Why Naked Singers Aren't Sexy
Do You Need To Take It All Off To Have A Professional Singing Career?
A friend of mine, herself a talented singer and quite an intelligent accomplished woman, asked the question: why do singers today need to look and act like porno stars and feel compelled to sell their sexuality? She posed this question on a popular social media site. The responses, primarily from musicians and singers, all acknowledged the plain and simple truth: Sex sells.
Why do women and young girls feel they have to overtly sell their sexuality? Isn’t being a talented performing and recording artist enough? Apparently not. You also have to simulate sex acts on stage and screen, too. I guess the kids won't get it, if it's not plainly spelled out.
When one looks to female vocalists who became household names without taking off their clothes, the list is long. Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, Peggy Lee, Carmen McRae, and Nancy Wilson, to name a few. If you look past the era of popular jazz singers to the era of rock and roll, soul, and R & B, even Tina Turner, Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston, never got butt naked.
Who was sexier than Tina Turner? She OOZED sexuality, without looking like she emerged straight out of a porn video. Peggy Lee's Fever is sexy as hell. These singers got the point across without having to spell it out. Shirley Horn's "Do it Again" is hotter than any Rihanna video could ever be.
Sexuality and music are an exciting combination that will always pique our interest. But it's innuendo that titillates us. Like a well crafted melody, current popular music has forsaken subtlety and innuendo. Both are a lost art. Watch Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not say to Humphrey Bogart “you just put your lips together and blow” and you have the crux, the very essence of what is missing in today’s music, and by extension, popular culture at large.
Beyonce, Miley, Rihanna, Katy Perry, etc. can’t possibly stack up to the chanteuses of the past, scoring a negative 5 on the "sex-o-meter". They’re downright boring. Yawn! What do they leave to the imagination? Not. A. Thing. They leave us with nowhere to go. No build up, no anticipation, no climax. And without imagination to connect the dots, there is nothing left to hold our interest.
Why were mystery, nuance, and innuendo replaced? How do we get “subtle” back in fashion?
It’s time for "innuendo" to take back the night.
It's not really about the music....... the music is boring as hell too. The music is the "background" to the pole dancing like in any strip club. I think in order to have the "less is more" then the music really has to be more. Or the main event.....
ReplyDeleteI am very shocked at what seems to win pop music awards these days. There is nothing all that interesting going on. Background music serves the same purpose in movies........ it fill space where dramatic interest should be. I think that the reverse is true for distracting images in music videos. It keeps your eyes occupied so your ears don't go to sleep.
I love this Ms. Ellynne, especially your closing paragraph that nothing is left to the imagination and there is ". . . no buildup, no anticipation . . ." in the music or in the videos. It is interesting to me that incredible male vocalists mostly keep their clothes on, sing sexy, have sexy moves, but for the most part don't have to get naked. Luther Vandross never got naked. Michael Jackson took his shirt off a time or two, but that wasn't his shtick. Rock musicians almost all perform without their shirts, but that's the norm for a lot of them, probably because it's hot on stage more than anything else. Jazz bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding managed to win a Best New Artist Grammy a year or two ago and we have surely not seen her looking anything less than elegant. It seems to me to be a self- esteem thing - as if the female singer knows her abilities as a vocalist and songwriter are limited and rather than honing her craft, she takes off her clothes. But what does that do to her possibilities as an artist? If you are presented to the world half naked, what if 4 or 5 years down the road, when you have established your mediocrity, and you want to wear a real dress, and your manager says, "no, you can't, your fans want to see you the way they've always seen you," -- what happens? You can't go back. Mariah Carey is an artist who was always sexy and always wore beautiful outfits. Then she divorced her first husband, music mogul Tommy Motola, and all her clothes came off! The difference is, though, we had her for 5 years dressed! So now, her videos are often more revealing, but when she appears on important shows, Ms. Carey is in a drop-dead divine gown or some sort of fabulous confection. She KNOWS she can sing her ass off, and she lets us focus on THAT. Which should be the whole point. Period.
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