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June 22, 2009

Why '70s Porn Music Was Never 'Classic'...

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These films were mysterious, myopic, bastard children of the 1970’s, and an ideal porno soundtrack would have been one part Frank Zappa at his most satirical, two parts Jello Biafra at his most nasal, three parts Gil-Scott Heron at his most seductively negroid, and twelve parts Li’l Blind Stevie Wonder taking a naked shower with R. Crumb and Al Goldstein at the same time.
70’s porn music could have invoked all that was dead and dying and wrong with the “Me” decade: the slow stagnating crumble of the hippie movement, the crushing depression that was Yankee baseball and Kissinger’s violently engineered overthrow of Socialist Chile, the feathered weirdness of Joni Mitchell going down on Jimmie “Dyn-o-mite!” Walker, the rise of DDT, black power, Reggie Jackson, leisure suits, feminism, and the quiet rise of the corporate Reich. Instead, you just got leisure suits. Porn-disco failed to ironicize—or even complement—what were at that time the first fledgling acts of public copulation that we had been forced to deal with on a grand scale in quite some time.