Hi all! I am the prof who first asked the question! Let me thank Phungi for posing the question, and all on the board for providing more material than I could hope for! I spent much of today listening to a lot of old and new songs, each registering in its own way on the “creep-o-meter.”
I teach English and Gender Studies and have been thinking lately about a perceived paradox today regarding youth and sexuality: namely, that on one hand it is more taboo than ever – and the most reprehensible of modern figures is that of the “pedophile” – and that on the other hand children’s sexuality is more visible and emphasized than ever before.
I was in the car listening to the radio and Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded” with its line “Are you old enough?/Will you be ready when I call your bluff?” hit me as one of many examples of a kind of celebratory tone to what (today) would be considered both morally and legally questionable behavior by the “adult” involved. It’s hard to imagine such a line – so straight and un-ironic – in a popular song today. So I started thinking about the recirculation of these “classic” songs on the radio and the overt and subtle messages that contain. (I was talking to a class about changing meanings in literature over time, and ended up citing this “hot-blooded” example in the context of literary work once shunned as “sex fiction” in 1899, and now considered a very popular and widely acclaimed work of feminine sexual emancipation.)
As one commentator here suggested, things get complicated very quickly. First, as most readers know, you can’t assume the speaker in a poem (or “song” as the case may be) has a direct relationship to the “author” or “songwriter.” Several of the songs posted today seem clearly to be dramatizations – the Kinks’ “Art Lover,” and Oingo Boingo’s “Little Girls” both for example seem like they establish “distance” between author and speaker. To put it another way, it’s hard to claim Nabokov was a sicko for writing Lolita. These songs work like critiques of the impulses and behaviors in question, though (as another person noted) they nevertheless evoke the fantasy and may “titillate” on those grounds.
In songs where the “speaker” is of undetermined age, there is another difficulty. The speaker in “You’re Sixteen” (“you’re beautiful and your mine”) – despite his subtle possessiveness – may BE a sixteen year old “speaker.” People are also right to point out that when the artist or speaker is 19 and the subject in the song is 17, it may be no great cause for alarm. So the strictly legal dividing line between appropriate and inappropriate is perhaps not enough to single out a particular song as morally or culturally problematic. Though once again this does put the fantasy in play.
Anyway, there is a lot going on. I started out most interested in the “Hot Blooded” variety – the “un-ironic,” to which Aerosmith, Benny Mardones, the Knack and others add – but again thanks for opening up new issues and ideas, because a lot of these examples raise new issues about artworks and reception, recirculation and changing values, etc. Spinal Tap’s parody of these kinds of songs shows perhaps that people were thinking about this kind of stuff in the heyday of its representation, and that reminds me too of “Serge’s Song” from the (fictional) teenage band The Paranoids in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), when bandmember Serge loses his teenage girlfriend to the handsome (adult) actor Metzger. Serge’s only choice is to go younger himself:
What chance has a lonely surfer boy
For the love of a surfer chick,
With all these Humbert Humbert cats
Coming on so big and sick?
For me, my baby was a woman
For him she’s just another nymphet;
Why did they run around, why did she put me down,
And get me so upset?
Well as long as she’s gone away-yay,
I’ve had to find somebody new,
And the older generation
Has taught me what to do—
I had a date last night with an eight-year-old,
And she’s a swinger just like me,
So you can find us any night up on the football field,
In the back of P.S. 33 (oh yeah),
And it’s as groovy as it can be.
Thanks again, and keep em coming! This really is making me think and write about all kinds of new issues!
