Wednesday, March 4, 2009

I want your sex . . . lyrics

Scientists always find new ways of blaming problems on various causes, sometimes with dubious research to back it up. This appears interesting, though, and potentially valid. A recent study links sexually explicit lyrics to teenage sex. Overall, it appears as more of a factor than a cause in a higher incidence of underage copulation, which one would hope isn't that easy to influence with music. If it is, I'm definitely listening to the wrong CD's when I have a lady over.
However, you need to take into account the many, many variables when it comes to teenage sex. Background, religion, ethnicity, personality, parental involvement and many others. No one just hears a song and acts on the basest message their subconscious derives from the lyrics. By that logic, after all the Queen I've listened to I should be gay by now, but I'm not. Or by all the angst-ridden, melancholic angry music I've passed over my inner ear I should have scars on my wrists or be in jail for beating someone near to death. Hasn't happened. This cause-and-effect discussion gets rehashed constantly, every subsequent generation coming up with new reasons why their kids are horrible and the world is spiraling into a pit of apathetic, cancerous degradation. If every generation was that much worse than the one before, by now we should all be beating each other to death over simple eye-contact and having unprotected sex with animals in the street. But we're not.
Video games aren't making your children violent, they merely bring out their inherent violent tendencies. Sexual lyrics are not making your children have sex, they'll figure it out without listening to degrading music they shouldn't be listening to anyway because it's mostly garbage, not necessarily because of the lyrics. This kind of music may only enhance certain ideas and actions they already have a mind to do.
If anything, I take exception with the complete lack of imagination these type of lyrics show. Back before the relative sexual freedom of the eighties, writers had to be more careful to conceal the true meaning of a song instead of just saying it outright, which is often done these days. There's no cleverness in songs of a sexual nature anymore, they just blurt it out. I blame Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

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