Jennifer Warnes

So begins Robert Fripp’s League of Gentlemen album from 1981. In fact, “rock and roll” was originally slang for sex (not too hard to figure out why), and the strong backbeat is supposed to subliminally (or liminally) suggest fucking or the rampant beats of an excited heart, which is why it makes parents so nervous to have their teenagers listen to it. It’s a short step between whomp-bomp-a-luma and wham bam thank you ma’am (or whiz, whirr, thank you sir, depending on your predilections) and it’s always been feared that exciting music will boil the blood past the point of no return. And not just rock and roll. Jazz was originally slang for sex and funk used to be (still sort of is) that musky, sweaty smell you get right after sex. But there’s more to sex than fucking and there’s more to music than rock and roll.

As a guy, I’m supposed to see sex as conquering, as thrusting and grunting, something physically aggressive, something done to someone instead of with, or for, someone. Rock and roll is supposed to be my musical metaphor, and it’s not supposed to be sex unless there’s penetration and orgasm. Anything else is child’s play. That’s the code of being a straight man in a sexist, dualistic society. But that’s a game I don’t like to play. It’s too goal oriented. The overriding paradigm at Hampshire College was that the process is more important than the product, and I think sex should be the same way. It’s the journey, not the destination.

Rock and roll as a sexual metaphor doesn’t work for me because, first of all, it’s entirely impossible to have sex to music, as far as I’m concerned. I’m way too plugged in to music to not get distracted by it – in any circumstances – and my sexuality is so frighteningly fragile that the slightest breath of distraction completely disintegrates it.

For a brief time after the movie 10 was released, Ravel’s achingly boring Bolero became the fashionable sexual metaphor, and it actually bobbed up on the pop charts for a moment. And there is something about the slow build-up to the shattering climax that mimics the body’s response during sex, but the climax is so over the top that it’s laughable. That’s movie sex, not real sex. Or, at least, not my sex (which waits for me, like a mongrel waits, downwind on a tightrope leash…).

That’s one of the problems. Sexuality is such an overwhelming part of our culture – pushed into our faces from every possible angle, used to sell everything from cars to shampoo – but it’s fake sex. The models for sexuality are wildly distorted, starting with the impossibly thin, large-breasted women who are, statistically speaking, physical freaks. Millions of women do unspeakable damage to their bodies and psyches trying to emulate a physical ideal that’s just plain impossible to achieve because it is the only model of sexuality available. If you pay attention to the media – even if you don’t – you are so bombarded with images and messages that it’s nearly impossible to maintain any sort of perspective. Nobody old has sex. Nobody fat has sex. Nobody ugly has sex. Nobody hairy has sex. Nobody who sweats or scratches their head or drives the wrong car or wears the wrong shoes or has a pimple has sex.

And not only that, but sex is always presented as having nothing to do with your real life. Although it is always portrayed as the ultimate goal in anything you do, it occupies this strange parallel universe that doesn’t really connect with the other things that are going on in your life. Sure, you do and say things in moments of passion that are difficult to reconcile in the cold light of day, fully dressed, at the office. But it was a revelation for me to discover that sex is intimately connected with your daily life. Sex isn’t a magic panacea that delivers you onto the shores of fulfillment. There isn’t just ecstatic mind-blowing sex, there’s also sad sex and angry sex and worried sex and scared sex and regretful sex. There’s sex for every possible human emotion, and it’s intractably connected to your “real” life at every step of the way.

My mom used to worry that my adolescent preoccupation with pornography would distort my sexuality. I think part of that was a fear that I would equate nakedness and eroticism with impossible standards of feminine beauty – chopped and channeled and louvered and airbrushed into a Platonic ideal that was unrealistic – impossible – to achieve in real life, and that I’d be disappointed to discover that my lover had bumps and hairs and bruises and fat in places that no Playboy model was allowed to. And it’s not just about unrealistic ideals for women, either. Most men who compare themselves with their freakishly endowed, athletically indefatigable male counterparts in Fantasyland would find themselves sorely wanting, and perhaps she worried about my own self esteem about these matters. But a more insidious myth is that good sex is some wild, carefree, energetic romp involving thirty different positions and ending up with screaming simultaneous multiple orgasms that leave both people wholly satisfied and blissfully content. And it isn’t like I don’t enjoy sex or haven’t had some spectacularly thrilling and satisfying moments, but it isn’t nearly the operatic spectacle that it’s advertised to be, and that is perhaps the more dangerous myth that pornography perpetuates.

Thank god for G, who gently held my hand and patiently guided me through the traps and pitfalls of sexuality and showed me how rich and satisfying and, most importantly, how much a part of everyday life sex can and should be. She rescued me from myself and my fantasies, and initiated me into the spectrum of intimacy, from bird-feather gentle to handcuff hard. Sometimes I feel bad for her, having such a damaged partner, for she is definitely the more adventurous of the two of us and she has to stay well inside the box in order for me to stay inside the box (sorry), but I’m grateful that she’s there for me, familiar and exotic, playful and erotic, patiently holding my hand in the middle of the night.

So, rock and roll isn’t my erotic music. Good to dance to, good for blowing the cobwebs out of my head, but I’m not a divide and conquer kind of guy, running the bases, scoring a touchdown. I’m more of an ambient guy. I’ve always felt my sexuality was more feminine than masculine, and for this reason, I find Jennifer Warnes’ Way Down Deep one of the most erotic songs of all.

Way Down Deep is feminine because it’s such an immersive love song; it celebrates enveloping your beloved in a warm, dark cocoon of love. And not just the obvious physical metaphor, but, more importantly, an emotional one. And the arrangement only strengthen that feeling, with its slowly unfolding beginning, bottom-of-your-belly bass notes, and lightly exotic percussion accents. The song ebbs and flows, but it never really breaks the surface, staying tantalizingly murky throughout. It’s the sound of candlelit bathtubs and shadowy caresses. There’s no climax, no over-the-top cartoony Bolero crescendos, and it slowly returns back into the dark warmth from which it came. Mmmm…gimme.

Jennifer Warnes is not somebody I am particularly drawn to, her most visible moment being the tiresome Up Where We Belong, an overwrought and overplayed duet with Joe Cocker featured in An Officer and a Gentleman. She spent some time as a back-up singer for Leonard Cohen, the gravelly-voiced Dustin Hoffman look-alike who has written literate songs in a loose folk idiom (i.e. depressing, acoustic, and with 57 verses) for over 30 years. She learned well at the knee of her mentor, and her most highly regarded album is Famous Blue Raincoat, a collection of Cohen covers. Five years later (1992), she released The Hunter, which is also a collection of (mostly) covers, but this time Cohen only co-wrote one track, this one. I can’t for the life of me tell you how this ended up in my collection. It’s clearly my wife’s, but she never buys CDs and I don’t remember getting it for her. Oh well, besides an interesting fleshed out arrangement of Todd Rundgren’s a cappella Pretending to Care and this song, there is little of interest to me on the disc. But this song is superb. Slinky and sexy, it warms up those dark, hungry areas way down deep.