Posts tagged sexin'

Jean Yanne - Coit

Deadly Death: Little Deaths is as much about dying as it is about doin’ it. In fact, the ‘Little Deaths’ suffix comes from the French Term ‘La Petite Mort’, a term often used by those conniving and lascvious Frenchmen to describe the transcendance of orgasm. I, for one, have always appreciated their directness. In my house, by which I mean the motel I’ve moved into, the knives usually come out after sex. But enough about work and my protective but violent employer.

Ever feel like you were born in the wrong country? ‘Coit’, or colloqiually en Englais, ‘Fuckin’, moves quickly to the top of the smelly, sweaty pile of songs seemingly built for showcasing on a site dedicated to corpulance, coitus, and cadavers, and has me trading in my toque for.. oh wait, toque is French. Anyhow, I’m gonna throw on a scarf then.

The first verse? Perhaps I’m prone to hyperbole, perhaps it’s the Veuve I’m drinking out of a coffee mug, but: it’s pretty great. If you don’t speak French, which is totally ok, bro, here comes a turtlenecked, windblown-haired eyeball-to-eyeball fuck poem from a gallic playboy:

I don’t know who you are.
I don’t know where you came from.
I don’t know your name.
I don’t know anything about about you.
I met you an hour ago.
And now, for an hour, with this music,
We will practice coitus.

Sometimes, the English language just falls short. I’m no lothario, but I can honestly say that girls don’t like it when you say ‘coitus’ to them, no matter how many times you wink. Sorry about that, Tyler. This gem undoubtedly got many a besmocked and beret-ed (?) jeune fille back to the [second location] in its time, and is funkier than blue cheese in a gym sock. Brilliantly juxtaposing the sound of an orgasm with a funereal church choral (‘Ahhhh, Ouuuiiiiiii’), with a bit of mildly menacing instructional direction from Jean Yanne (probably wearing a leather mask, FYI), what we’ve got here is sex, religion, dirty old men and the bass guitar tied up in a tidy, 2:57 package. Which, incidentally, is how I’m often described. I’m available, ladies!

Fig 1.1: Right???

Frank McDonald and Chris Rae - Night Moves

No, not that ‘Night Moves’. The night moves referred to here are clearly those of the sweaty and repetitive variety, and I don’t mean Jazzercise, people.

Lifted by Nas on Stillmatic, and featured on Vol. 4 of the great comp series ‘Dusty Fingers’, this song is basically aural scotch poured over a crushed velvet cravat with just the lightest lingering aroma of Camembert, and if ever there was a song worthy of buying an ‘86 Pontiac Fiero to drive around reaalll slooow in, this is it. The only way I might improve on this jam is by whispering ‘Yeaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh’ every 4 bars or so, which I’ve been doing for the last 45 minutes as it plays on loop. I’m getting some looks here in the public library, believe you me. So what’s the story behind this song? I like to imagine it involves safecracking and sexual congress, but beyond that I can’t find much info.

Françoise Hardy - Réve

It’s hard not to get daydreamy listening to France’s (yep, again) Françoise Hardy, as this album sounds like sepia sunlight coming through sheer blinds in a lightly dusty farmhouse. In my private reveries, Françoise and I carry a grocery bag with sundry delicacies and a baguette peeking out the top as we stroll down a narrow Montmartre street. I am wearing a really rad scarf. She wrinkles her nose and gaily dismisses my discussions of dread and salvation as she bites into an apple. Quelle Réve!

‘Réve’ (‘Dream’) is an odd intersection of that good ol’ gallic saccharine and Western flavours that closes off Françoise’s 1971 album ‘La Question’. ‘La Question’ sees Françoise mostly accompanied by only guitar and light stringwork - this being one of the only two ‘fully’ arranged songs on ‘La Question’; the album’s opener ‘Viens’ (also great!) and closer, ‘Réve’. Françoise reportedly can sing in 5 different languages, but as far as I can tell she sings all her songs in bonerese.

OFS Unlimited - Mister Kidneys

‘Mister Kidneys’ is an interesting song in that it belongs to a small shard faction of 70’s funk concerned with third-person descriptions of badass motherfuckers (e.g. ‘Theme from Shaft’, ‘Superfly’, ‘The Mack’). ‘Mister Kidneys’ tells the tale of a ‘son of a gun’ who goes by the name of, well, Mister Kidneys, and you should watch out for him because he is going to eff your girlfriend, and presumably based on his nickname, give her a urinary tract infection. When they were handing out badass nicknames, Mister Kidneys got the uh, shaft, y’all. I would think that someone whose superpower is how easily they can fuck your woman would have a nickname more representative of that - something like Will Hung. Johnny Dick. Gash Stabberson. I dunno.

You can basically hear the tape rotting on the song, and I can only assume it’s because this funk number is so ripe and plain old stankin’, and it’s not hard to imagine the VU meters redlining through this whole recording. Either this song was recorded by an idiot savant or just an idiot, because shit isn’t supposed to sound like this. And I mean this in a good way.

OFS Unlimited have a very small catalog of recorded works - from what I can find their only release was this 45 (b/w ‘Mystic’) on the Columbus, OH Prix label, an obscure funk/soul label who never even made it big in Columbus, let alone state or country-wide.

Check out the dude on the stairs!

Isaac Hayes - Going In Circles

Oddly, much has been written on the merits of brevity, but tonight, let’s live the dream. You know who Isaac Hayes is. His songs fingerbang your soul-hole in ways other singers can only have wet dreams about. This song will do that, and then bring you a sandwich - maybe turkey. Grab your blankie and a scented candle and throw this shit on, and I’ll see you on the other side.

Emitt Rhodes - Somebody Made For Me

‘Somebody Made For Me’ is one of those songs about the charming idea that there exists, oddly quite often within a 100km radius of your hometown, a person constructed solely for the purpose of being your form-fitted soul mate forever and ever and ever, and the two of you will ride a tandem bicycle to a meadow and have a picnic and then go back and fuck your brains out in a 3-million-dollar Manhattan loft, which is an idea I happen to subscribe to as it of course is the reality of my everyday life. A smaller, more bitter and less handsome man than myself might suggest that this idea of someone being made for you is true in the same sense that the sticker McDonald’s affixes to your Egg McMuffin saying “Made Fresh For You!” is true, in that yes - it was made, and yes, now you are holding it, but it was made from ingredients that are available in bulk and is truly designed for mass consumption, and the mildly nauseating satiety both this idea and Egg McMuffins provide will make you comfortable and ultimately fat. Yes, I just wrote a paragraph-long sentence comparing the romantic notion of love to an Egg McMuffin. The line-up for my boudoir forms on the left, style code in effect.

At any rate, American one-man band Emitt Rhodes, along with the vast majority of pop songwriters, do not share the Love N’ McMuffin theory, and much ink has been spilled and tape rolled on the subject of soul mates. This song, luckily, delivers its message in a format that sounds awesome. The first thing that will likely grab you about Emitt Rhodes is that he unabashedly channels Paul McCartney in both vocal stylings and bass ploddery, so in many ways the songs you’ll find on his eponymous 1970 debut are like a lost Beatles album. One thing quite notable about Emitt however is that he recorded all of the tracks, this one included, in the comfort of a modest 4-track home studio. Only after Emitt secured a record deal were they slightly punched up to add mostly vocal overdubs. An interesting factoid on this record is that at the time of its release, musician’s union rules stated that records released on a major label had to be recorded in what the union considered a ‘proper’ studio - likely an attempt to secure work for studio engineers and pump jobs and work back into the industry - so all references to the fact that this was home recorded had to be kept hidden from view.

Chairmen of the Board - All We Need Is Understanding

Double-shot of Motor City Soul today, he said in his best Casey Kasem voice, given last night’s oversight. By way of a recap, Holland/Dozier/Holland, the songwriting/production team largely responsible for that hoppin’ Motown sound that drove matching suit sales through the roof in the 60’s, left Motown in 1967 to form their own label, Invictus Records. One of their first bands was The Chairmen of the Board, fronted by a gentleman by the name of General Johnson. Yep, General. General, to my ears, isn’t exactly the most naturally talented singer of all the golden age Detroit soul there is out there, but the production on ‘All We Need Is Understanding’, from 1970’s ‘In Session’ is like a velvety, jhericurled hug for your ears, and the chorus has just enough of that Jackson 5 descending bassline shuffle to cause a little dip in my hip, though that may be just the muscle I pulled slamming your mom to this track. Checkmate!

Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot - Initials B.B.

Few women have done as much to champion the cause of sweet, sweet tits as actress, model, and chanteuse Brigitte Bardot. Among her many acts of mammary activism are her bringing of the bikini to the mainstream, the plunging neckline (aka ‘The Bardot Neckline’), a mode of dress in which both shoulders are exposed, and, perhaps less directly, the ‘choucroute’ hairstyle in which the hair is lifted in a quasi-beehive style, better exposing her B.B.’s for reverent ogling.

Brigitte’s activism wasn’t limited to the freeing of the twins however - a fervent animal rights activist, Bardot railed against the traditional slaughter of sheep in Muslim ceremonies, causing her to be fined several times by the government of France for making racially and religulously provocative statements - though her widely advertised views on Muslims and foreigners in general were far from moderate. In fact, Bardot has, to date, been convicted 5 times for ‘inciting racial hatred’. She also once, while babysitting a neighbour’s donkey (yeah, you read that right) had it castrated because it was ‘sexually harassing’ her donkey, and to add to the outrage, also sexually harassing her horse. I think I speak for all of us when I say ‘holy fucking shit’. Her neighbour subsequently took her to court, perhaps under some French law relating to donkey balls, but at press time there’s no indication of whether the donkey’s danglers were returned to their rightful owner.

Brigitte’s dabbling in pop music was mostly at the hands of Serge Gainsbourg, who obviously was railing her with French abandon, but also put together some great music to back her sultry cooing - including this song, ‘Initials B.B.’, which is of course about Bardot herself, and comes from the album ‘Initials B.B.’ (1968). It’s a wondrous, moebius strip of a moment as the chorus hits, in which she sings about herself, on a song named after her, from an album of the same name. This meta-tastic, circular self-referencing stretches both the fabric of space-time and her sweater, not to mention the stitches of these suddenly confining khaki Dockers.

Pictured: Brigitte Bardot and her BBs.

Wesley Willis - Arnold Schwarzenegger

You know that old adage ‘if you can’t be a good musician, amaze them with how bad of a musician you can be, but have amusing lyrics’ ? Me neither. To call the recordings of Wesley Willis (RIP) ‘music’ is essentially true, but true in the same sense that spray cheese is cheese. However, you have to admire his consistency and dedication to the demo button on his keyboard. Willis was a diagnosed schizophrenic, and often used wild obscenity to attempt to offend the howling demons of his mind enough that they would leave him alone. For example, an entire series of songs involving sexual acts with zoo animals was directed at the three ‘demon mullets’ Wesley believed to be terrorizing him - classics like ‘Suck A Cheetah’s Dick’, ‘Suck A Camel’s Bootyhole’, ‘Taste A Panda’s Ass’, etc. All said, Willis put together over 50 albums of slurred rants about topics varying from ‘Suck[ing] a bactrian camel’s dick’ to Superman, making all stops in between.

Wesley took great solace in repetition - for example, headbutting fans was part of the joyful ritual of meeting Wesley - so much so, that a large callous formed on his forehead, which kind of made him look like a bizarro-world, schizophrenic Aaron Neville. Wesley’s songs, when not about [sex act]ing a [rare animal]’s [genitals], were often about other bands, or prominent figures in pop culture. The chorus of these songs was almost always a bellowing out of the band or person’s name repeatedly. Sure, the songs might leave a little to be desired in terms of structure, but they’re a joyful mess. And fuck, do you have any idea how hard it is to find listenable songs named after actors? What have I got myself into?