I’m counting down my 100 favourite songs of all time. To keep this from becoming a Bob Dylan / Tom Waits love-in, only one track per artist is allowed.
Go to 81: Let's Push Things Forward by The Streets
Go to 83: I Feel Love by Donna SummerGo to 81: Let's Push Things Forward by The Streets
A short history of filth
In 1975 TIME creepily categorized and counted Donna Summer’s moanings on her 1975 hit, Love to Love You Baby. The venerable magazine’s interest in establishing that the singer performed 22 orgasms was largely due to the fact that this kind of sexual explicitness was rare in pop music at the time.
Not that musicians were prudish on the topic of sex, but they usually disguised their dishonorable intentions with metaphors. Granted, Chuck Berry was barely even trying to hide the true meaning of his ode to onanism, My Ding a Ling. In 1980 The Vapors added a touch of casual racism to the self-indulgent innuendo on Turning Japanese, while Divinyls were not exactly beating around the bush with their 1990 hit, Touch Myself (or were they?)
When not broadcasting their autoerotic adventures, pop stars spent a lot of time pleading obliquely for others to join in the fun. Peter Gabriel wanted to be “your sledgehammer”, Grace Jones requested that you “pull up to the bumper baby and drive it in between”, while Anita Ward asked you to “ring my bell” (maybe she should have called Chuck).
But with each passing year, music, like most other media, began to uncover its appetites, no longer hiding sex behind symbols and similes. One of the most infamous examples is Prince’s Darling Nikki, whose eponymous “sex fiend” the purple one met “in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine”. When Tipper Gore heard her daughter listening to this song, she was so outraged she launched a campaign that resulted in records featuring sexual content or swearing being branded with a Parental Advisory warning label.
Far from protecting America’s youth, the explicit tag opened the floodgates on filth. It normalized obscenity and made it acceptable as long as it was wrapped in a label that quickly became a badge of honour for rebellious teenage music fans looking for new ways to defy parental authority.
Hip-hop, in particular, took to smut with the ease of a train entering a tunnel.
2 Live Crew earned a particular notoriety in the mid 80s with songs like Me So Horny. In 2002, Khia echoed the Crew’s “put your lips on my dick and suck my asshole too” with her lyric, “my neck, my back, lick my pussy and my crack”. And most recently one of the most famous people in the world wished his “dick had GoPro” so he could watch his escapades “back in slo-mo”. Stay classy, Kanye.
But this explicitness isn’t as revolutionary as it initially appears. In fact, popular music has a long tradition of lewdness. In the 1930s, blues singer, Lucille Bogan was renowned for her immoral lyrics though you had to see her live in an after-hours club to feel the full force of her filth.
Often considered one the big three women of blues alongside Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, Bogan was among one of the first singers ever to be recorded and her studio pressings always kept on the right side of the censors. Except that at one of her final ever recording sessions, Bogan laid down two versions of the song Shave ‘Em Dry, the second of which was never intended for public release and featured the swearing and smut that her late-night live audiences would have lapped up.
Live shows were often a place where artists could get away with things, especially in those halcyon days before our ubiquitous recording devices that leave no sin unpunished. Of course, Ike and Tina Turner didn’t care that there were cameras around when this charged cover of I’ve Been Loving You Too Long took on an additional performance aspect that leaves you in no doubt about what they mean.
Filth can definitely be fun. But it also often comes at the expense of artistry. If you’re not disguising sex with inventive metaphors then you’re just talking, probably like a bone-headed braggadocio at the bar. Though Salt’n’Peppa urged us to “talk about sex”, they were better when they wanted to “push it real good”. If you’re exchanging wit for explicit, you need to add a little extra spice to the affair. When you’re openly talking about banging, your song better be a banger.
Bump…bump...bump…bump…bump
Aside from a deliciously dirty beat, Bump by Spank Rock doesn't explode in an orgy of obscenity. It has a rhythmic “bump” chant that’s definitely suggestive and rapper Naeem Juwan uses a tired old lollipop metaphor – “my popsicle is so sweet” – though he more than makes up for it with the truly brilliant, “Behind my Gameboy I got game, girl”.
Fortunately, the track’s producer XXXChange is pulling out all the stops from the very first second with a vigorous beat and pulsing vocal cut building to a phenomenal verse where Juwan hits full flow to a backdrop of hypnotic synths and throbbing rhythms. Then the music eases off, returning to that “Bump” hook and chorus before the furiously funky build begins again, this time with staccato beats and crashing cymbals.
At times, the lyrics are a little old-fashioned. “You can date me, take me down to the picture show…I’d even let you hold my hand so the whole damn world can know.” Who is this girl he’s talking about? She sounds nice and definitely too sweet for him to be calling her a “bitch” like that. Oh look…here she comes now.
It’s me and Spank Rock we always poppin’ it hot
When I saw Spank Rock live, I knew exactly what to expect when a skinny, dark-haired girl took to the stage. Yet what happened next still seemed impossible. Rapper Amanda Blank brings the same feeling of incongruity that you get when someone like Amy Winehouse opens her mouth to sing. You can’t believe that voice comes from that form, or in Blank’s case, that she is indeed the true font of such filth as “My rhymes are painful and fresh, my pussy’s tasting the best” and “My get-em girls fake it fake it if that dick ain’t sweet”.
It’s quite an intro but Blank is just getting warmed up and gives you fair warning – “I roll my Dutch thick, I can spit my verse quick” – before exploding in an extraordinary orgy of obscenity. She’s a machine gun of rudeness, unleashing a spectacular spray of crude come-ons (“If you get us at the right time you get it from behind”), vulgar descriptions (“Thigh squeezing, pussy teasin cock”) and hilarious one-liners (“I ride like Kelly Bundy I keep that shit nasty”) at jaw-dropping velocity.
And then she’s gone. XXXChange brings back that “Bump” hook and the track closes much as it began leaving you in a slight state of shock. Did it actually happen? Did that woman really just let loose the greatest 90-second cavalcade of crassness you’ve ever heard? So you do the only sensible thing in these circumstances and hit play all over again.
Bump…bump...bump…bump…bump
Sexual explicitness is no longer such a rarity in pop music that it makes popular newsstand publications sit up and start counting. But when the tongue-twisting skills of Amanda Blank bring this pounding Spank Rock track to an earth-shattering climax, you get that thrill of the transgressive that shows how, in the right hands, filth can still be fun.
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If you like this song, try:
Bump - live performance
Sweet Talk
Rick Rubin
Car Song (featuring Santigold)
Go to 81: Let's Push Things Forward by The Streets Go to 83: I Feel Love by Donna Summer
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