‘My Girl’s Pussy’, 1931: Has music always been obsessed with sex?
Lyrics are viewed differently depending on who you’re speaking to. For many people, the lyrics of a song are an essential part, as they can match the tone of a track with its overriding theme, speaking to a listener’s emotions and making their internal thoughts feel heard. For others, the lyrics don’t matter as much, as many modern shoegaze outfits use nonsense words as another layer of instrumentation, the actual words not meaning anything but the sound they make being the important thing. Finally, some people use lyrics as a means of desire, objectifying words entrenched in each line as fantasies of sexual favours are fulfilled in song.
As time progresses, culture changes; with those changes, what is and isn’t deemed acceptable to write about varies. For instance, a lot of music these days focuses predominantly on objectification and sex. In contrast, at another time, the mere mention of sex will have been enough for people to roll their eyes at some lyrics and ban a track from seeing the airwaves. However, the overriding theme has always been present in music; it was disguised as a metaphor.
Now, though explicit lyrics might still be met with some controversy, they are more widely accepted. They can be seen especially in hip-hop, a lyric-heavy genre where artists aren’t afraid to go into detail about what they would like to do to someone / have someone do to them.
For instance, in Ludacris’s track ‘Splash Waterfalls’, he doesn’t hold back in talking about sex in a way that is very on the nose. The hook looped throughout are the repeated words, “Make love to me / fuck me,” while Ludacris says lyrics along the lines of, “They want it now and fast / grabbing and smacking ass / you gotta make it last.”
As a general rule, how such explicit lyrics have been delivered is from the point of view of a man singing about a woman. People usually are pretty happy to let such language slide, but recently, in music, as the world is dragged kicking and screaming into becoming a more progressive and open-minded place, artists are gradually becoming more comfortable mixing up that dynamic depending on their sexual preferences. This means that people of different genders now write about sex, which, though it can still lead to hits, isn’t as welcome.
In 2020, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion caused controversy with their song ‘WAP,’ which stands for ‘Wet Ass Pussy’. Here, both rappers spoke openly with lyrics like, “From the top, make it drop, that’s some wet ass pussy / get a bucket and a mop, that’s some wet ass pussy”. There was outrage at the song, with people saying that the use of such lyrics was TMI and that music should revert to how it used to be. Well, when we look back at how music used to be, it turns out that the use of the word “pussy” is nothing new.
Back in 1931, Harry Roy and his Orchestra released a track called ‘My Girls Pussy’. In those days, explicit mentions of sex would be shut down as quickly as they could be sung, and as such, tracks were laced with metaphor. At the beginning of the song, there are cat noises, implying the pussy being sung about is a pet. He also references “my girl’s pussy” as his “pet”, saying, “I stroke it every chance I get”. Maybe the naïve would buy the metaphor and look the other way at these double entendres, but as the track progresses, it becomes painfully apparent what Roy is singing about.
Lines like, “It’s never dirty, always clean / in giving thrills, never mean / but it’s the best I’ve ever seen / It’s my girls pussy,” and “Often it goes out at night / returns at break of dawn / no matter what the weather’s like / it’s always nice and warm.” The song’s lyrics may as well read, “I like having sex with my girlfriend, I put my penis in her vagina, and it’s lovely.”
It’s hard to trace back what lyrics started what specific movements, but the idea that profanity and sexual objectification in music is a new thing is absurd. ‘My Girls Pussy’ is one old song out of many that specifically refers to sex, just in a more subtle way than we see it now. A lot of the time, people’s attitudes towards specific lyrics highlight their biases as opposed to showing their artistic integrity. For as long as music has been around, so too have songs about sex, as Harry Roy and his girls pussy can attest to.
