NSFW: What's Older Than W.A.P.?
A brief history of selling music with sex
Content Warning: I’m going to try to thread the needle of talking about highly sexualized content without using explicit language. If you are not okay with discussing sexuality, though, this post will probably not work for you.
Verily, in the middle of the sixth month of the COVID-19 lockdown in the U.S., artists Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion put out a record that made …a splash. The song is an openly celebratory sexual experience, performed by two Black women who don’t give the audience the slightest pretense that they might be singing about something other than what they are singing about.
The song is referred to as “WAP” - an initialism for the NSFW phrase that gives the song its actual name. For the sake of those who try to avoid words or ideas that make them uncomfortable, I will avoid using the “naughty” words, and I posted the “Clean version” of the video—but I have to be honest: the “Clean version” sounds worse to me than the original. “Wet and gushy” doesn’t sound any “cleaner” to me just because you suppress the actual word they used in the original, but I guess the power of that “P” word persists perpetually, and proscribing it with a proxy placated the protestors.
(This video is that “Clean version” — but play at your own risk. The first and last thing you hear in the track is somebody changing “There’s some whores in this house.”)
As you might expect, certain corners of our society reacted the way they always do, probably leading to more exposure and higher sales than the song might have attracted without the loud, performative objections.
I’m not going to say much about this song’s musicality. The composition and the production are a vehicle for the spectacle. The song's raison d’etre is for these artists to stride up to the edge of the imaginary line of “what is decent” and defiantly violate it. They want to provoke outrage and ride that outrage to new heights.
In that effort, they were successful, and I doubt we will have to wait long for someone to come along and try to top them. What I find fascinating about this phenomenon is the persistent recurrence of this same cycle of outrage and escalation.
Who Did It First?
There is a long tradition in popular music of purposely crossing the line of acceptability for the sake of shocking the audience. Artists are constantly seeking out and probing that line. Some of them are genuinely exploring the limits of their art and their expression, some are trying to exploit the Streisand Effect—provoking “bans” or protests of their music to drive more attention to it.
Whether they succeed or fail, there is no shortage of examples, from Katy Perry's 2008 hit “I Kissed A Girl,” or the Lords of Acid with their “P” song in 1998, to George Michael's “I Want Your Sex” in 1987. The entirety of 1980s hair metal seemed to be built on innuendo, winking at the real meaning of “rock and roll” —and that winking extended a tradition going back before Elvis Presley's “Hound Dog” antics on the Ed Sullivan Show. (Never mind the original lyrics of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti.”)
Then there’s Prince. Almost everything that man did on stage was obscene1. His performance of “Gett Off” on the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards featured Prince in a yellow body suit (missing the booty) and performing in the middle of what can only be described as an onstage orgy. Even the most pearl-clutching prudes gave up trying to shame him and did their best to ignore him, instead.
Every single time one of these performances broke through to the mainstream, there would be outrage and protest, but the audience wants what the audience wants—and the show must go on. Academically, we could trace this back as far as you like. Shakespeare’s use of ribaldry and innuendo wasn’t even new in his time.
But for our purposes today, I’m thinking about our heritage of American artists who put their art on the record. And if we’re talking about recording songs with shockingly dirty lyrics and putting them out where the public can hear them, we’re talking about Lucille Bogan.
Lowdown Dirty Blues
Lucille Anderson was born in 1897 in the American South—whether Alabama or Mississippi is a matter for debate. She married a railroad man named Nazareth Bogan in 1914, and by 1923 she was recording vaudeville songs for Okeh Records.
Like most musicians, she didn’t just record a couple of songs and call it a day. She performed live, wrote her own songs, and performed songs by other people. She hustled, in other words. According to her Wikipedia article, she found that trick that has been known since before Shakespeare:
“With her experience in some of the rowdier juke joints of the 1920s, many of Bogan's songs, most of which she wrote herself, have thinly veiled humorous sexual references.”
That phrase “thinly veiled” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Some of her songs—My Georgia Grind, for example—could be considered “veiled,” since she doesn’t come right out and say what “grind” means. But others make no attempt to hide her meaning.
Considering where we started, with WAP, I think it’s a little bit ironic that we can trace that American heritage of recording outrageous and openly sexual content back to a song called “Shave ‘Em Dry.” (Dare to listen? Here you go.)
So, next time you find an outrageous, over-the-top song climbing its way up the charts, come back to Lucille Bogan and see if they can top her for sheer raunchiness.
Most of the time, they can’t.
Prince was an amazing musician, but I’m saving that post for another day.
That Lucille didn’t hold anything back!
That's some deft, careful tip-toeing through the two-lips, Tad....nicely done. There's nothing new under the sun, and, while it's amazing to see what Bogan, in particular, was recording a century ago, I'm finding it fascinating to contemplate why...the motivation.
For the more recent artists, the motivation seems to clearly be titillation, and with it, bloated record sales/downloads, with what seems to be the desire to position themselves (ironically) as truly adventurous, "dangerous" and ground-breaking artists. Or, grab a quick headline; I appreciated your mention of the "Streisand effect," which, while hearing it referenced here and there, I never bothered to look it up. I actually vaguely remember, now, that air-photo flap from the start of the century.
As for Bogan's motivation, it's amazing to weigh her major-label experiences with the racism charges leveled against the '50s and '60s label execs and the signings (or lack) of Black artists, and the emergence of what were called "race records" (on the same Okeh Records Bogan was on just 30 years earlier...and other labels).
Hers and other '20s and '30s records are amazing pop cultural touchstones, and of course, major highlights of the record industry writ large. I'm sure there have been college courses on the racial anthropology of recorded sound, but, in listening to Bogan's "Shave 'em Dry," it's easy to hear her sheer giddiness in "being let in the door" to record her honest private experiences, with far more authenticity and "realism" than the later, far more exploitative and contrived, commerce-driven efforts of Cardi B, MTS, and even Prince....all of whom seemed to only want to shock the older and/or more conservative, and "impress" their younger audience members/record buyers with just how "hip" and "cool" they'd like to be perceived as being.
The Okeh label on which Bogan recorded, was bought by Columbia in '26, after which, she then switched to Paramount Records, starting in '27. It'd be interesting to see if she was cut from Okeh following the Columbia acquisition, or was simply sought after by Paramount. She recorded for Brunswick from 1929-'31, with titles seeming to imply more explicitness! Her '33 "Shave 'em Dry" (one of the lasts things she recorded) was actually, as Discogs noted, "probably a private pressing of an explicit song."
Now, what I'd LOVE to know is if my dad had any of her 78s. His 20,000-piece collection featured mostly jazz LPs and 78s, and he was more of a "music collector" than a historically-motivated "record collector," but I remember (I was born in '55) growing up and looking through a lot of his older records (he actually had a 3" Decca record of someone from the '50s)! Haven't seen one since! I do remember seeing some Okeh and Brunswick labels on some of his 78s, but I can't remember what names he had! Fun stuff, Tad....thanks again!