The lights are off. The moon and a 100 candles shine with a soft glow upon the bedroom scene before you. A figure moves in your direction, swaying ethereally. You hear the digital hum of the beginning of a Chopin CD.
Embracing at the foot of the canopied bed, your lover is warm and welcoming as you both fall lightly to the mattress. The music begins.
After your gentle yet devoted lovemaking, the music is still playing. You talk and laugh quietly, caress your soulmate's chin, then enjoy a soothing back massage as you drift placidly into sleep.
We now inturrupt this romance novel... to bring you back to college.
While there are an abundance of “romantic” interludes on the Ohio's campuses, the circumstances and the music are expectedly different from this overcultured paperback scene.
The music you love to love to is more about creating a separate reality to surround your fervid coupling and to cover the sometimes embarrassing noises involved. It's about creating a wall of sound to block out the housemates in the livingroom or to prevent them from snickering when you or your partner finally slink to the bathroom.
As Ohio University senior Smut Bunny* puts it, “[The music you choose] ...depends on if you want to think or not. If you want to talk afterwards, listen to jazz. If you want to forget about the whole thing, play something you don't know the words to so you can concentrate on that.”
“Or if you really don't care you could just turn on the TV,” says 22 year old OU student T-Bone Morris. “But Otis Redding is for smoking cigarettes afterward at four in the morning,” she adds.
OU photography senior Carl Parodi says he likes jazz and blues like John Coltrane, Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.
“It has a lot to do with that period of time,” he says. “The music is very sensual and very sexual.” Oooh, sensitive.
But in order to protect the sensuality of your loveplay, you need privacy. Jumper Swifty and Johnson Adams roomed together in the dorms at OU. They had a plan to make sure that no carnal experiences were interrupted. If one of them returned to the room and heard Temple of the Dog playing, don't even knock. “All Night Thing” was probably playing on repeat as someone smoked a Marlboro in post-coital bliss. Or perhaps “Pushin' Forward Back” was masking the concupiscent sloshings of a potentially historic session. But the plan did have its flaws. More than once the luckier roommate sauntered out into the hallway to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, only to find his friend curled up in a drunken fetal position on the floor outside the door, waiting for permission to enter.
The music you love to love to requires a felicitous selection. You wouldn't go home with just anybody from some bar (well, maybe you would) so why should you play just any record?
Musical tastes abound, and one couple's preferences may not correspond to the music of choice for another couple. You already know what songs you like to bump around to, and I wouldn't sneak into your room to blast the Melvins while you were up in it, but here are some bands to consider:
· The Afghan Whigs' dirty-love, delinquent-lust, off-key melodies of failed relationships, substance abuse and general misery and deceit are my favorite complement to an evening of tenderness and romance. The band's Uptown Avondale record is a four-song collection of heartbroken '60s soul covers guaranteed to add a morbid touch to your lovemaking (all Whigs albums are recommended for most sentimental and/or violent situations).
· If you enjoy taking a lot of drugs then Monster Magnet's Tab or Spine of God records would make your sexual experience as sleazy and sweaty and low as you'd like it. And I mean that in a good way. With a box of whip-its and a dime bag at your bedside, Monster Magnet is the Zeppelin/Sabbath/MC5 of the '90s. The smell of pot, moldy carpet and sweaty butts are actually engineered into the recording (not recommended for your first time together).
Music can be an important part of sex, though the honest among us will admit that in many lonely, prurient, self-gratifying moments, we have imagined (vividly) the pleasure of making amorous musical memories to our favorite bands.
(*Names have been changed because they liked these better.)
| By The Billy Keaggy | Originally published in insideOUT Magazine, Spring 1994 | i am keaggy.com |
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