FEATURE:
The Ex-X
PHOTO CREDIT: Ali Pazani/Pexcls
Are Artists Today as Bold and Provocative When It Comes to Themes of Sex and Passion in Music?
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EVEN though music has not…
IN THIS PHOTO: Christina Aguilera/PHOTO CREDIT: Zoe Rain
become completely free of sexual content in music, it is clear that there is not the same degree of boldness and revelation that there was in the 1990s or the 2000s. Think about that first decade of this century. There were some really confident and revealing artists who were very open about their sexuality and desires. Some would say that there was a degree of exploitation back then. Think of artists emerging from that time like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. How much of those images and videos were controlled by the artist?! I feel there was over-sexualisation. That is problematic and is not as common now. Women are still exploited and sexualised by the industry though, when it comes to the nature of sex and sexuality, I also feel they are producing the type of songs that raise the temperature and put everything out there. These really emboldened songs. When it comes to a certain intensity and passion, female artists are leading the way. More and more, they are carving their own narrative and controlling their voices – though a lot of major artists still have labels behind them pushing sex and a particularly provocative image. I guess that opens other questions when it comes to the line. Is the artist having a say regards their images and whether they want to be sexualised?! What is the right balance for our time?!
Things have changed in the past couple of decades. We have mainstream artists like Charli XCX and Dua Lipa who are given strength and confidence to women when it comes to discussing sex and being unashamed and unapologetic. Some terrific Rap and R&B artists who write songs that are sensual and sweat-inducing. Of course, being too explicit and lurid can cause offense and be seen as a way of creating controversy. It is a balance that seems to still be tipping towards the safe and less expressive/sexual. I think there has been a slight decline in terms of the nature of music and lyrics the past five or ten years. Not to say there is more of a focus on passion and love as opposed something more physical and transient. The sexual spectrum is more open now than years ago. The L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community sharing their voices and are being given spotlight in a way that was not visible or permitted by the industry before. It is a much more accepting as broad landscape to the one I grew up listening to. That is a really positive and progressive thing – though the mainstream is not as diverse as it could be when it comes to spotlighting and supporting that community. I am glad that we do not have the same sense of exploitation and lurid interest in artists as there was back then. It applied to women and how the industry represented them. Problematic and often very degrading, I am not sure how many of those major artists could create their own visions and images. That idea that ‘sex sells’.
I am not sure what channels people are turning into, though a recent study showed that teens want less sex in their T.V. and films. I would say one of the issues with film is that sex is not present enough. Not in a real way. Often quite tame and unrealistic, perhaps there are certain films and shows that are too explicit. In general, I do wonder if those people asked are seeking out shows and films that are more provocative and sexual. Look at modern film and, sure, there are those that deal with sex in a bold and realistic manner. I don’t think we live in an overly-exploitative and sexualised age when it comes to film and T.V. Maybe there is so much more music now that, inevitably, things are varied and there is still a lot of artists discussing sex. I think that Pop still has that to a degree, yet there is more of a focus on the complexities of relationships. Artists more revealing about their thoughts and depths rather than something more shallow. Rap and R&B still push things though, similarly, maybe it is less common to see artists of all genders put sex at the front. This is not a prurient desire or itch. I actually feel that film and T.V. has become safe and a little too restrictive when it comes to sex right across the spectrum. This new article argued whether we have seen the death of sex on T.V. Contrary to a recent survey, maybe sex not being portrayed and visualised in a realistic way that often. It is clear many disagree. I think one big change from decades ago is that Pop is less hypersexualised. We have (thankfully) got rid of lads’ magazines and that reliance on smut and ‘pin-up’ artists. It was something that was more aimed at female artists. That need to show them with as little clothing as possible in order to sell and image and, importantly, records.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kylie Minogue/PHOTO CREDIT: Shore Fire Media
It is good things have progressed. If there might not be as much challenging and boundary-pushing songs, artists and videos about sex and the physical, maybe the nature of sex and relationships means that artists are creating something deeper and more fulfilling and positive – as opposed songs that could be seen as quite cheap and dangerous at times. Many modern artists might react to criticism of the past. This 2015 article argued modern music might be more about sex and less about love. Some see modern Pop as too sexualised. Not to focus on women too much. I feel that they were given a raw deal back when. Too exposed and sexualised. Now, we are seeing a crop of young and legendary artists – from Cardi B to Kylie Minogue – who are very much in control of what they are putting down. Maybe I have seen this wrong. Rather than there being a comparative lack of sex and something thrilling in music, artists are going for staying power and pride. Many artists seen as sensual rather than sexual. This debate is more complex and deeper than I imagined. I want to finish with a couple of fairly recent feature that react to the changing face of popular music. How the nature of sex and body confidence has shifted. In a BBC article, Arwa Haider asked whether explicit expressions of female sexuality in Pop really be empowering. It did seem, after a few years of raunchiness being less common from the queens of modern music, there was this new breed of empowering artists bringing it back on their own terms:
“A lot of songs about love are really about lust and desire,” says Davies. “Now, what I like about WAP is that it really doesn’t stop; I totally understand the feeling that ‘men in this field have been so overt in talking about my body, it’s time for me to say something’ – and it’s not just a little bit of ‘hey, I’m going to play you at your game’ titillation. Cardi B has all these different ways of trying to really shove the message home. I still haven’t got my head around the bit with the macaroni…”
While WAP smashes mainstream boundaries, I still find myself questioning who gets the biggest kicks from its boldness, in an industry that remains largely patriarchal
While WAP smashes mainstream boundaries, I still find myself questioning who gets the biggest kicks from its boldness, in an industry (songwriters, directors, CEOs) that remains largely patriarchal; as with Madonna’s Sex and Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core album (1996), the visuals fetishise female flesh (particularly non-white bodies), rather than male objects of desire.
“When Madonna did the Sex book, some people thought: ‘this is so brave, the biggest star in the world baring all’. I just thought, ‘what else have you got to show us now?’” admits Davies. “It reminded me of a time when women would get the dirty joke in before men did. Obviously, women are entitled to talk about their bodies and what they want as much as men, but often, men will choose to react to that in a way that gives them the power.”
At the same time, 21st-Century pop seems to embrace a positively broad spectrum of female sexuality, including creative trailblazers like Janelle Monáe (modelling ‘vagina pants’ in the gorgeous video for 2018’s PYNK) and headstrong young stars such as Sweden’s multi-platinum-selling Zara Larsson – who, at 22, seems wowed that I’m old enough to recall the original release of Like A Virgin. “Pop music is beautiful because it’s a form of empowerment: be who you want to be,” Larsson tells me. “I’ve always looked up to women who embrace their sexuality, and I’ve always idolised strong women with big voices – Christina Aguilera, Céline Dion, Beyoncé. They represented what I wanted to be. Or when Rihanna is singing Sex with Me (2016), I love that she’s addressing the guy, unapologetically.”
Larsson argues that, regardless of the songwriter, just hearing women sing about sex is empowering – although she adds that there have been very contrasting traditions: “Usually, when women sing about sex, it’s like: ‘I wanna feel this’; guys are more likely to express: ‘I’m gonna do this to you’; sex is something being done to you, rather than something you’re part of. When I write songs, my favourite thing to explore is that initial attraction, when you see someone on the dancefloor, and it’s raw lust. That feeling is so fun to write about, and it’s so relatable.”
For another contemporary talent, British singer-songwriter/musician Shingai Shoniwa, fronting a band (Noisettes) and drawing from her African Bantu heritage proved an empowering experience, in advance of her exhilarating solo album, Too Bold (2020). “I’d been making music for a living since I was 16,” says Shoniwa. “Being in a group, playing bass and guitar, I didn’t feel pressure to perform for the male gaze. I was this black girl with natural hair who made my own clothes, and I was confident in the communication of the music – jazz, rock’n’roll, blues, funky house.”
Shoniwa notes that there is still “a whiff of post-colonialism” in the commercial industry: “Every corporate machine is going to encourage black and brown bodies to be hyper-sexualised in pop music, often for a short-lived moment of success, and not to the financial benefit of these women. It means you have this conveyor belt of forgotten female talent.”
“It doesn’t help when we’re not allowed to be positioned if there’s more than one of us,” says Shoniwa, bringing to mind the current much-publicised ‘spat’ between Cardi B and Nicki Minaj. “When a lot of female talents know they might only get a year or two in this business, they might think: ‘How am I going to maximise on that?’ We’re talking about ownership of image, of beauty, of curves, of brands. And when I see how a lot of major label artists are signed now, you’re better off being self-funded. Besides Madonna, there are so many women artists that prove you can be sexually empowered without feeling like you have to sexually entertain everyone else.”
In modern pop culture, there should be space for multiple queens – and female solidarity and staying power turn out to be the most provocative moves”.
There have been cultural moments and complications in the past that have forever changed how artists explore sex and sensuality. I want to go back six years to an article from The Guardian. Laura Snapes wrote how songs and artists (male mostly) blurred lines. Talking more about coercion, rape and taking away consent. Together with an industry still overly-sexualising women, it was obvious things had to change. In a modern time when we are hearing so many cases of sexual abuse and assault, is there a fear from artists that they need to hold back when it comes to sex? Can they use their platform to fight against those who take away their rights and consent? In 2023, we still need to be quite careful when it comes to sex in music. The 2018 article from The Guardian discusses a particularly damaging and problematic watershed moment in modern music:
“When Robin Thicke and Pharrell released Blurred Lines on 26 March 2013, they had no idea (or claimed not to) that it would kickstart a debate about rape culture and misogyny in pop . The outraged response to its suggestive lyrics – particularly the refrain “I know you want it” – permanently changed the standards to which pop is held, and the way in which pop itself deals with sex.
That is not to say that sex has vanished from pop since the controversy. Jason Derulo and Bruno Mars are no strangers to objectification; ex-boybanders such as the former One Direction members are still breaking with their clean-cut pasts by letting you know in song exactly how much sex they’re having; while Brit awards nominee J Hus cackles in the face of good taste. In 2016, Ariana Grande released a classic of the form in the admirably brazen Side to Side, about the inability to walk straight after a long night at the coal face.
But pop’s portrayals of sexuality have been complicated – and muted – by an unusually eventful half-decade. Intimacy has been corrupted by technology and anxiety. Female artists are redefining sexuality. Would-be seducers must acknowledge conversations about consent and gender politics. Provocateurs who aren’t progressive are soon rumbled. R&B is grappling with what pleasure looks like when black bodies are under siege from police brutality and cultural fetishisation. And LGBTQ listeners are demanding more than rote heterosexual hook-ups. This immediacy is nothing new – pop has always either shaped or reflected the social and sexual mores of its era – but the outcomes are.
Last year, US critic Ann Powers published Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music, an inspired history of sex in pop. She writes of how rock’n’roll validated teenage desire and liberated girls; posits Robert Plant’s moan and Donna Summer’s gasps as music’s answer to the mainstreaming of pornography in the 70s; and Madonna, Prince and Michael Jackson “playing freely within the dreamscape of eroticised fantasy” as a safe outlet for sexuality during the Aids crisis. Female rap and R&B acts in the early 90s – Salt-N-Pepa, TLC – stoked a playful consciousness where safety didn’t come at the expense of pleasure. This segued, however, into the turn of the millennium and the scantily clad, raunch culture of Paris Hilton, MTV’s Spring Break and Christina Aguilera’s Dirrty. Music channels were full of pornified dance-pop videos: the likes of Eric Prydz’ Call on Me or Alex Guadino’s Destination Unknown.
Rina Sawayama is a Japanese-born, London-raised DIY pop star tipped to break out this year. Her slick sound is influenced by mainstream music from the turn of the millennium, “when labels and A&Rs were actively promoting young sexuality through acts like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera”, she says. But that is where the similarities end. “People are more sensitive to manufactured sexuality, especially from female artists.” she says. “If singers are going to talk about sex, then it has to come from the artist; authenticity is important.” She praises the “comfy erotica” of SZA and her track Drew Barrymore: “She talks about the TV show Narcos in the first verse; it’s a perfect Netflix-and-chill song. I think it echoes how millennials – and especially people of colour – want to spend our time, in a safe space with the people we love.”
The gold standard of empowered female pop sexuality is another holdover from 2013. On Beyoncé’s self-titled surprise album, she sang with explicit command about rediscovering her sexuality after the birth of her first child. “Beyoncé boldly proposes the idea that a woman’s prime – personal, professional, and especially sexual – can occur within a stable romantic partnership,” wrote Pitchfork’s Carrie Battan.
But Beyoncé’s next album represented another paradigm shift in how artists – and specifically black artists – address sexuality. Built around images of matriarchy and female solidarity, 2016’s Lemonade was assumed to confront longstanding rumours of husband Jay-Z’s affairs. “But the trauma of infidelity is about much more than matters of adulterous fucking in Lemonade,” wrote MTV News critic Doreen St Félix. “Black women in America are cheated out of spiritual and material things.” Lemonade confirmed the inseparable nature of structural injustice and interpersonal love, St Félix asserted.
In the age of Black Lives Matter and an evidently racist White House, more black artists are confronting these themes. “It’s difficult to express intimacies, or make room for pleasure, when thinking about the body demands facing the many ways it can be diminished, even extinguished, instead of serving as a vessel of joy,” Powers writes. R&B star Miguel was singing straightforwardly pornographic lyrics on his 2015 album Wildheart, but last year’s War and Leisure saw sex newly intertwined with apocalypse; Beyoncé’s sister Solange’s 2016 album A Seat at the Table proposes sex as alleviation from the exhaustion of racial aggression. “I slept it away, I sexed it away,” she sings on Cranes in the Sky. “Artists like SZA, Kelela and Jhené Aiko definitely explore eroticism while also insisting on being introspective and self-reflexive in other ways,” Powers tells me. “They question the mandate for women – especially women of colour – to be sex symbols while insisting on claiming erotic agency”.
There is a lot to consider and balance. With many feeling sex is too evident and there is not enough music about relationships and passion, there is also visibly less sexy and provocative songs in certain genres. I still think it is women that are more prolific and confident when it comes to desire and sex. I am not sure why this is. Perhaps it is that liberation and taking control. Is there a fine line between liberation and objectification? It is a tough debate and sticky subject. I would disagree that there is too much sex in Pop or other genres. The reason I am writing this is because you do not quite see the same sort of striking and memorable songs that really do put it out there. Perhaps radio stations have to censor and limit that. Music videos not as explicit as they were (which can be a good thing). Mainstream artists like Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift and Harry Styles talking more about love than sex. Other artists in the mainstream sprinkling other subjects and lyrical angles among songs about sex and desire. In a moment when young people do feel that film and T.V. is too obsessed with sex and there is too much being revealed, is music suffering the same thing?! Is the opposite true?! Artists definitely need to talk about sex and communicate that with their audience. It can be very empowering and powerful if artists do have that frank connection. There is a fear that, in a social media age where there is too much sexualisation and a lack of filters when it comes to young people and sexual content, that music needs to be more responsible. It is a debate and thought that I wanted to open up. Personally, I feel that music is a lot less ‘icky’ and coercive than it was. Women more in control of their voice and image, even if there is still some way to go. Perhaps fewer songs that take risks and do linger in the mind when it comes to the physicality and intensity. Though, all things considered, maybe that is…
THE way things have to be.