Switched on Pop - What Makes a Song Sexy?

Episode Date: February 5, 2019

Author Courtney Smith joins to offer her expertise on an urgent topic in advance of Valentine's Day: Can we abstract the sexiest songs of all time into a universal list of arousing musical qualities? We try our best by examining five decades of pop sexiness, discovering lyrical lingerie, and consider the most (and least) seductive instruments. Featuring: Nina Simone - I Want Some Sugar in My Bowl Donna Summer - Love to Love You Baby INXS - Need You Tonight Portishead - Glory Box Kings of Leon - Sex on Fire The Weeknd - Often Check out Courtney's article Let's Talk About Sex, Baby: Every Trick You Need to Seduce Someone with a Playlist on Refinery29 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists,

follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the Eater. app at eater app.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And we are very excited. We have a special guest joining us. Hi, I'm Courtney Smith. I'm the music critic for Refidary 29 and the author of a book called Record Collecting for Girls. Right now, I'm most interested in exploring feminism and women's point of view in music. And she has a piece that feels very relevant because we're about a week out from Valentine's Day.

And Courtney is writing about what makes a song sexy. Oh, Courtney, welcome to Switchdown Pop. Thank you so much for having me. This is such an essential topic. I can't believe we haven't covered it yet. So I'm really grateful that you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're bringing this to our attention. And obviously there's an urgency as there's some, there's love in the air now. I want to get into this by going through some of your selections of some of the sexiest songs

in popular music history. And I thought we could try and understand what makes these songs tick, why they are so effective. That sounds good. Yeah, I decided to pick a selection of songs from last 50 years that constituted sexy in each decade because I couldn't think of another way to talk about what sexy would be to get at the heart of what makes a song sexy other than listening to songs. I couldn't think of a better approach either. I want to just dive right in with one of your selections. This is Nina Simone Sugar in My Bull. Come on Save my soul

I want some sugar In my bowl I ain't fooling I want some sugar In my bowl I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is not a song about breakfast cereal Definitely not Definitely a lot of illusions happening there

A lot of double entendres. Courtney, why did this song make it on to your sexy song playlist? Well, I started out thinking about sexiness and music

by thinking about everything that came before the 1960s and the way that things were divided by race records and race charts and how the blues and a lot of black music was

sexy in this sort of way. and obviously this is a cover of an old Bessie Smith song, and that it was so much more overt and that there were these two different types of music for the black community. It was the jukebox and honky-tong kind of music and gospel music. And that white music and mainstream pop music was very buttoned up and straight. And how once some of our great American songwriters started hearing these songs, they wanted to write those kind of lyrics.

And, you know, to some degree of success and some utter failures, but that really the heart of sexiness and music comes from the black community. So I wanted to look to someone there, and there really is no one with a more sultry and sexy voice than Nina Simone. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I love you bringing in that history as well. As you point out, this is a song. I think she recorded this in 1967, but it's published originally in 1931.

However, you have to imagine that that central idea, the metaphor of sugar in my bowl, must be much older than that as well. So as we're listening to this, we're listening to like decades and decades of musical history. now we can get into the sound of the song to try and explore what makes this not just lyrically so appealing but musically so enticing as well and I think there's a few things going on here

I think one is the tempo and the feel of this song which is at just the right sort of laid back groove. Like, there might be a sexiness sweet spot. Like, not too fast, not too slow, right in the middle. Yeah. I think there's also something about Nina's piano playing. Like, we talk a lot about her voice and recognize the sexiness of it. And she hits this tempo with a lot of her songs. But the way she plays piano is so confident and assured, and there's something very sexy about that, mastering an instrument, but also just being so confident in the way that you play and playing so strongly. I love that. I couldn't agree more.

I'm also captured by obviously the double entendre that we talked about, which is the early onset of rock and roll and music that was eventually sort of more geared towards young people. its sexuality was often implied, not as overt as can be said today, in pop music. And there's something about using double entendre, which is almost like a lyrical lingerie. It's like it's addressing the thing to imagine what it could be. Okay, cool. I like this. That's absolutely true. And I feel like there's something to be said for the only people carrying this sort of lingerie songwriting forward today are beyond.

who I think does it knowingly paying tribute to this old-time blues music with some of her songs and country music actually. I think about people like Thomas Rett who has a very sultry voice. And country in general is, you know, so much more conservative that it's hard for them to be overtly sexy. So they are using a lot of these old blues songwriting tactics, I think. I love it. All right. So now we can start to establish some more global ideas of what makes a song sexy. And perhaps we're seeing that there's a certain balance between hinting at something, but not giving away too much. However, that brings us to the next song that you've selected, which is not quite perhaps as subtle as the Nina Simone track we just listen to. Let's hear a bit. of Donna Summers' Love to Love You Baby. Smirking. No, I'm blushing.

Wow. So I think we need to talk about the orgasm. I mean, the elephant in the room here. What a difference one sexual revolution makes. Wow. Why does this song ascend into the pantheon of sexiness for you, Courtney? Well, when I was thinking about the 70s, for the most part, I think about the gigantic rock bands that ruled the 70s and it's, you know, the Stones and Zeppelin and the Who.

And everything about it is so masculine and so dominated by this, the thrusting forward of the guitar and the electric guitar being the main thing and it becomes, you know, just manly. And then disco sweeps in at the end of the decade. And everything about the instrumentation is feminine and the audience for this music is feminine. And we're at the same time culturally experiencing this revolution for women of feminism taking hold in mass culture, getting more and more equal rights throughout the decade, and owning their own sexuality in a way that hadn't been possible before. And Donna Summer is not only an amazing and talented vocalist and gifted performer, but she is kind of the apex of the female voice in the deep. decade. So I love the idea of this song coming at the end of the decade and really dominating, flipping on its head what the idea of sex in music sounds like.

Yeah. And once again, we appreciate your historicizing here. There might also be a connection to Nina Simone. I think once again, the tempo and the groove here is right in that laid-back sweet spot. Not too fast, not too slow, kind of gently, propelled. telling you along. I find there's something very captivating about being in that, in that mode that's very effective and very alluring. Now, there's something else going on here, too, right? Donna Summer's vocals are incredibly sexy.

Overtly so. Well, they just are, they literally are sex. Like, that's not even, that kind of to me straddles the line between Is it sexy or is it just full-on sex? Right. Okay, so that's an interesting question. So it's like, again, if we show too much, it actually stops being sexy because it's no longer, there's no longer that mystery or something? I think it can unless you're working with someone like Georgio Moroder who created this track, right?

So the sounds you're talking about and the tempo it's at and even those sampled drum. and the mood sounds he's using in this song, he's smart enough to create an ambient sound that mirrors the way our bodies move during sex. So the tempo never feels rushed. And while her voice is aggressive and the mood she's expressing is aggressive, the music is relaxed.

So it works together, I think. I love also what you said earlier about the contrast to the sort of 70s masculine rock that's happening. And if we think about the musical components that are going on here, this is a guitar-oriented song, but the way that the guitar is being played is so different than those big distorted riff-rock-oriented things

that people might have been hearing. This is funk guitar. It is rhythmic. It's like soft and cradled, but also propelling. It's clean instead of distorted. It is so totally different than the style of music that was being played on the airwaves of that era.

Exactly. it's so much less aggressive and arguably more effeminate. Okay, let's keep pressing on through half a century of musical sexiness. We move now to the 1980s and in excesses need you tonight. Courtney, what catapulted? this in excess track to your sexy playlist? I don't know about you guys, but other than Prince in the first half of the decade

and George Michael in the second half, the 80s are deeply unsexy to me. I was worried about this. The music's super romantic. Like a lot of the new wave and new romantic stuff from the early part of the decade is more of a makeout vibe and like the guy you hold hands with, but maybe you don't go all the way.

And then the second half of the decade is like a lot of Paula Abdul and C&C Music Factory, which, you know, not sexy. And then, you know, you've got Madonna sandwiched in there. And that's so overtly sexy that talking about someone's virginity is not a turn on. I don't know. So for me, in excess is kind of that song that feels so different than what a lot of people were doing. And it's the intimacy of it that really grabs my attention. The intimacy of the lyrics and the way that he sings, that sort of harkens back to the crooner style back of the 50s and the 60s. And the way that he, in the lyrics, that mission of vulnerability.

And then again, just like you heard in Georgi O'Mruder, those snap drums that just keep, it's a real drummer, it's a real person, but it's so perfect that it could be a machine. and it just keeps the beat going. Very steadily. Yeah, that does seem... I love this. I mean, first of all, I think you're absolutely right. The 80s deeply unsexy decades. Reganomics, not sexy.

This track maybe furthers some of the ideas we've been talking about. It's got... You want to settle into a really stable groove when you're setting the mood. you don't want a lot of maybe extreme rapid changes and surprises and and sort of jarring musical shifts. You want to really ease into a nice, a nice slow group. Yeah, verse needs to just flow into pre-chorus, flows into chorus, flows back into verse. Nothing, yeah, no big jumps. Yeah, if it jumps, then imagine if you had these songs on an actual make-out playlist

while you were trying to have sex to them. And then that moment happens, and it's just like, am I supposed to synchronize my movements with this surprise guitar solo? It's ruining the whole mood. Yeah. Yeah, we could do a whole separate episode,

perhaps, about the most unsexy possible sounds. And we might actually talk about a few of them later. I feel like we've maybe even identified another global element of sort of content continuity of dynamics is extremely important in sexiness. Right. Which raises certain questions. You know, can, for instance, the accordion ever be a sexy instrument?

Wow, that would be a challenging. I don't know. We press on now into the 1990s. Let's have a listen to Portishead's Glory Box. I might have to unbutton my collar here. Courtney, what sent Portishead into the ranks of the sexiest songs ever? The 90s overall, I feel like, are kind of a dirty and dirty decade. Well, I mean, you know, not smell-wise, but like the way that the sound of music was, it was dirtier on purpose and that was what we wanted.

Not naughty, dirty, but like the sound was dirty. And this song with Glory Box is an allusion to slang for female genitalia. And that harkens back to what we heard in Nina Simone with the illusion. And I also love, like, I love the lyrics to this song and that whole idea of give me a reason to be, give me a reason to be, I just want to be a woman. And, you know, that says something without coming right out and saying it. It's not overt. And I think musically, the template that Portis Box are working from is building from what we've heard before. If you mash up Georgio Moroder and in excess, there's elements that are in both of those that translate to this song.

But in the future, we hear a lot of people working off of Portis Box, Portis Heads, template. Yeah, I love that because as we listen to these next to each other, I hear things that I wouldn't. have expected or connections I wouldn't have made. Perhaps another sort of universal maxim of musical sexiness is while you want to have this sort of consistent groove throughout, the last three songs we listen to sort of do have peaks and valleys. The verse will often be very sparse and laid back. And then it'll sort of crest in the chorus, create more tension. and then peek and then ease back into the chorus and then do it again. So it's got these gentle slopes and valleys,

but it's never boring. Are you talking about music? I don't even know anymore. What am I trying to say? Okay. Sorry, Courtney, please. The one thing about this song, though, that makes it different than everything else we've heard before

is that that dirtiness and it's sad. Like, it's not fully a song that celebrates sex. or even asks for sex, it's so full of longing and it's a little bit depressing. Can being depressing be sexy? I say yes, but I mean, that's a personal choice. Right. No, and who are we to say that our sexiness has to be your sexiness? It's obviously this is a very subjective thing.

And for one person, it might be very wholesome. And for someone else, it might be a little dirty, a little lucid. I feel like this this asks another question though, which is that are there sexier decades? Because this is also a very 90s song in that it's based off of a sample. And sampling as an art form really sort of takes off in the 90s. So this is based off an Isaac Hayes sample, which later gets reused on Alessia Cara's here, uses the same sample, maybe even looking to the Portis head. But there's something, I mean, the Isaac Hayes sample in itself is already a extremely sexy bed of music to use. use to inspire this

track. And I love, though, how sort of to your point, Courtney, it totally recontextualizes what is a song called Ike's rap into a song celebrating femininity. And that brings us back to the funk guitar that we talked about on

Love to Love You. Totally. I think maybe even more to the point than is there, are there sexier decades might be, are there sexier genres of music? Yes. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster?

Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no.

No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly Democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal

aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. when it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea

who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. That question takes us to our next track and indeed a new genre. So we can sort of use this as a test case.

For the 2000s, let's spin Kings of Leon Sex on Fire. Courtney, why, perhaps despite the obvious answer in its title, why is Sex on Fire a classic sexy song? Because it's got swagger, to quote Justin Bieber. No, the least sexy artist. Yeah, I just feel like I had a lot of debates when this song came out with friends, not debates, but conversations where people would just be like, yes, this song, it just gets you in that place. Like, it gets you in a groove.

And it's not necessarily a sexy groove for everyone. Like, I don't think this is a universally sexy song. But there is something about the swagger to it. And as far as the lyrics go, this is a song that knows nothing about sex whatsoever. Like nothing he's saying makes any sense or has anything to do with sex in any way that is attractive. But the guitar parts, like that high pitch lead guitar and the insistent rhythm of it. And then the way the bass seems kind of buried to me and the drums, the snare really leads. Something about it is just so confident and sexy.

I love it. First of all, your musical logical analysis is so on point. Kudos. Thank you. I agree. You have really opened this song up for me because I would not have thought of this as a sexy song. And now I can't not think of it. I don't have much to add, except I will point out that it also does follow this trend.

I've been noticing of songs sort of cresting in the chorus and then really coming back down to a very, quiet place for the verse. I really like the moment in this song where it's peeking, it's peeking, it's peeking, and then all of the sudden, it just kind of collapses back into this very quiet and slow texture that will then build up into

another chorus. And again, that's sort of, those peaks and valleys I find very captivating. Nonetheless, but the drums keep moving through it. So they're like, there's something consistent even when the dynamic is changing. Indeed. Correct. I have to say, I feel this song breaks a little bit of our not too fast, not to a slow, just right kind of tempo.

This is a fast song. This is fast, yeah. This is a heated song. Right. I think what you said about the way that the volume and the insistence of the song change and Crest and Wayne is the key here to a fast song being sexy. I don't think this is necessarily a song that sets the mood in the way that some of the other songs will talk about and have talked about do. I think it's a song that more mimics the physiology of having sex, where you work at one tempo, and then you switch it up to keep it interesting or keep it going, if that's not too graphic. Yeah.

No, no, not at all. I mean, once again, clearly the Kings of Leon don't know how sex works, but they've gotten lucky here because I think you're right. There is variation is key. Yeah. They don't know how to talk about sex, but they know how to talk about sex, but they know how. to do it, I guess. That's a large cultural problem that we have. Presumably.

Let's move on to the decades in which we currently reside, the 2010s. Our emblematic sexy song is going to be the weekend often. Ask me if I do this every day. I said often. That's no many time she wrote the wave, not so often. it often. Baby, I can make that, make that brain. Often.

Often. Girl, I do this often. Make that pop pop up and do it how I want. Do this often. Make that. It's hard to imagine anyone in the 2010s who is more universally considered sexy than the weekend, other than maybe Miguel's first album. And it's, to me, again, like with Michael Hutchinson and an exhumel.

It's a lot to do with the delivery and the voice. And even though he sounds like Michael Jackson, and we didn't consider Michael Jackson sexy for a huge part of his career, if you think back to off the wall and the early solo albums, he was very sexy. And it has to do with the production. That's when he was doing more of a disco-based, funk-based, soul-based production. And the weekend takes those elements and takes a lot of the elements of Portishead, but who he's sampled in other works and makes something out of it that is this, to me,

an agamation of everything we've found to be sexy in the last 50 years. He takes elements of all of them. So he is truly the evolution of what we as a society of sound to be musically sexy in a lot of ways. he's like a perfectly calibrated sexy music machine he's a unstoppable force yeah i i agree this song is is very effective as are a lot of his but it makes me think of something that you mentioned earlier the not only and and i'm glad you pointed out that he in fact samples portis head i sense a similar darkness creeping into the edges here that you identified in the Portishead track. And I'm wondering if it's fair to say that maybe over time our musical notions of what sexy

have become a little darker, a little more shadowy and minor key and a little less wholesome over time. Is that a fair assumption? I think he reflects a time before. me too and before consent regained a lot of sexiness for a lot of people and became a part of our discourse. I would imagine in the next decade what we think is sexy musically will move away from this because a lot of his themes are really dark lyrically as well as musically. And I don't think women find this that sexy anymore to be honest. Like there's a vibe to the music that's very sexy and that might carry on, but I think thematically, it's questionable. I think it's not insignificant that he also gained his fame through the soundtrack for 50 Shades

of Gray, which both deals with issues. It's funny because 50 Shades of Gray, of course, has like issues of consent baked into the entire film, which I have absolutely only read synopsies of. But at the same time that 50 Shades is all sort of. about BDSM and that a lot of consent language comes through that community, there is sort of this pivot point that I feel like is happening around the weekend's music and Me Too that hopefully we can move on to the other side of more sexually exciting consensual music. Yeah, I think that is such a good point and you're totally right on. But something vocally he does is the intimacy, like the male intimacy right into your ears of kind of telling you what he wants. And I think once we start

seeing that presented a little more fully in terms of what women want instead of just what a man wants, that's going to be a part of the evolution. But that's also been part of the appeal of his songs, I think. It makes you feel like he's singing just to you. It totally does. And what you're describing makes me think that we may be about to. hear something I can't quite imagine, but like the next generation of sexy songs. Like what is the paradigmatic musical sexiness of the 2020s going to sound like? I don't know for sure, but now I'm kind of excited to find out. Yeah, I've been listening and trying to figure out what it is.

And I think I would imagine, based on what's popular like Maggie Rogers and a lot of the Swedish pop that has been getting more in Norwegian pop, that's been getting more and more popular, that it's going to be hardcore pop production with naturalistic elements, and that puts more of a emphasis on women, I hope. No doubt.

And it makes me think, too, about how probably non-normative sexiness will continue to rise. We've focused, for instance, on our show on tracks like Troy Savant's, my, my, my, which is very careful not to really assign any clear gender markings and sort of exists in this almost like pansexual utopia.

Yeah, it's really interesting that you say that a lot. I've found a lot of female singers, women singers, do that and have started exploring bisexuality, pansexuality, and their lyrics. And a lot of men haven't. I'm really excited for people like Sam Smith, to step up to the plate on that because he has this sad, sexy voice in a big platform. He should explore it. Hit, hint.

Right on. This has been so fun. I need to take a quick break. Take a cold bath. Courtney Smith, thank you so much for joining us. It was my pleasure. I love this. You can find more of Courtney's work at Refinery 29,

and we'll be posting a link to this particular. article in our show notes. Catch you on the other side. Switched on Pop is produced by me, Charlie Harding, and my co-host, Nate Sloan, mixing and editing by Brandon McFarland, designed by Luke Harris, and community management by Sarah Terry. Thanks again to Courtney Smith from Refinery 29. We'll post a link to her piece in our show notes.

You can find more episodes of Switched On Pop at Switched On Pop.com, and we really like to talk to you on social media. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Switched On Pop. we take your show ideas super seriously, and they often turn into episodes. So, yeah, definitely catch us there. We're going to be back again in another two weeks, and until then, thanks for listening.