The 1960 hit Chubby Checker crowned “the dirtiest song” ever recorded
Rock and roll has always had a sexual element to its content, but it hasn’t always been so overt. Back in the early days, for instance, the fight for radio play and mainstream consumption meant that its sexual content had to be dressed up in innuendo or knowing winks, as Chubby Checker found out with his defining hit.
You have to feel for Chubby Checker; after years of toiling for a hit, ‘The Twist’ launched him into the rock mainstream, but its colossal success meant that his subsequent efforts were forced into a corner of twist-based sequels or similarly novelty dance songs, in a vain attempt to recapture that success. His label, Cameo-Parkway, likely meant well with those subsequent efforts, but it seems as though even they didn’t cotton on to the obvious subtext of that 1960 single.
On one level, ‘The Twist’ is the archetypal dance craze song, ushering in a new dancefloor movement and nothing more; these songs were, after all, ten-a-penny during the early days of rock and roll, and still persist to this day. However, if you take even a cursory glance at the lyrics, it is easy to suggest that the track isn’t to be enjoyed exclusively on the dancefloor.
“Daddy’s just sleepin’ and mama ain’t around, we’re gonna twisty, twisty, twisty, ’til we tear the house down,” for instance, doesn’t require much interpretation.
“It was probably the dirtiest song that was recorded,” Checker himself admitted during a 2015 chat with the Toronto Sun. Then again, it didn’t really matter how dirty the song was, because Checker never expected it to become the colossal smash hit it ended up as.
“The kids in the inner city came up with this little move,” he recalled, “And I saw an opportunity in a song that was never going to be heard again and a dance that no one was going to see.”
Much to his surprise, though, people did see that dance, in their millions. Following an appearance on American Bandstand, the song became a nationwide craze, and it didn’t take overly long for its influence to spread across the Atlantic to the UK, either.
“I went on and in two minutes and 42 seconds, not only did we transform Bandstand, we transformed the dancefloor,” Checker beamed.
According to the performer, that dance-floor revolution was explicitly sexual in nature: “Because now, I am looking at the lady, the lady’s looking at me, she’s exploiting her sexuality in front of me, and I’m doing the same thing.” Luckily, the censors were completely oblivious to the sexual nature of ‘The Twist’, else they might have stifled its chances of mainstream success, and it certainly wouldn’t have appeared on Bandstand.
Then again, the fact that only Checker and the kids on the dancefloor recognised the inherent sexuality in the track meant that the performer was doomed to record a plethora of other would-be dance craze tracks, each more a novelty and less successful than the last. Inevitably, then, Chubby Checker was rarely considered in the same category as the more ‘serious’, authentic rock and roll artists of the day.
Putting his subsequent career aside, though, not many artists could claim the same all-encompassing influence on the dancefloors of the Western world as Chubby Checker during the height of ‘The Twist’, regardless of whether mainstream audiences recognised its sexual subtext.
