Pop music has come a long way since Elvis Presley gyrated his hips in front of a shocked nation watching television in the 1950s.
Or has it?
Nowadays, it seems people don’t even think twice when they hear Enrique Iglesias sing “Tonight (I’m F**kin’ You)” or when they see fireworks explode out of Katy Perry’s bra in music videos.
But music professor Glenn Gass, who teaches courses on the history of rock ‘n’ roll, says popular music has always lent itself to sexual themes.
“Birds do it, bees do it,” Gass says. “There were songs back in the 1920s that were cleverly guarded, risque, sexual innuendos. And that’s probably been going on since pub songs back in the 16th century. I think that sex and romance have always been the recurring themes of popular music.”
Songs such as “My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll),” for instance, popularized by blues singer Trixie Smith in 1922, even paved the way for coining the very name of one of the most sexually obsessed genres of music in history.
“A lot of songs use the term ‘rock me and roll me,’ and that term was a metaphor for sex,” Gass says.
It wasn’t until the 1950s, when DJ Alan Freed renamed rhythm and blues music “rock and roll,” that it took on a slightly less sexual meaning.
And from that point on, Gass says the popular music of each successive decade succeeded in outdoing itself in terms of shocking lyrics.
“Each generation goes a little bit further,” he says. “The (Rolling) Stones went further than the Beatles, and glam rock went further than that, and heavy metal went further, and punk rock went further. The sexual references got more explicit.”
By the 1980s, songs had lyrics that openly referenced masturbation and sex. Prince’s song “Darling Nikki” led Tipper Gore, ex-wife of former Vice President Al Gore, to form the Parents Music Resource Center, a committee that sought to prevent children from easily purchasing music with explicit lyrics.
Regardless of the steady increase
in explicit sexual references throughout the decades, Gass is quick to remind
that the blues musician Muddy Waters sang “I Just Want to Make Love to You”
back in the 1950’s, well before the Rolling Stones covered the same song on
their debut album in 1964.
THE VERDICT: THEN
Dirty clothes
It’s a Thursday night and the “Girls Only” line wraps around the perimeter of Kilroy’s Sports Bar N’ Grill. The uniform appears to be a tight, black skirt that stops before it reaches mid-thigh. It’s typical wear, but IU graduate Betty Klinger remembers a time when the shortest skirts hit mid-calf and girls balked at wearing shorts. “It would have been scandalous to wear shorts on campus. The only thing worse would be wearing jeans,” says Klinger, who studied home economics at IU from 1955 to 1958.
Her party outfit of choice? A strapless pink dress with a full skirt that hung past the knees. And boys wore dinner jackets and ties. “Every boy owned a white dinner jacket. They wore them to parties and would eventually wear them to their wedding.”
Fast forward to 2011. Over the course of a lifetime, today’s college students have experienced—and been exposed to—nearly everything.
Crop tops display toned tummies, leggings cling to thighs and shorts barely cover the butt.
Deborah Christiansen, an IU clothing and textile professor, attributes the drastic shift in fashion to social change — in this case, the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Without the change in society, she says, people wouldn’t have even thought to wear what they do now.
“Look at Amelia Bloomer. She showed her ankle and people were shocked. Now who cares about an ankle?”
It takes time, but eventually, people become used to seeing something (ankles, bra straps, butt cheeks) and no one gives it a second thought.
“Fashion is about extremes. And honestly, the only extreme we can reach now is no clothes at all,” Christiansen says. “We’ve done everything else besides nudity.”
A pause, then, “Well, maybe men in skirts. We haven’t done that in awhile.”
THE VERDICT: NOW
Jeans shockingly scandalous? No way. This is a no brainer.
Dirty language
For thousands of years and for millions of people, language has been the crux around which cultures define themselves. So if we’re dirtier than our predecessors, the language we use in everyday life must be filthy by comparison.
“If language is getting dirtier, then there must be a dirtier phenomenon to which it’s attached,” says Michael Adams, an associate professor in the English department who studies English words, particularly slang. “So if our language is dirtier, then we’re dirtier as a culture.”
One clue to our supposed dirtiness then is the progression of profanity out of the depths of vulgarity and into the realm of prestige.
Take, for example, the F-word.
At
one point it was an unspeakable taboo. But eventually the F-bomb moved into the
realm
of vulgarity — a word reserved for the crude lower classes.
Today, however, Adams says, “fuck” seems to be a buzzword in Hollywood — a status symbol for those who can get away with saying it.
“The moment you devulgarize something as potently vulgar as ‘fuck’ once was — if you’re inclined to be dirty or vulgar -— you’re going to have to come up with something else because your repertoire of dirty just got smaller when ‘fuck’ was expelled from it,” Adams says. “Dirty language will always be with us … there will still be new dirty words because dirty is a human preoccupation and a human impulse.”
So if dirty language is always going to be part of our culture, are we really dirtier today than we were, or is today’s culture just another point in the natural progression of cultures?
“I think that we are a socially lax society compared to society of earlier times,” Adams says. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that we allow people to do things, and we allow an awareness of what they do more than we used to. And so there’s probably dirty language that follows that permissiveness and that awareness.”
THE VERDICT: IT'S ALL RELATIVE
If language is dirtier then so are we, but if we're dirtier then so are our
mouths.
You thought we were dirty? Just look at our coaches
Bob Knight and the dirty toilet paper
Between throwing chairs and mock whipping, Knight’s faux pas were many.
But it doesn’t get much dirtier than the ugly toilet paper incident. Literally.
Six months before Knight was fired, one of his former players alleged that the infamous Hoosier coach came out of the bathroom, wiped his posterior, and showed the used toilet paper to the team.
Uh, gross.
Kelvin Sampson’s dirty recruiting
From being named coach of the year to having the media predict the end of his Division I coaching career, Sampson experienced a fall from grace — with IU basketball not far behind.
By placing impermissible phone calls to recruits and then lying to the NCAA about it, Sampson’s actions were probably the most damaging to himself and to the program.
Bob Knight at least won a few championships along the way.
Tom Crean’s dirty record
Last season the Hoosiers went 12-20. In his last season, Bob Knight's successor Mike Davis went 19-12, prompting the Hoosier nation to demand his resignation. With an overall record of 28-66, Crean hasn't quite restored IU basketball to its former glory.
But hey, he didn't have much to work with. We're rebuilding, right?
