Let’s take this article and convert it to a challenge.

Sex sells, and I trust we can provide excellent examples from popular culture. It doesn’t have to be from song. For example, we can also look to literature, film, radio/TV and advertising.

(Side note: Plain in-your-face is easily found but not very interesting. We want instances that, as the article says, “dance on the edge of impropriety”.)

Challenge accepted?

To “prime the pump”, I’ll start us off with a mild one.

”In olden days, a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking, but now, God knows,
Anything goes!
Good authors, too, who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words writing prose.
Anything goes!”

It's another subscription only article but I get the idea...


Not a single example as such but a whole book series. A philosophy professor named John Lange using the pen name John Norman wrote a series of novels about a fictional world called Gor. The first couple are in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian novels but as they go on the setting is kept but they become more and more about sadomasochistic bondage and sexual slavery with a society of dominant men and slave women. So the first few are straightforward but - to use the title phrase of the thread - dancing on the edge of impropriety but later ones hurl themselves screaming over the edge into the open space of extremely distasteful pornography. Made the author a lot of money though and according to Wikipedia there is a whole subculture of gamers, role-players and - presumably - LARPers who follow the books. I read the first few while they were still Burroughs style fantasy but gave up quite quickly as they changed. Apparently he is still churning them out. Wikipedia list the latest as published this year.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

In a more linguistically inclined example, Dana Gillespie's excellent album "Blues It Up" features, among other tracks, A Lotta What You Got, My Man Stands Out, One Hour Mama, Big Ten Inch Record, Joe's Joint, Organ Grinder Blues and It Ain't The Meat It's The Motion.

And if that doesn't make you want to hear it I can add that she is one hell of a blues singer.

And while I have no idea if it's true (sounds more like an urban myth to me) I did see on the internet somewhere that the Beatles "Ticket To Ride" is about a card that German prostitutes carried to show that they had no nasty diseases.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

Here it is, Bob:

It’s time to pay our final respects: The naughty song is a thing of the past. Before it withered away, it enjoyed a long, prosperous life. For decades, 20th-century tunesmiths produced risqué ditties. Dancing up to the edge of impropriety, they delighted us with songs about one of our favorite subjects—sex.

In 1919 the future opera sensation Rosa Ponselle and her sister, Carmela, recorded a gorgeous rendition of “Coming Through the Rye.” Though you’ll need a glossary to understand the Scottish lingo in Robert Burns’s 18th-century hymn to promiscuity, the gist of his naughty lyric is unmistakable: What happens in the rye, stays in the rye.

In a 1928 musical, crooner Eddie Cantor schooled bachelors in the perils of “Makin’ Whoopee.” Soon after, the incorrigible Cole Porter took the naughty song to new heights (or depths). Mary Martin caused a mild stir with Porter’s 1938 ode to infidelity, “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” Such lines as “If I invite a boy some night / to dine on my fine finnan haddie” gave sexual innuendo an upper-class veneer that only Porter could get away with.

In the 1946 musical “Annie Get Your Gun,” Irving Berlin’s sassy sharpshooter touts the joy of backwoods sex: “Grandpa Bill lives on the hill with someone he just married. / There he is at ninety-three, doin’ what comes natur’lly.” A decade later, Frank Loesser routinely wove sex into his musicals. Recent cancel-culture target “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is one such gem. In “A Secretary Is Not a Toy,” Loesser’s stenographers warn: “Her pad is to write in and not spend the night in.”

In 1971 Stephen Sondheim got into the act with “Boy, Can That Boy Foxtrot.” Its recurring double entendre is delicious fun: “Who needs Albert Schweitzer when the lights are low? / And oh boy, can that boy foxtrot!”

Sadly, as time rolled on, the naughty song began to feel its years. Time and cultural changes wrecked the once-glorious wittiness of the dirty ditty. The best we could do in the waning 20th century was on-the-nose nothings like KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Shake Your Booty” and Olivia Newton-John’s “(Let’s Get) Physical.” Rap lyrics generally prefer direct vulgarity to oblique wit.

Still, a few of us remember how grand the naughty song once was. To quote another famous tune, thanks for the memory.

Mr. Opelka is a musical-theater composer and lyricist.

Ruth Brown said

quote:

"If I can't sell it, I'm gonna keep sittin' on it. I ain't gonna give it away."