Let's get it on

The word “sex” doesn’t appear in Wikipedia’s “Woodstock Festival” entry. Maybe professors are right about not trusting Wikipedia. Forty years ago this weekend, about half a million Baby Boomers convened in a rural New York field for “three days of peace and music.”

And sex – lots and lots of muddy sex.

The enormous festival and its throngs of shirtless 20-year-olds combined intimacy and music in a public, provocative way. It capped off a tumultuous decade of underground counterculture and established a new era of a sex-saturated mainstream pop culture.

“One thing the ’60s generation did, for all the stupid things that happened, was to make love OK,” said IU music professor Glenn Gass, who teaches the popular History of Rock ’n’ Roll course at IU. “They took it from the back seats in the country where no one could find you and just brought it out into the open.”

In the decades since the late-1960s sexual revolution, recording artists have pushed the sexual envelope relentlessly.

Today’s top-10 bang songs like Jeremih’s “Birthday Sex” and Snoop Dogg’s “Sexual Eruption” are a far cry from the classic soul music and doo-wop ballads of generations past.

But despite wildly different lyrics, their basic function is the same: to inspire the horizontal mambo.

Evolution of make-out music

Before iTunes and playlists was AM radio.

“The radio becomes this sort of lifeline to this other universe,” Gass said, talking about the 1950s dating culture of muscle cars and cruising. “That sense of distance that suddenly is beaming in from somewhere on a dark night adds to that sense of wonder and mystery.”

He said the radio had the same appeal as today’s shuffled playlist – people didn’t know what was coming up next. That is, if reception was good.

“You’re at the mercy of the radio station,” he said. “People would find out where the clear channel stations from New Orleans were. ... I knew in Putnam County which hill I had to get on to be able to get this certain station to play specific music.”

The 1950s saw a car culture with teenagers who had plenty of free time. Unlike the previous generation, which dealt with the Great Depression and World War II, teenagers in the ’50s grew up making out and going steady, all to a radio soundtrack.

“I bet if you went up to people who grew up in the ’50s and said, ‘What’s ‘our song’ for you guys?’ I bet ‘In the Still of the Night’ would be the No. 1 pick,” Gass said.

Doo-wop was the great romantic music of the ’50s, as were ballads by Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly.

The innocent, sweet lyrics in these early styles of intimate music seem to contrast sharply with the explicit descriptions of sex in contemporary hip-hop and R&B.

But the styles that are most commonly associated with baby-making music – doo-wop, soul, disco, rhythm and blues – are all products of the black American musical tradition.

“(R&B) is a really emotional black style, which came largely out of the black church originally and then was brought to these secular romantic lyrics,” Gass said.

He said the common notion that white singers can’t make real baby-making music is valid, considering how black artists invented the R&B style.

“I think black American music is always viewed as the standard, that’s the real thing, and then the question becomes, ‘How close can you get to that?’” Gass said. “I don’t think there are that many dots to connect between doo-wop in the ’50s and the R&B or hip-hop now – and surprisingly so, too.”

The artists and lyrics may change, and the content may push previous boundaries, but the purpose of the music remains the same.

“There’s nothing better than love and nothing better to help it along than music,” Gass said. “Just like ‘The End’ from ‘Abbey Road’ says: ‘The love you take is equal to the love you make.’”

Weddings, frat parties and booty calls

Maybe not all baby-making music is created equal.

A distinction must be made between romantic, intimate music and pure romp songs.

“A lot of time people will say play a love song – any love song,” said Carlos Goins, a local disc jockey for about 30 years. “I would say the R. Kelly and K-Ci & JoJo would be more the booty-call type of thing, whereas, on the other hand, you have classic love songs like Luther Vandross and Earth, Wind & Fire.”

Goins founded Ace Entertainment three decades ago. He said about 70 percent of his gigs are for wedding receptions, where the song selection is shifted toward older material.

“For a wedding, there is usually a lot more sentimental music,” he said. “The bride and groom respect that there’s going to be older people there, so we’ll play a lot of classic stuff, even swing and early ’50s stuff.”

He said fraternity and sorority parties comprise much of the rest of his business, and they are completely different atmospheres.

“Most requested at the fraternity parties would be Madonna, Lady Gaga, Britney (Spears), Snoop Dogg ... Top-40 stuff.”

As for how Goins constructs his playlist, he said choosing high-energy songs in the first couple hours is crucial, but then he mixes in sexy hook-up songs in the middle and at the end.

“In the last hour, we won’t play any slow songs until the very end of the event,” he said. “And it’s, as they say, ‘The Booty Call.’”

Science of sex vs. art of love

Alfred Kinsey was a music teacher before he practically invented the field of sexology.
Kinsey, whose groundbreaking surveys of sexual behavior in the 1940s and ’50s profoundly affected social attitudes about the then-taboo topic, was actually an avid collector of LPs.

In a 1956 article for High Fidelity magazine, Kinsey wrote about how studying sex is like studying music.

He claimed that, although he spent much of his career meticulously and systematically collecting scientific data about sex, he never once presumed to understand the art of love.

Similarly, he had collected records since he first encountered an “Edison Rec-cord” as a teenager and listened to music daily. He had scientists visit his home and listen to the newest release with him. But he was sure to separate the science of sound from the art of music.

Kinsey said he thought the science of sex was completely separate from the art of love, which perhaps explains why the Kinsey Institute to this day has no research about the role of music in sex and intimacy.

Baby-making music is all about the art of love. It’s the know-it-when-you-hear-it bass beat, the steamy singing and the do-it-like-this lyrics.

It’s the music that helps us get it on, and it might even be the reason you’re reading this sentence today.