“Not saying she's a piggy but I'm breaking her specs Monster in the jungle and I'm coming for sex Paying like a DJ cos I bounce cheques And baby if you talking credit, then I'm shipping the wreck" (Mabozza Richi - Send In The Clowns)
For as long as someone could slap out a rhythm on their thigh for another to dance to, humans have intertwined music and sex. It’s a tense and complex relationship, as sexual ones tend to be. The fads and trends of sexual inclusivity in popular music ebb and flow with the tastes of the times, but there has never and will never be an art medium or movement that does not have some form of subculture rooted in sex.
I write highly provocative lyrics concealing and expressing complex metaphors. While some artists like Odd Future will use pure shock fictional luridity in their work, others like Missy Elliot mostly prefer to remain in the innuendo and euphemism space.
“Fuck Tyler, I'm a change my name to Uncle Phil // Cause every girl I deal and fuck it's all ways against her Will” (Tyler the Creator alias Wolf Haley - Splatter)
*"If you got a big [elephant sound], let me search ya // To find out how hard I gotta work ya"* (Missy Elliot - *Work It*)
One assuredly cruder than the other, but are they both effective in conveying their message? Are they “art”?
Removed from all context, one would say no. In fact generously one might say they were schoolyard level cringy banter at best. Within the tapestry of their respective works, they’re at home - organic, part of the living fiction. If someone puts on Splatter expecting to hear a set of in-the-pocket tight 8s about what Tyler had for dinner last night, they are trick or treating the wrong house that Hallowe’en.
So where’s the line? Surely not in the eye of the beholder, that’s too risky. We have devices such as the Miller test in the USA, to determine if something is protected by the First Amendment. Here’s the criteria of the Miller test:
As you may imagine, most people, when confronted with the criteria of the Miller test, immediate leap to hoist you on your own petard - ‘Aha! Well, as an average adult I find the whole matter most distasteful and patently offensive sir!’ and here it is that we see the last vestige of protection of the darker arts against those that seek to selectively sanitise creative spaces.
Whether a reasonable person finds that the matter, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
What an incredibly difficult, arbitrary thing to define, and what a wonderfully broad set of criteria. The thing that many offended by art fail to appreciate, is the value it can hold outside of how they personally perceive it. They cannot see the people to whom it speaks, the message that it carries, for they are blinded by their own discomfort and moral outrage.
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/luke-records-v-navarro-11th-cir/
In Luke Records v. Navarro, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an album by the rap group 2 Live Crew was not legally obscene.
The decision stands for the principle that music has serious artistic value and, as such, does not rise to the level of obscenity even if it is filled with profanity and misogynistic language.
MUSIC
Not just ‘some music’. Not just ‘good music’. Music - the expression of creativity through combining vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion. From the Greek ‘mousikē (tekhnē)’ or ‘art of the muses’.