Wednesday, March 01, 2006
(9:42 AM) | Brad:
Ladies and Gentlemen, I Give You . . . Sexual Chocolate
To tell the truth, I'd kill for you
It's sick I know, but after all
My definition of the word:
Love is blind, love is good. ("Love," The Twilight Singers)
Lest things get too academic around here, I thought I'd devote my alloted blog time to something far more mundane: sex music. Some people need or want porn to spice things up, and all power to them. Some people employ toys, bells & whistles. Others like exotic places, like Ikea and truck stops. Me? Well, I may bordering on entering that "too much information" territory, but all I really need to get the motor running is music. It could be music playing on the stereo, or it could be music playing in my head -- or it could be something as simple and sublime as a midget-clown-midget sandwich in the corner singing barbershop-style.
Or, it could be The Twilight Singers. I got a chance to see them play a couple of years ago in Glasgow. At the time, I was at a very low place. I was hating my thesis. I was hating Scotland. And I was hating that I was nearly thirty and feeling old in spite of not really being that old. In two hours, though, their live soundtrack to sex made me absolutely forget all that hate.
My college years were spent listening to the Afghan Whigs, thrashing about wildly at their concerts in Cincinnati and Columbus, oblivious to everyone and all. They were, and still are, the best live band I've ever seen. When they broke up in 1999, I decided that was the sign that it was time to put college things behind me -- to move on to more sophisticated things. To a bit of jazz. To classical. Hell, even an opera or two. On that evening at the King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, though, I hit a worm hole, and found myself back in 1997, held in complete awe by a pudgy, unremarkable looking gravely-voiced, bourbon-drinking former Afghan Whig frontman named Greg Dulli.
Now, The Twilight Singers are not as good as the Whigs at their height -- the intuitive mix between the band members just wasn't there (though maybe it is now). But the energy, oh yeah, they got that in spades. Greg Dulli on stage is rough sex incarnate: sweaty, grunty, and a little jiggly. He thinks he is the coolest, sexiest thing in the room, and everybody at some point during the show, even if only for a moment, believes it. In the ensuing frottage of singer and audience, you can't help but start feeling the same thing about yourself. At some point you, the sexual energy hits you full in the face like a hurricane and you realize you are screaming a full-bore orgasm cliche: "Fuck YEAAAAHHHHHH" to nobody in particular. Every room Dulli's bands walk into becomes a party, an intoxicated saturnalia. The next morning you might feel a little ashamed, and maybe even a little dirty, but so long as you don't tell nobody else will either.
That, my friend, is sex music. And I love it. It ain't Friday, but I invite you to confess your sexual soundtrack.
