Which musician has won the ‘Bad Sex in Fiction Award’?
Even worse than the unscary horror or laugh-free comedy is a badly executed depiction of sex.
Be it Hollywood or literature, it takes a skilled artist to capture human sexuality in all its sensual charge and emotional resonance, for a lot can go wrong.
All potential steam can be sucked out of the affair by the use of an atrocious euphemism or coldly fixating on the base, biological functions at play. Readers turned off by crass shoehorning, stifling a titter at impossible acts of acrobatics, or lapsing into trite clichés that fail to light any amorous fires.
Such galumphs into awful eroticism were waded into by the Literary Review. Since 1993, the magazine had bestowed the dubious ‘Bad Sex in Fiction Award’ before calling it quits in 2020 after the masses had been “subjected to too many bad things this year”, but had stepped up to the tall task of wading through each year’s failed stabs at sexy “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”.
Since then, a roll-call of literary and journalistic big names has found themselves the red-faced ‘winner’ of the Literary Review’s booby-prize, Melvyn Bragg, AA Gill, Norman Mailer, and Rachel Johnson, just a few of many that grace the bad sex hall of shame, but is it fair?
While it may seem all in good fun, critics have argued that such ridicule can deter perfectly talented and well-meaning writers from taking that risk and tackling the hugely complex and often politically necessary terrain of the sexual realm. It took a while, but a musician eventually found themselves lumped with the unceremonious gong. While a few had signed up to present, including Marianne Faithfull, Sting, and Kim Wilde, only one big name of popular music walked away with the trophy of untitillation.
So, which musician has won the ‘Bad Sex in Fiction Award’?
He’d already rubbed the critics the wrong way with his insistence on a prestigious Penguin Classics-style branding on early editions, but Morrissey’s first foray into the world of literature with 2015’s List of the Lost was met with near-universal derision.
A stream of consciousness style novel about a 1970s Boston relay team haunted by an accidental death, the former Smiths frontman found himself on the receiving end of a volley of critical scathing, from accusations of pitying self-indulgence to crafting a scarcely coherent plot. But it was the sex that caught Literary Review’s attention, gleefully highlighting the bafflingly unsexy hawker as their case in point for that year’s prizewinner:
“Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.”
“Bulbous salutation” is certainly a choice, and it’s hard not to imagine Eliza suffering from an unfortunate medical condition with her barrel-rolled mammaries. Morrissey’s flowery verbiage works wonders on most of The Smiths’ indie songbook, but despite having penned some of the stirring and witty love songs in popular music, List of the Lost’s jump into literary sex merely leaves a “pained frenzy” at trying to glean what the fuck he was thinking over even the faintest pique of titillation.
