Dr. Koop gets some credit. Seriously, just about the one liberal hero in the entire Reagan Administration. He was chosen because of his pro-life views, but he was also eminently qualified in the field of public health, and he had a wonderful television presence as well—he just seemed like everyone’s family doctor.

So when this old, pro-life Republican surgeon general came on television and said that we as a society had to get real and stop shaming or shunning any discussion of condoms, it had a huge impact.

I really wish pop music was still sometimes socially conscious.

Excellent point, Dilan.

Lily, there is a lot of hip-hop that still touches on issues of race, class, and human rights. But feminism has fallen completely off the map in most music that has a chart presence.

I think that’s the case for nearly any socially challenging music. The rare occasion you hear a protest song out there, it’s coming from either a long-established artist or someone with so much influence (like, say, Lady Gaga) that they can’t be ignored or have their music blackholed without fans getting annoyed. It’s probably what also killed jazz-rap as a genre, since many such groups (Digable Planets and, although less jazz-oriented, Arrested Development come to mind) focused heavily on social lyrics. Gangsta and Crunk though? They don’t really challenge the status quo. Gangsta rap perpetuates stereotypes of thuggish ghetto types, while crunk just pushes the whole party animal thing.

Not to take anything away from someone like Dr. Dre as a musician, but the music itself is kind of… um.

#4 Re: BrianX
Good point.  One of the many ways you could track MTV’s slow corporatization was the diminishing frequency with which it played music with a social message.

I totally remember this era. I had become sexually active in the late 80’s when AIDS awareness had almost no impact on het people’s behavior. Then Koop’s mailer and survey came to my off campus apartment in I think late 88 or early 89. It made a difference. Koop was with the government and here to help. I really think he helped make these two songs the mainstream successes they were. Everyone else in the Reagan administration wanted to bury their heads in the sand about AIDS. I am sure that Koop indirectly saved the lives of tens of thousands of Americans.

And you gotta remember that we all thought Koop was a kook. I remember reading anti-Koop articles in the paper as a precocious teen. I was pretty politically hip at 13-14. and had grown up in Strange Demise of Jim Crow progressive Texas. I had more comprehensive sex-ed in 7th grade than today’s Texans get in tenth. Koop was clearly a loon in my fourteen year old eyes. Who knew he would become so badass when I was 21?

And yeah, whatever happened to rap and hip-hop. Where are the politics and social issues that drove old school rap?

I graduated high school in 91; it wasn’t just the lady rappers. References to “jimmies, jimmy hats, body-bags,” etc. were all over hip-hop.

Condom awareness was a big thing; when I was in school, a big deal was made from moving them from behind the counter where you had to ask for them to the general store-space in supermakets and pharmacies.

I remember this because it used to be a Unibomber-style conceptual (no pun intended) joke-grenade for my friends (as we were young and assholes) to take some and drop them into very old people’s carts, because ANY way it goes down at the checkout is a victory: if they just bought them without knowing and found them in their bags at home, if they noticed them but made no mention of them and bought them quickly, not wanting to draw attention, or if they made a stink like, “THOSE are not mine!”

Any way it came out, it seemed like a victory for random chaos.  Which is a noble goal to the young and assholish.

Hip-hop is certainly doing more than most other genres r.e.: social messages, although it seems like less than it used to (I hope this isn’t me just looking back with rose-tinted glasses. If it is then I’ve developed extremely early-onset “you kids get off my lawn” syndrome, considering my age).

@BrianX, I like Lady Gaga, but I also find it kind of depressing that she’s the one that’s got the most anarchic, rock n’ roll spirit of anyone in the charts, and that “Born This Way” is the best we can hope for in the way of songs with a social message. We could do a lot better if mainstream media picked up some of the almost unheard of artists that are more willing to consistently address such things. It would also take some pressure off Gaga herself, since some people seem to expect her to be McCarthy or Bikini Kill when she’s more like the artists mentioned in this post: fun-loving, accessible, weaving occasional social messages into light-hearted dance music and love songs rather than taking a more didactic approach.

“Born This Way” is fine, I think. It’s fun the first 8664755154 times you hear it, and when it showed up on Glee it felt, like the show itself, about as edgy as a singalong on Sesame Street, but that’s really because its “message” should have been drilled into everyone’s head by now. The fact that much of the class is still behind on this lesson is the sad part.

jdobbin: I like to think of their spouses finding them at home.

“Strawberry flavoured condoms? I thought you didn’t like strawberry.”
“I don’t.  I thought I bought vanilla ones.”

Treefinger: I’m pretty fond of Rise Against. They pretty consistently do socially conscious lyrics (Make It Stop is perfect IMHO) and get a lot of radio play locally.

jdobbin, no, that’s pretty damn funny, since of course the only sensible thing to do is say, “Hunh, dunno how that got in here” and hand it to the cashier to restock.  With that option always available, people are doing it to themselves, and that’s the definition of empathy-based humor.

When we look at corporate/top-40 music, everything needs to be considered as a message.

Push It was in ‘87.

Me So Horny was ‘89. I know that there were songs before that which gave Tipper Gore a sad, but Me So Horny was the song that made parents flip their shit and bring the whole Parental Advisory labels back into the forefront. There were a couple of years when this stuff was getting fought out and the record labels were able to capitalize on the controversy.

Let’s Talk about Sex was ‘91, which was during that period. I remember there being a debate about whether or not it was “too obscene” to play on the radio (in the midwest). The song was just transgressive enough that it got people interested in it.

Around ‘92-‘93, things had pretty well settled down and the record companies knew they couldn’t bank off of the controversy.

everything needs to be considered as a calculated risk. Bah, I keep forgetting not to post before caffeine.

If I remember right, the supposed offending song for Tipper was Darling Nikki off Purple Rain.

witless, Darling Nikki wasn’t a top-40 hit though. Me So Horny was what drove the censors insane.

It was pretty much all of 2 Live Crew’s songs (of which Me So Horny was the biggest hit), mainly because they made the obscenity their whole schtick rather than having the one or two songs that people could point to with other artists.

Also, pretty much no artistic merit whatsoever. Other groups and artists can get away with a lot of crap because they can do good stuff. 2 Live Crew had nothing going for them at all other than their offensive lyrics.

KeithM—censors have never cared about “artistic merit.” Me So Horny got airplay, and whether it was because they bodily ripped off Wild Thing (which was de rigeur at the time for top 40 rap) or because it was designed to be controversial, it did what it was supposed to do: it got the censors worked into a lather to the point where the record was nearly banned.

Meanwhile, in the same year that Me So Horny was in the shit, Serrano’s “Piss Christ” was causing an uproar, with D’Amato and Helms in the senate using it as a reason to defund the NEA. Frankly, I see very little artistic merit in “Piss Christ,” and feel that it was a work intended to shock. But the point was that in the late 80’s and early 90’s, it was very fashionable for art to shock and court censorship. It was the trend.

I heard a radio interview in the 80s with a Trojan spokesperson that referred to the condom industry term for their sales curve increase, “The Koop Bump”.  I’m surprised the term didn’t catch on - its meaning is google-proof (until this comment).

Self-aggrandizing-coincidence-within-post-alert - I formed a duo called The Koop Bump with Mark Gunderson, adknowledged inventor of the mashup.

I remember that record labels capitalized on “I Want Your Sex” by George Michael, which was also supposed to contain an important social message. I think it was banned from MTV, but I’m not sure.

There is still brilliant work coming from hip-hop artists. What about Sarah Jones and “Your Revolution”?

Ace mashup, BTW.  Some of MarK’s latest (and the 1st, “Rebel Without a Pause”,) are included on his mp3 page.  So is the somewhat sulky but germane-to-post “Sperms Got Germs”.

Oho!  The aforementioned “Sperms Got Germs” (possible creepy trigger) is old but appears to have a new Julian Assange coda.  I’ll shut up now.

Left Eye’s last name is spelled Lopes.

Bach-us - since MTV was where I saw I want your Sex, I doubt that, or at least not so that it never went out.  It may have made their after hours only list though - it was at night, not in the after school hours, not that I had much time to watch MTV in the middle of the day then.

In defense of Piss Christ: I vaguely remember that Serrano is a Catholic, and has said that his intention in the art was to describe his experience of Jesus’s love (or some such thing) in his work as a hospital aide caring for very sick people, which is obviously a high-bodily-fluids experience. Don’t remember where I saw this.

Why was there a sudden interest in having even more frank discussion about HIV and AIDS in the early 90s?

NBA superstar Magic Johnson announced he was HIV positive and was retiring in November, 1991.  It was generally believed Johnson was/is hetero but had multiple partners during his playing career.

Mighty Ponygirl, “Me So Horny” was pretty damn racist.

In defense of Piss Christ: I vaguely remember that Serrano is a Catholic, and has said that his intention in the art was to describe his experience of Jesus’s love (or some such thing) in his work as a hospital aide caring for very sick people, which is obviously a high-bodily-fluids experience. Don’t remember where I saw this.

I really liked Piss Christ, and not in an ironic or critical way (I thought the crucifix had a holy, angelic look in the work), which is weird, because I’m almost a Philistine when it comes to modern art. The work’s critics were focusing on the material and ignoring the spiritual, which might have been Serrano’s point in the first place.

I loved TLC when I was a preteen, but I was a little too late to get into Salt n Pepa.  But I guess the message seeped into me because when I became sexually active in 2001, I knew that condoms were important.  I have made the mistake of not using a condom on a few rare occasions, but overall I’ve been pretty adamant about them.  I remember STDs and contraception being frankly discussed in teen fashion magazines, right alongside the latest nail polish trends.  I guess it wasn’t such a bad time for me to be a teenager.

Dilan, having met Serrano, I can assure you his “point” changes depending on who asks him what it’s about. The work was intended to shock. All of his artist statements since then have been pretty bald-faced pandering to minimize blowback to himself personally.

Haha, so he made it and then decided what it meant, several times over? I like that.

Dilan, having met Serrano, I can assure you his “point” changes depending on who asks him what it’s about. The work was intended to shock. All of his artist statements since then have been pretty bald-faced pandering to minimize blowback to himself personally.

Well, it didn’t shock me, in part probably because I’m not easily shocked but also in part because when I first saw it, it wasn’t readily apparent to me what it was. It just looked like a crucifix photographed in such a way that it had a sort of angelic orange glow.

I don’t really care about Serrano’s motives; that was a throwaway line and perhaps the guy is completely full of shit. It certainly worked as art FOR ME. (And as I said, that is no mean feat, given that my tastes in the visual arts are pretty Philistine.)

Just by its title, “Piss Christ”, appeared calculated to offend Christians which it did in spades.  One doesn’t have to believe in God or Christ (I don’t) to recognize how offensive it was.  To expect the government to subsidize this art is quite a bit too much tone-deaf and arrogant.  Defend the work if you want, but defending government funding of it is rather like defending the Marines pissing on corpses by saying they were just trying to wash the dust or blood off the bodies.  I’m not so much offended by the act as I am offended by the actors’ apparent intentional provocation.

Not really the point Amanda was making, but that TLC song still sounds incredible. I love the dissonant organ-ish sound in the gang-vocal sections. Public Enemy was making those sorts of discordant noises a few years before that, but I wonder exactly where that sort of thing comes from and why it now sounds like such a relic of New Jack Swing-era hip hop / R&B, even though it still sounds really bracing, or like there’s a train screaming by in the background.

Anyway, great song, and a great, energetic video too; makes the stuff they ended up becoming better-known for seem disappointing in comparison.

(Also, Amanda, at 1:58, the words “safe sex” fly by on the screen. That’s actually not subtle at all.)

MAL, please go to HR and pick up your geezer badge.