Let's Talk About Sechs

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

"Isn't sex the point of pop?" asks the Lex. I dunno about the point, maybe a point, but is there really a lot of sexy pop around? (And what would that mean anyway?)

I have (I think!) enabled ANONYMOUS COMMENTS on this post if anyone would like to use em. No, I haven't, ignore that bit.

Comments

[whalefish.livejournal.com]

I'm bored of pop about sex, or songs about sex in general really. Billions of things a person could think about or write a song about, a lot of them more interesting than shagging, and yet it's always sex or love. Boring.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Like what?? Sex isn't boring at all. I think in terms of subjects I want to hear songs about, sex and love are pretty much top of the list: they're endlessly complex, endlessly fertile and pretty much universally relevant.

[whalefish.livejournal.com]

Like what? Well, they could write a song about absolutely anything else! I'd really like to hear, I dunno, Usher doing a song about the Irish potato famine but in his usual style. Sex is easy.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

But if you actually think about, that song would probably sound awful, and the lyrics would be terrible, and I'd end up still preferring to listen to 'Yeah'.

Sinéad O'Connor did a song about the Irish potato famine. It was funny but awful and I definitely prefer 'Nothing Compares 2 U' and 'Troy'.

[koganbot]

In principle I agree with you - not that romance is boring at all, but the ever-insistent concentration on it in song lyrics can get tiring, and there are plenty of other things to write songs about. But...

Who's doing these other things well? Where are these other songs? I mean, there are plenty of them in indie, but they're bad songs and stupid lyrics, often.

[whalefish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's a point - I can think of some horrible indie songs about mundane subjects, actually. Jumble Sailing by Clearlake (sample lyric: "We'll know that it won't break the bank, 'cos it's only 10p") is a disgraceful song.

Maybe the lack of good songs about other stuff is partly because it's just so much easier to write a good song about sex, or because it's so hard to write a good one about unlikely subjects.

[koganbot]

(Of course, a lot of hip-hop is about violence and commerce, and violence in commerce, and about wordplay for its own sake.)

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

However sex is something pretty much everyone can relate to (whether it's doing it, not doing it, being happy/miserable about either of these situations). Whereas not everyone has eg been an astronaut. Hence the latter not being such an omnipresence in popular music.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Problem is that songs about sex or love are known to sell, and have been selling for decades. And the music industry is there to make money, not to think of innovative things to do with music or marketing.