicka chicka bow… (where bow rhymes with ow!)
I’m unaware of anything that had ‘chicka’ in it. We had it going:
BOM-boppa-BOW, BOM-boppa-BOW
no chickas in sight.
Yes, 70s porn that we found in our dad’s sock drawer. (which I’m sure is why our moms always found our porn…we always hid it in some stupid, obvious place cuz that’s what dad did.)
Most early porn had no soundtrack. The early sounds ones were just the silents with dubbed music or dubbed music/dubbed dialogue/dubbed sound effects. At first, sound tracks were music stolen from radios or records. Then synthesizers organs have been around and popular since Switched on to Bach came out. With the premiere of Deep Throat, porn went legit and started to produce *original * soundtracks. But cheap is as cheap does…