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168	Et cetera * SUMMER 1985

. . . Turner -- seem to be speaking for a whole new breed of woman -- bold, tough, and materialistic -- ("Girls Just Want to Have Fun," "Money Changes Everything," and "Material Girl") -- seeking, along with equal pay, equal sexual satisfaction -- with or without a partner. It was, indeed, a female singer, Cyndi Lauper, who took the subject of auto eroticism out of the closet of male album cuts and into the spotlight of single hits in "She Bop." (3) Suggestive lyrics have traditionally employed metaphor, double entendre, or the vagueness of the word it (long a stand-in for copulation) to evade the censure of blue pencils. Back in 1928 Cole Porter's "Let's Do It" was qualified by the line "Let's fall in love." By the sixties the Beatles could dispense with the hedge and get away with a more direct, if somewhat funky invitation: "Why Don't We Do It in the Road (No one will be watching us)" which, repeated endlessly, constituted the song's entire lyric. The semantics of it in contemporary songs has progressed on two levels: from something the singer is thinking about doing to something the singer is in the act of doing; and from the act of coitus in general to the act of fellatio or cunnilingus in particular as in such recent hit titles as "Do It Any You Want (But do it, do it, do it, do it)," "Do You Like It Girl," "I Like To Do It," "I Wanna Do It to You," and "Lick It Up." Not only has explicitness displaced subtlety, and the erotic territory expanded to include masturbation and oral sex, but lyrics have even invaded the once taboo terrain of incest. Rock superstar Prince, for example, whose pornographic output includes the ode to fellatio "Head," gives the green light to familiar intimacy in "Sister": She was thirty-two and lonely, he was sixteen and innocent, and "Incest is everything it's said to be." (4) It is apparent that we've entered the age of hard core lyrics. Dr. Hayakawa wouldn't believe his ears: For example, the endlessly repeating chorus of "Relax... when you want to come," accompanied by a synthesized orgasmic beat, filled the airways [sic] around the world in 1984 and 1985 (5); Sheena Easton, in another 1985 megahit, invited her partner to "spend the night inside my sugar walls" (6); Oscar award winner Prince, addressing Sheila E. in the duet "Erotic City" gets down to specifics, "I just want your creamy thighs/We could f -- -- -- until the dawn" (7); And just in case a listener doesn't catch the message on the stereo, it's all spelled out on the lyric sheets that accompany the albums. The language of today's four-letter "sexplicitness" was recently deplored by Smokey Robinson, recording artist and vice president of Motown Records, as "a situation in desperate need of change." (8) That songs speak for their time is a given. But they are more than mere mirrors of society; they are a potent force in the shaping of it. In this increasingly acoustic world, popular songs -- whose attitudes and injunctions are walked to, danced to, chanted, and internalized -- provide the primary "equipment for living" for America's youth. (9) The power of lyrics to persuade, and even to incite to action has long been known. In no previous . . .

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