Me So Horny

My music library spans a range of genres, including jazz, rock, metal, electronic, hip-hop, industrial, thrash, classical, salsa, and afro-pop. It includes music from as far away as Japan, Korea, Thailand, Ukraine, Russia, Spain, and Siberia. I’m not prejudiced against any genre of music. There’s a reason why I went with underground pop music for Neuerotica, which, in general, reaches farther and spreads faster than any other musical genre. But underground pop (hyperpop in particular) has usurped commercial pop’s position in terms of creativity and sound diversity.  

While Anquette and 2 Live Crew brought sexually explicit songs to hip-hop, and later, female rappers like Foxy Brown, Lil’ Kim, and Nicki Minaj brought these kinds of songs to a broader audience,  hyperpop took explicit music to places others feared to tread. Fans of the genre understand what I’m talking about, because before hyperpop, I had never heard a queer or transgender musician make a sexually explicit recording about their queerness or transgender identity. I wasn’t just turned on to the music, I was turned on by it as well. The filthier the song, the more I’ll enjoy it. There’s no way for me to know for sure, but I’d be willing to wager that there aren’t many adults my age listening to the music of Gen Z. My dad liked blues singer Ruth Brown, who made sexually suggestive songs (his mom hated her), but sometimes I wish he were still around to hear some of the songs in my music library.  

Today’s parents are probably like “Eh” when they hear their kids listening to those “nasty” hyperpop songs, but songs like these have a long history in the U.S. The only musician I knew who made that kind of music when I was younger (before any of the rappers mentioned above) was the legendary Blowfly, whose songs a college friend introduced me to. He recorded sexually explicit songs from the seventies to the 2010s, but even he wasn’t the first. You have to appreciate the irony of boomers claiming that “dirty” songs weren’t made in their time (though if they’re white, there’s a likelihood they’ve never heard them), because two years ago, while doing research for a series of articles entitled ‘More Power to the Pussy’ about black women and dirty music, I learned that there had been plenty (if you’re interested, you can read part one here, and part two here). They were called “party records”, and they were illegal under indecency laws enacted throughout the United States. Most of those records were songs by different musicians, but some of them were vulgar comedy acts, where the likes of Richard Pryor and even Bill Cosby had albums in shops. On one such record, comedian and actor Mantan Moreland famously proclaimed, “Shit, if this is gonna be that kind of party, I’m gonna stick my dick in the mashed potatoes!” Songs like these (in edited form, of course) can currently be heard on commercial radio, but from a century ago to the early 1990s, record shop owners and their customers faced jail time for selling and purchasing these records and tapes.

Below are some from the previous century:

Dinah Washington -“Big Long Slidin’ Thing”

Dorothy Ellis - “Drill Daddy Drill”

Julia Lee - “King Size Papa”

Irene Scruggs - "Good Grinding".

Below is one from the 1950s (1957?); I don’t remember how I found it on YouTube. "Faye Richmonde was an American nightclub singer, known for her risqué recordings in the 1950s." The name of this song is called My Pussy Belongs to Daddy.  Back then, those records had to be sold under store counters, and record shop owners could be fined, jailed, or lose their businesses if they were caught selling them. These days, Faye would have been a millionaire R&B celebrity.

It was surprising for me to learn that record shops were still being raided for selling “obscene music” during the late 80s and early 90s. It’s been said that 2 Live Crew “took a bullet” for hip-hop when they fought their obscenity case with the U.S. government and won. The fact is, however, they took a bullet for the entire music industry. Their case forced the government to acknowledge the First Amendment rights of musicians across all genres. In fact, their case is what led record labels to start putting parental advisory stickers on albums. Not surprisingly, the sticker idea backfired, since young audiences were already seeking uncensored music; the stickers made it easier for them to find it.