Taylor (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} taylor_parkes) wrote,@ 2003-08-14 20:27:00 |
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Event One
Outside Archway Station, the busker plays one drum. On a hot day, dribbling through the crowd, you could be in a cannibal movie.
ATTENTION FANS: Here is why I was sacked from BONG Magazine...he who dares to submit this article to the self-styled rock-off trustafarian blockheads of Media shall not eat on Friday. This piece was replaced by a full-page picture of The Arse Of Dita Von Teese. I say: cosmic, man. This is the edited version.
THE PORNOGRAPHY OF POP
FIRST...
What's Wrong With Being Sexy?
Look look - somewhere over there is Robbie's crotch. Atomic Kitten, in a sunkissed promotional film, rise from the waves like seamonsters in soft focus, and let the camera settle on their arses (in slow-motion). Christina Aguilera's no shrinking violet either! She'll do anything...but not with you. But fat Fred Durst did it all (for the nookie). Holly Valance's skirt just won't stay down, but it's only a bit of fun. Some ugly bloke I don't recognise stands in the desert with his shirt off, nodding approvingly at a gyrating tushy (model's own). I stood on this train platform in Milton Keynes for twenty-five minutes in the rain, next to a plasma screen showing pop videos to lonely travellers: I was irradiated with shiny, cynical sexuality, men leering and preening like I'd never dare, women behaving more provocatively in public than many do in private. But not once did I feel like I was in on the joke, never a part of the fiesta. I was the man who couldn't afford to orgy.
In other times, pop's outre sexuality was something for us, something to fuel our defiance, or at least our conceit. Lately it feels like we've been edged out, except as fans or lechers - more and more, pop stars are being styled as the keepers of some exclusive erotic power, overlords of desire, reminders that you (that's YOU) ain't never gonna get it. There's nothing new about teasing for profit. It's part of rock'n'roll, something Elvis did. Boy bands understand, and every sexy female singer in history has found that hard cocks prop pockets open. But this intensive farming of our prurience is becoming too easy to notice, and starting to feel faintly sinister. In the new pornography of pop, sex roles are fixed, flesh costs (bling!), addiction is freedom; put another pound in the slot and Girls Aloud will show you their knickers. It's a spectacle, a cheat, a distraction. Already-perfect bodies are Photoshopped into impossibility, pitched too high for reality to keep up, placed in front of your face at the newsagents, on billboards, on every television in the world. The bland force of the bombardment, and its peculiar lack of intrigue, make it simply a source of alienation and, worse, an annexe of advertising - every day we inch closer to Bill Hicks' vision of the ultimate Coke commercial, a naked woman masturbating and licking her lips, with the slogan: DRINK COKE. Waiting for a bus, you stand under a ten-foot poster of a smirking supermodel, with digitally-elongated legs and skin like gold. If it stops you thinking about something else, even for a moment, they already own a piece of you.
It's a bid to privatize desire. An inversion of energy, an Orwellian trick - sex, the root of human communication, being used to pull us further and further apart, for no stranger reason than money. It's like Leonard Cohen said, of this you can be sure: the rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor.
THEN...
Touch My Bum (This Is Life)
When Jimi Hendrix shared a shower with three teenage girls, there was nothing subversive about the fact that he enjoyed it. Gentlemen had been doing these things for years, in the company of whores. What was subversive was that the girls enjoyed it, and weren't being paid. This was the deal - for all the old rock stars' macho posturing, they were offering a vision of free love, love-free, that was for a while relatively progressive: a form of communion, not necessarily, not absolutely based on remote power or financial transaction. When I see Fred Durst in a video, surrounded by hired women because he's a rock star, I just see a 19th century cotton magnate patronizing the bordello. Show me the money! Change channels: a young lady demands respect on the grounds that she's a gangster's moll. Show me the money! Perhaps the 21st century began the day the Spice Girls' personalities were "downsized" and "streamlined" into one-word wank fantasies, and their nipples began to dispense Pepsi.
Tatu are another moneymaking enterprise, but when I first saw them (on a downloaded video clip, throwing water over each other in their underwear and miming strap-on sodomy onstage in front of thousands of hysterical 12-year-olds) I was puzzled - is this something to do with the Russian mafia? When it transpired that Tatu's boss-man was a psychologist turned advertising guru, things became a lot clearer, if slightly dispiriting. But at least they're not just selling skin. At least they're setting a good example to young kids.
Because the fact that a prepubescent girl might now dress like Britney and embarrass everyone with dirty dancing at a wedding reception isn't a sign that children are being sexualized - it's a sign that sexiness is being de-sexualized, so it can be sold to children. What kind of humans are we breeding? With that in mind, Tatu seem almost revolutionary, since loss-of-self, poignancy and deviance are part of their aesthetic, as they are part of sex and life, and I suspect their fans understand.
Still, no one ever lost money inflaming parents' paranoia (especially over underage sex - for the pubescent kids who buy pop, underage sex or the fantasy of it is - whisper it - The Appeal). So, inspired by Tatu, I've devised my own 'answer' band. It can't fail. In the video, two 17-year-old boys dressed in school ties, caps and shorts stand around feeling each other's dicks. We tell the press it was actually filmed several years ago when they were 14 or 15, although they look exactly the same as they do now. Through flashback sequences, we discover how they met: flirting in an internet chatroom, the strangers agree to meet up in an hour's time on some deserted waste ground, in the dark. Close-up of text appearing on chatroom screen: "Don't bring the dog." The group's called Wonderland, and the song's called 'He Makes It Hard'. If this doesn't go straight in at number one, I'm gonna take that goddamn plugger and nail his ass to the cross.
FINALLY...
We See God Through Our Assholes In The Flashbulb Of Orgasm
The problem, then, is not that pop is becoming pornographic. The word pornography means, literally, the selling of images - pop is pornography, it can't not be. The problem is that pop is becoming pornographic in the wrong way. Or perhaps, not pornographic enough.
It's a common perception that soft porn qualifies as erotica (even if it's not erotic), while hardcore is hollow, misogynistic, even 'damaging'. In fact, it's softcore, with its deceitful power balance and airbrushed ass-as-utopia aesthetic, that's riddling our kids with wrongness. Leaving aside the conundrum of the sex industry, vivid images of consenting adults are empowering, because (like pop) they're able to compress the abstract into a moment - so if pop is something that links us with the Earth and asks "How free are you? Who told you? And what is freedom, anyway?" then the sex it has must be equally visceral, personal, inclusive. Perhaps Robbie Williams and The Cheeky Girls should just grasp the nettle, and fill their videos with penetration shots, A2M, creampies and drooling blowjobs (and let's be honest, who can look at The Cheeky Girls without suspecting that somewhere there's a Rocco Siffredi film with a scene missing?) Perhaps Robbie, whose erections are probably ironic, could fuck himself?
Or maybe we should just start doing it in the streets, and reclaim the public space for our own imagination. It's unlikely to work, but it'd be an improvement on last weekend, and there's no way Pepsi would sponsor it. Our dirty minds are our own - the libido wears no logo. I say: grab back your seedy thoughts and dwell on them! Take Slut Power! Fuck your friends! Depravity For Equality!
Outside Archway Station, the busker plays one drum. On a hot day, dribbling through the crowd, you could be in a cannibal movie.
ATTENTION FANS: Here is why I was sacked from BONG Magazine...he who dares to submit this article to the self-styled rock-off trustafarian blockheads of Media shall not eat on Friday. This piece was replaced by a full-page picture of The Arse Of Dita Von Teese. I say: cosmic, man. This is the edited version.
THE PORNOGRAPHY OF POP
FIRST...
What's Wrong With Being Sexy?
Look look - somewhere over there is Robbie's crotch. Atomic Kitten, in a sunkissed promotional film, rise from the waves like seamonsters in soft focus, and let the camera settle on their arses (in slow-motion). Christina Aguilera's no shrinking violet either! She'll do anything...but not with you. But fat Fred Durst did it all (for the nookie). Holly Valance's skirt just won't stay down, but it's only a bit of fun. Some ugly bloke I don't recognise stands in the desert with his shirt off, nodding approvingly at a gyrating tushy (model's own). I stood on this train platform in Milton Keynes for twenty-five minutes in the rain, next to a plasma screen showing pop videos to lonely travellers: I was irradiated with shiny, cynical sexuality, men leering and preening like I'd never dare, women behaving more provocatively in public than many do in private. But not once did I feel like I was in on the joke, never a part of the fiesta. I was the man who couldn't afford to orgy.
In other times, pop's outre sexuality was something for us, something to fuel our defiance, or at least our conceit. Lately it feels like we've been edged out, except as fans or lechers - more and more, pop stars are being styled as the keepers of some exclusive erotic power, overlords of desire, reminders that you (that's YOU) ain't never gonna get it. There's nothing new about teasing for profit. It's part of rock'n'roll, something Elvis did. Boy bands understand, and every sexy female singer in history has found that hard cocks prop pockets open. But this intensive farming of our prurience is becoming too easy to notice, and starting to feel faintly sinister. In the new pornography of pop, sex roles are fixed, flesh costs (bling!), addiction is freedom; put another pound in the slot and Girls Aloud will show you their knickers. It's a spectacle, a cheat, a distraction. Already-perfect bodies are Photoshopped into impossibility, pitched too high for reality to keep up, placed in front of your face at the newsagents, on billboards, on every television in the world. The bland force of the bombardment, and its peculiar lack of intrigue, make it simply a source of alienation and, worse, an annexe of advertising - every day we inch closer to Bill Hicks' vision of the ultimate Coke commercial, a naked woman masturbating and licking her lips, with the slogan: DRINK COKE. Waiting for a bus, you stand under a ten-foot poster of a smirking supermodel, with digitally-elongated legs and skin like gold. If it stops you thinking about something else, even for a moment, they already own a piece of you.
It's a bid to privatize desire. An inversion of energy, an Orwellian trick - sex, the root of human communication, being used to pull us further and further apart, for no stranger reason than money. It's like Leonard Cohen said, of this you can be sure: the rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor.
THEN...
Touch My Bum (This Is Life)
When Jimi Hendrix shared a shower with three teenage girls, there was nothing subversive about the fact that he enjoyed it. Gentlemen had been doing these things for years, in the company of whores. What was subversive was that the girls enjoyed it, and weren't being paid. This was the deal - for all the old rock stars' macho posturing, they were offering a vision of free love, love-free, that was for a while relatively progressive: a form of communion, not necessarily, not absolutely based on remote power or financial transaction. When I see Fred Durst in a video, surrounded by hired women because he's a rock star, I just see a 19th century cotton magnate patronizing the bordello. Show me the money! Change channels: a young lady demands respect on the grounds that she's a gangster's moll. Show me the money! Perhaps the 21st century began the day the Spice Girls' personalities were "downsized" and "streamlined" into one-word wank fantasies, and their nipples began to dispense Pepsi.
Tatu are another moneymaking enterprise, but when I first saw them (on a downloaded video clip, throwing water over each other in their underwear and miming strap-on sodomy onstage in front of thousands of hysterical 12-year-olds) I was puzzled - is this something to do with the Russian mafia? When it transpired that Tatu's boss-man was a psychologist turned advertising guru, things became a lot clearer, if slightly dispiriting. But at least they're not just selling skin. At least they're setting a good example to young kids.
Because the fact that a prepubescent girl might now dress like Britney and embarrass everyone with dirty dancing at a wedding reception isn't a sign that children are being sexualized - it's a sign that sexiness is being de-sexualized, so it can be sold to children. What kind of humans are we breeding? With that in mind, Tatu seem almost revolutionary, since loss-of-self, poignancy and deviance are part of their aesthetic, as they are part of sex and life, and I suspect their fans understand.
Still, no one ever lost money inflaming parents' paranoia (especially over underage sex - for the pubescent kids who buy pop, underage sex or the fantasy of it is - whisper it - The Appeal). So, inspired by Tatu, I've devised my own 'answer' band. It can't fail. In the video, two 17-year-old boys dressed in school ties, caps and shorts stand around feeling each other's dicks. We tell the press it was actually filmed several years ago when they were 14 or 15, although they look exactly the same as they do now. Through flashback sequences, we discover how they met: flirting in an internet chatroom, the strangers agree to meet up in an hour's time on some deserted waste ground, in the dark. Close-up of text appearing on chatroom screen: "Don't bring the dog." The group's called Wonderland, and the song's called 'He Makes It Hard'. If this doesn't go straight in at number one, I'm gonna take that goddamn plugger and nail his ass to the cross.
FINALLY...
We See God Through Our Assholes In The Flashbulb Of Orgasm
The problem, then, is not that pop is becoming pornographic. The word pornography means, literally, the selling of images - pop is pornography, it can't not be. The problem is that pop is becoming pornographic in the wrong way. Or perhaps, not pornographic enough.
It's a common perception that soft porn qualifies as erotica (even if it's not erotic), while hardcore is hollow, misogynistic, even 'damaging'. In fact, it's softcore, with its deceitful power balance and airbrushed ass-as-utopia aesthetic, that's riddling our kids with wrongness. Leaving aside the conundrum of the sex industry, vivid images of consenting adults are empowering, because (like pop) they're able to compress the abstract into a moment - so if pop is something that links us with the Earth and asks "How free are you? Who told you? And what is freedom, anyway?" then the sex it has must be equally visceral, personal, inclusive. Perhaps Robbie Williams and The Cheeky Girls should just grasp the nettle, and fill their videos with penetration shots, A2M, creampies and drooling blowjobs (and let's be honest, who can look at The Cheeky Girls without suspecting that somewhere there's a Rocco Siffredi film with a scene missing?) Perhaps Robbie, whose erections are probably ironic, could fuck himself?
Or maybe we should just start doing it in the streets, and reclaim the public space for our own imagination. It's unlikely to work, but it'd be an improvement on last weekend, and there's no way Pepsi would sponsor it. Our dirty minds are our own - the libido wears no logo. I say: grab back your seedy thoughts and dwell on them! Take Slut Power! Fuck your friends! Depravity For Equality!
