Night Beat (43 page)

SKIRMISH THREE: OF SEX, VIOLENCE, PRINCE, MADONNA, SATAN, MURDER, METAL, AND THE NEW PARENTS

Does rock & roll threaten the morals of its most susceptible fans? Can it foment debauchery, cultural dissipation, sexism, even violence? These questions, in some form or another, have been the subject of repeated and passionately unresolved debates, stretching back as far as Elvis Presley’s first unabashedly sexy nationwide TV appearance—an event many critics and moralists viewed as a shocking signal of the degeneracy of postwar America.

Over the years this charge and its refutation have become a fixed and venerable part of the rock tradition for virtually every American and British parent and child (or censor and libertine) who have felt the volatile fluctuations of pop culture, from the initial jolt of Presley to the purposeful nihilism of the Sex Pistols to the coy androgyny of Boy George. But the continual controversy has also become a rite of passage that has a way, years later, of making unseeming conservatives and old fogies out of yesterday’s progressives. In the 1960s, many of us witnessed the moral pedagogy of parents and older siblings who had acted out the surface gestures of rebellion with Elvis but were angered by the social liberalism of the Beatles and the San Francisco bands and repelled by the sexual bravura of the Rolling Stones. By the same token, in the late 1970s, many of those former pop insurgents (the tiring “Big Chill” generation) resisted the punk mutiny, chafing at the knowledge of a younger crowd mocking their own once-daring but now enervated (or, more accurately, now abandoned) ideals.

I am both happy and sad to say that in 1985 things really aren’t that much different [nor are they different in 1997, as I revise this piece]. I am happy because I believe it’s every subsequent generation’s inalienable right (if not obligation) to disturb or offend the status quo, and sad because it invariably seems that so many of yesteryear’s iconoclasts, while they remain pious about their own periods of rebellion, end up disparaging the worth of any later upheavals or progressions. Sometimes it seems as if the children of ’56, ’67, or ’77 feel they have a patent on legitimate pop revolt, that their discovery of the thrill of change or disruption was the last cultural discovery worth sanctioning. The truly confounding part of this is that, with the rapid turnover these days in pop styles and values, it doesn’t take long for old-fogyism to creep in. For example, consider all the late-1970s punks who turn up their noses at anything that gives off even a whiff of techno-pop.

But the real subject here, of course, is the moral content of much of today’s pop, which certainly seems to be rankling many folks. Among them is freelance journalist Kandy Stroud, who in a 1985
Newsweek
“My Turn” column, called for the legislative censorship of “pornographic rock.” Stroud (who professes to “being something of a rock freak,” by which she means she enjoys performing aerobics to it) was incensed when she discovered her fifteen-year-old daughter listening to Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” with its glaring reference to a woman “masturbating with a magazine.” After that, Stroud’s newly awakened ears found filth all over the place—in Madonna cooing “Feels so good inside” in “Like a Virgin”; in Frankie Goes to Hollywood singing of gay sex in “Relax”; in Sheena Easton extolling arousal in (Prince’s) “Sugar Walls.” Claiming that all this music degrades and corrupts its listeners, and noting that most parents don’t have the time or wherewithal to monitor what their children listen and dance to, Stroud proposed that the time has come for the public suppression of such songs—either by self-imposed restraints from the radio and record industry or by the enactment of local legislation.

Stroud finished her article with this thought: “Why can’t musicians . . . ensure that America’s own youth will be fed a diet of rock music that is not only good to dance to but healthy for their hearts and minds and souls as well?” Welcome to the new parents: rock fans who demand that the music adopt and stand for the prudish values that their generations were once free to reject.

Well, I guess Stroud’s question is fair: Why can’t rock stars produce music that is “healthy for hearts and minds and souls . . . ?” To my way of thinking, of course, rock musicians already
are
producing music that nurtures our souls and hearts, but here is the better answer to Stroud’s question: Because they don’t have to,
nor are they morally obliged to.
American and British artists are free to assume any perspective—even to exalt or to deride another person’s beliefs. Remember “freedom of expression”? It extends even to rock & roll upstarts.

PART OF WHAT Stroud and so many others miss or overlook is that sex is among the causal impulses of rock & roll. (Of jazz too, for that matter; remember the old rumor that the word
jazz
was derived from “jism” or “jizz”?) It wasn’t merely the bold, unmistakable thrust of the music’s grinding rhythms (a trait inherited from the pulse of blues and R & B) or the often prurient text of the lyrics (the sort of salty stuff that got songs like “Work with Me Annie” and “Sixty Minute Man” banned in some places in the mid-1950s), but rather the way the music brought chance masses of people into potentially excitable contact. From Alan Freed’s explosive live shows to the Rolling Stones’ 1960s tours, sexual provocation, expression, and implicit interaction were the sustaining subtext of rock’s popularity. What made this message so culturally eventful was that it forged inseparable facts out of youthful bravura and racial declaration. Of course, it was for this very feature (and for bringing undiluted black and hillbilly sounds into the pop mainstream) that many people regarded the rise of rock & roll as an ill omen: a sign of the coming of permissiveness and liberality in America. Fortunately, it was exactly that.

In the epoch since that initial eruption, everything and nothing have changed. Certainly rock & roll has consciously aspired to more overtly artistic and political (and even mystical) ambitions, just as art and politics (and yes, mysticism too) have aimed at more openly sexual concerns. Still, it is pop music that has done the most effective job of mixing and balancing these various elements—and of examining hard questions about how these matters relate in our daily lives.

In the music of Elvis Costello, for example, one finds an uncommonly deft examination of how some sexual-romantic interactions often resemble acts of social tyranny. Meantime, in the music of Bruce Springsteen, one finds accounts of erotic playfulness (such as “Pink Cadillac” and “Fire”) juxtaposed alongside harrowing portrayals of how sexual fear can fuel debilitating isolation (“Dancing in the Dark,” “Downbound Train,” “I’m on Fire”) and even sudden meanness (“You Can Look”).

Of course, all this sexual obsessiveness is also a two-edged knife: What once worked as a personally and politically liberating influence in some ways turned back on itself, until the liberation itself seemed like nothing so much as a costly indulgence paid for by sexual typecasting. One has only to regard what happened to punk and new wave in the early and mid-1980s to witness this development at its most troubling. In its early stages, punk asserted itself as music that rejected the knee-jerk carnality of the pro forma 1970s rock attitude, and in time—in its brief postpunk incarnation, through such bands as Au Pairs, Gang of Four, Young Marble Giants, and Delta 5—the music went on to consider questions of political friction and sexual rapprochement. One could almost imagine it as a worthy version of a sex classified: Good beat seeks good idea, for healthful intercourse.

Then, almost overnight, as new wave and video pop joined resources to help rejuvenate the record industry, the notion of social-sexual progressivism began to fall off. Calculated, arty sex poses—from artists like Dale Bozzio, Teri Nunn, Duran Duran, or Adam Ant—seemed indivisible from sleek textures and throbbing beats. In its rush to find wide acceptance, the new music had been reduced to a token of sexual manipulation—transformed into an easy version of excitement that sold easy and obvious (though still fun) ideals of sensual experience.

This, then, became the quandary: How does a music that derives in part from sexual rhythm and style remain sexy without becoming a medium of exploitation or debasement? Is the sort of sexiness that was once advanced by Elvis Presley, Tina Turner, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and so many others still tenable or understandable in a time where anti-sexism and anti-pornography have become large causes? Does pop romance need to be
straitlaced
to prove positive? Are implicit or graphic portrayals of sexual relations in rock (or pop culture in general) necessarily oppressive? Are vivid testimonials to lust essentially sexist?

If you want to see just how twisted these questions can get, consider the widely popular (at least in the mid-1980s) music of Prince and Madonna—two ambitious Minnesota-raised pop stars who made indelible content out of a manifest sexual style. Prince’s example might seem more substantial. He won his first bout of serious fame and acclaim with the 1980 album
Dirty Mind,
which presented unmistakable accounts of incest, infidelity, oral sex, and implicit bisexuality. At the same time, the record asserted Prince’s lionizing of sex as a means of striking back at all the tireless advocates of discrimination, avarice, inequity, and war who had helped hem in the world that the artist came up in. By the time of
Controversy
(1981) and
1999
(1982), Prince was already striving to make political, racial, and religious sense of his concerns—and while his social-sexual musings were sometimes contradictory or plain arrogant, they were also just as often edifying, not to mention provoking.

Interestingly, up through
1999,
Prince’s unabashed sexual interests were hailed by most pop critics for their spunk and intelligence. But with
Purple Rain—
the surprise success film of 1984 about a maverick pop prodigy who must overcome selfishness and brutality to find redemption and acceptance—Prince began meeting reproof.
Purple Rain
’s detractors saw the film’s two male leads—Prince and the Time’s Morris Day, both playing men who contemptuously exploited the women around them for sexual and career purposes—as glorified endorsements of sexism, and also saw the cartoon-style sexiness of the female characters as a damaging stereotype.

What these critics seemed to miss is that the sexism of the Prince and Day characters runs pretty true to form for much of the pop scene. That is, the Prince and Day characters are mildly likable, unctuous men who come to look on women as the prize of privilege, and not surprisingly, they attract mildly likable, willing women who have learned to wield sex as an entrée to the realm of privilege. But like any worthy dramatic portrayal,
Purple Rain
gave these characters more depth than simple villain and victim delineations. In Prince’s case, the character he plays (“the Kid") is self-interested and ungenerous as the result of a brutal family environment; he hates his father for his violent tirades against the mother, but at the same time can’t even bring himself to give a fair hearing to the music of the women in his band, or allow his girlfriend the room for a pop career of her own (in fact, he slugs her when she announces her plans). At the film’s end, though, the Kid takes a small yet crucial step toward rejecting the brutality that trapped his parents, and the film puts forth a moving vision of redemption and equality as related ambitions.

But then Prince, um, climaxes the movie with an image of himself playing a guitar that literally ejaculates. Is this, as some critics insisted, an offensive image? (If so, what about Jimi Hendrix’s masturbatory displays with
his
guitar?) To some people, sure, that sort of imagery
is
offensive. It was probably even more offensive to some when Prince further celebrated orgasms by making a Top 10 single out of "Erotic City"—the first massively popular song ever to place the word "fuck" right in the heart of mainstream radio. Maybe this is a tawdry achievement, but it’s also an honest act of rejoicing. Prince may be a sensationalist and opportunist, but that doesn’t preclude him from being a serious and worthy artist: He aims to assert that a celebration of sex isn’t far removed from a celebration of life—which in the 1980s’ climate of voguish avarice and nuclear dread, could seem pretty transcendent and affirmative.

Madonna, too, is a sensationalist. From the start, with her hungry leer and her bemusedly mercenary view of romance, Madonna outraged some pop-leftists who believe that such manifestations of sexiness further objectify the cultural image of women, thereby undercutting feminism at a politically precarious moment. In other words, Madonna isn’t what some folks call a "sister."

As a result, in perhaps an even more enticing way than Prince, Madonna had proven a great divider in modern pop. Either you like her (not a simple affair, since for many of us it involves an appreciation for irony and a belief that feminism and lustful sexiness can be reconciled), or you revile her. And to a surprising extreme, many of Madonna’s detractors vilified her in dehumanizing ways—such as a 1985
Village Voice
review that labeled her as "whorish," and numerous items in other magazines and newspapers that described her with the word
sleazy,
as if image and repertoire alone are enough to merit such a verdict. (Even record stores got into the act: Los Angeles’ Tower Records on Sunset carried Madonna’s "Like a Virgin" in its racks under the title "Like a Slug.") All this for a brazen belly button and an (at worst candid but more likely satiric) "boy-toy" image? If Madonna stands condemned under this sort of narrow-headed puritanism, I’m only glad that Eartha Kitt and Julie London got to make the best of their bedroom-and-furs bit before our current era of "enlightenment"—and I’m amazed that Tina Turner’s wonderful raunch (both past and present) has gone unscathed.