Before I begin this thing, I’ve got some instructions. First, if you don’t have a Grooveshark account, get one! Honestly, it’s way faster than downloading all your music, and it allows you to subscribe to friends with similar tastes so that you can see their new discoveries and you can check them out. This leads me to my next instruction: if you have any interest in what I’m writing here, subscribe to tlando on Grooveshark! That way you can check out the playlist that I’ll be referencing throughout this article, and also check out not only whatever I’m listening to, but also all my other playlists! Seriously, I make a lot of them. Now, on with the show…
Gill is always telling me that I should write more for The Back Row. To be honest, I am kind of sorry I don’t contribute more to the site, and even its sister site, The Velvet Rope. I mean, sure, I am on two podcasts, but the fact that I watch a fair amount of pornography and haven’t written more than a couple articles on the The Velvet Rope is just laziness on my part. So I’ve considered a lot of things I could write about from time to time, but haven’t actually written about any of them. Part of it is that my own preferred style of writing is probably better suited to blogging than it is to this particular website. That said, the Tom Lando… thing has gotten pretty big. Particularly on this site! I’m honestly really surprised by the resoundingly positive response to “The Tom Lando Files” and for all those fans of the Tom Lando thing who are reading this, I’d like to tell you how flattered I am. Hopefully I’ll keep producing stuff that you like.
So with this kind of support for the Tom Lando thing, I figure it’s a bit easier for me to get self indulgent crap put up on the site! Of course, I personally don’t want to break the proper rhythms and themes of the site, so I’m not about to start using it as my new blogspace. But then I saw an opportunity. A while back I made a post which followed up on the newfound success of “The Tom Lando Files”, advertising my Grooveshark account and the series of playlists I was putting up on said website. Fast forward to the time of this writing, and I have (among many others) a new playlist, simply titled “Tom Lando’s Sexy Times”. Now, most of my playlists are simply what I feel are the best tracks pulled from the discographies of certain artists. This one, however, is a change of pace – “Tom Lando’s Sexy Times” is a playlist of, as you may have guessed, songs which I associate strongly with sex. Songs that get me hot, horny, or which I feel would actually be perfect to have sex to!
After thinking about it a while though, I realized that this playlist perhaps… said certain things about me. In fact, it suggested things that even I felt were questionable, let alone other people. What does all this “Mindless Self Indulgence” on my sexy playlist say about my own personal sexual neurosis? Hell, just the style of music probably communicates some deeply personal issues to begin with. This presented a cool prospect to me. I had often considered writing some kind of musical criticism for The Back Row, but often either felt that I didn’t have enough to say about any given album, or felt that it would be silly to review albums and music that came out ages before I wrote about them. But if I were to analyze this particular playlist, I could not only talk about music I was into, but also talk about sex, which people seem to be into.
And thus we have “Make Love The Tom Lando Way”, an ongoing examination of songs that I, Tom Lando, find sexy in one way or another. Also, I get to reference that book by Bruce Campbell, so it’s a win/win! So I hope you enjoy this exciting exploration of things both musical and sexual. Just some opening notes for curious readers – I’m a practicing bisexual, single, not particularly sexually active lately, enjoy pornography, am not accutely aware of any major fetishes which I can lay claim to, and am a bottom in homosexual relationships, but a top in heterosexual relationships. Oh, and I dig trannies. Anyways, I’m sure we’ll go through all of this along the way. Let’s get it on!
1. Black Beatles (a mashup by Loo & Placido, featuring The Beatles, Ludacris, The Black Eyed Peas, Kelis, and honestly I think even more than that)
Alright, as the position of first song on the playlist might suggest, this was the first song I thought of when I began creating “Tom Lando’s Sexy Times”. In fact, this way have been one of the songs, if not THE song, which inspired me to create this playlist in the first place. So the questions is, why?
Well, carefully examining any mashup is a matter made complicated by the many songs that are… well, mashed-up to create the final product. So to begin with, there’s the first thing we hear, the instrumental track of the song, which is taken from The Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started”, which I understand was originally titled “Let’s Get Retarded”, but was then re-titled to make it suitable for radio play… You see? This is already so complicated! Look at all the punctuation in that last sentence! That’s not sexy! Anyways, say what you will about The Black Eyed Peas (like how they are fucking awful and their constant radio play ensured many painful hours of musical assault when I worked at KFC), but this song is pretty good, at least on the instrumental level. It even works really well in “Hot Tub Time Machine”, if you’ve seen that. Anyways, again, a good song with a really solid bassline.
Then comes what really sells the song for me – The Beatles! The first handful of lyrics are the opening to “Girl” by The Beatles, which are awesome (see “Across The Universe” for good exploitation of this awesome opening bit), and then they immediately run into ANOTHER Beatles song, “Run For Your Life”.
It is here that I would like to touch on what will almost certainly be a recurring element of “Make Love The Tom Lando Way” and that is – does my associating these songs with sex suggest that I might be a serial killer-in-waiting? In this particular instance, let’s look at the specific lyrics used in this song:
“Well I’d rather see you dead, little girl
Than to be with another man
You better keep your head, little girl
Or I won’t know where I am”
Then:
“Well you know that I’m a wicked guy
And I was born with a jealous mind
And I can’t spend my whole life
Trying just to make you toe the line”
And later:
“Let this be a sermon
I mean everything I’ve said
Baby, I’m determined
And I’d rather see you dead”
Among others… Now, I’m not trying to judge the lyrics of The Beatles here. Hell, way more explicit lyrics are present in the songs of the playlist. But that’s what I’m saying – What does it say about me that implicitly or explicitly violent lyrics keep appearing in the songs I associate with sex? Now is probably not the time to explore this, as we’re only one song in, but I guarantee it’ll come up again.
So, moving along, we have several more verses, mostly from hip hop artists I’m not nearly as familiar with. I know that the first rap verse is by Ludacris, and they’re super sexualized (A Ludacris song with suggestive lyrics? GASP!) so that makes sense right? Good music with a strong beat and bassline, highly sexual lyrics, and also some singing which is good but also… kind of in the vein of something a creepy psycho-sexual murderer might say? The second rap verse is by a guy who seems, judging by his lyrics, to have foot fetish; not really my thing, but whatever, those lyrics are of a sexual variety as well. Then there’s some more stuff mixed in which I not only can’t identify the origin of, but can’t really figure out the meaning of either.
Overall a track which I might even describe as “bumpin'”, whatever that means. So why did it come first? Well, I think what happened was that I was listening to it on a playlist at some point, put on some porn in another window, but found that the music kind of matched the themes of the porn, which got me thinking about how there are some songs which I feel “fit” with a sexualized context, at least way more than other songs do. Thus I got the idea for this playlist, which I eventually created, and then started looking back on and analyzing… and here we are.
2. Could You Be Love Gamed? (a mashup by DJ BC featuring Lady Gaga and Bob Marley)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X1-549m-eQ
So, when making this this playlist, since I started with a mashup my mind immediately wandered to another mashup. Since most of the mashups I know are made with a lot of club music, which seems to lend itself to sexual themes and appropriately driving rhythms, there were quite a lot to choose from. I did, however, manage to pick out a particular track. A few notes for this one: First, this song uses the lyrics from Lady Gaga’s “Love Game” (Not THAT Love Game), which is notoriously sexual, to the point where I’m still amazed it got radio play. That said, Cee-Lo’s “Fuck You” got tonnes of radio exposure, so maybe my expectations of radio censorship are behind the times. Whatever the case, it’s interesting that one of the most explicitly lines in the song, “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick,” is not even present in this mashup! I’ve considered that the connection to the original version, and my knowledge of said version, is influencing my choice of this track, but then I look at the lyrics that DO make the cut, and it’s not like the rest of the song is relatively tame.
The music is some very well remixed instrumental backing from a Bob Marley song. I remember back in high school, like Grade 10 or something, my friend Eric did some kind of exchange program which involved a French dude named Basille living with him for a while, and then Eric had to live with Basille in some French mountain village or some shit. Anyways, Basille was a crazy stoner (actually, Eric even reported that he saw Basille doing ether when he was in France), and one time a cop showed up at Eric’s place while Basille was on mushrooms… ahh, good times! Anyways, what I’m getting to is one time Basille had sex with a model in the guest room of Eric’s house while listening to Bob Marley. Obviously, being in Grade 10, this was kind of a thing to us. What a feat! Anyways, I wonder if this has subconciously put the idea in my head that Bob Marley is good music for having sex. I have no idea. In fact, overall I would disagree. But this brings me to another consideration that I feel is bound to come up again throughout the examination of this playlist.
See, when I think about it, maybe Bob Marley IS good music to have sex to – for NORMAL people. What does that mean? Well, when I imagine the sex I would have while this playlist is playing… it’s not “normal” sex per se. Like, I don’t imagine two people in a healthy relationship having sex to this music. It is in this that it occurs to me that this playlist entails a certain type of sex, perhaps a kind of sex reserved for one night stands and other such flings.
This is where YOU, the reader, come in. I have a survey of sorts for anyone who listens to this playlist. I’ll be asking these two questions at the end of all articles in this series. They are:
1. Would you have sex to the music in this playlist?
2. If so, would you have sex with a commited long-term partner to this music, or with a one-night stand? Or both? Or neither? If neither, explain under what circumstances you would have sex to the music in this playlist.
And as I said, these questions come AT THE END of each of these articles, and thus I will leave things at that for now. Hopefully when I write the next chapter in this series, I will have some responses regarding the survey!