Who came up with the phrase, ‘sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll’?
Like many phrases that come to define an era, ‘sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll’ did not arrive fully formed. We now recognise it as a wry ideology, but to begin with, it was closer to a ruddy diagnosis.
In a 1969 edition of Life, the writer Edward Kern asked, ‘Can It Happen Here?’
Beneath that rather open-ended headline, he mused: “Almost certainly not. Despite all the turmoil in America – the chaos on the campuses, the uprisings in the ghettos, the threats to burn the country down – it is almost impossible to imagine the US undergoing a violent political revolution”.
Later in the piece, he fatefully decreed: “The counterculture has its sacraments in sex, drugs and rock”, rather than revolt. To Kern, the upswell of pop culture was simply a hedonistic subversion rather than a genuine political force. So, rather than encapsulate the movement with a wry slogan, he simply looked to deride it.
But his phrase, like the revolution in many ways, went nowhere. Vitally, also like the revolution, it lacked rhythm. ‘Sex, drugs and rock’ just doesn’t flow that well; it’s lacking the roll.
Putting the ‘roll’ into counterculture encapsulation?
This stilted triplet would later be polished up in a 1971 piece in The Spectator, with the publication opining, “Not for nothing is the youth culture characterized by sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll”. This may well be the first time we see the phrase used in earnest. However, the conservative sentiment of the piece meant that it never really caught on from there, either.
It seems notable that these early uses of the phrase are academic in tone and come from outside the movement. The counterculture movement had never self-applied it at this point. In this regard, it wasn’t even really a phrase. It was descriptive rather than declarative. It lingered outside of the musical zeitgeist and simply looked in. But all that was set to change.
The first use of ‘sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll in song?
At the time, music was the driving force of the zeitgeist, and it would be music that brought the phrase’s inevitable mainstream assimilation to fruition. And it all came about thanks to good old Ian Dury. “It’s the groove really, a rhythm pattern, and a certain tempo,” he said about his songwriting, “And the words find their own tempo, and it’s usually the right one. If it means a certain thing, you’ll say it or you’ll sing it in the same tempo every time”.
In other words, there is an inherent poetry to phrasing that materialises itself in music. For instance, take the following verse – if you read it aloud, you can gauge the melody from the prose alone without ever having even heard the song:
“Home improvement expert
Ian Dury
Harold Hill of Harold Hill
Of do-it-yourself dexterity
And double-glazing skill
Came home to find another gentleman’s kippers in the grill
So sanded off his winkle
With his Black and Decker drill”
That might showcase Dury’s wordplay dexterity, but it was his knack for iconography, coupled with his knowledge that if something means “a certain thing” it’ll carry its own tempo, that etched his work into history. And so, his track with The Blockheads, ‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’, crystallised the sacraments of counterculture in a melody that would stick.
As a result, Ian Dury found himself in the Oxford English Dictionary as the originator of the phrase.
What does ‘sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll’ really mean, then?
Interestingly, the song itself doesn’t focus on the three elements in the title. Instead, it uses them to symbolise the notion of an ‘alternative lifestyle’ depicted in the riddle-like verses. In many ways, this is a more fitting usage of the phrase than literally focusing on the triplet. The abstraction is precisely why SDRnR has endured. It doesn’t describe behaviour so much as it encodes a mood. The words are signifiers that point beyond themselves.
Even a study in Human Ethology looked to determine whether the phrase did, indeed, have a literal connotation. “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll (SDRR) is a storied trilogy in popular culture,” it began. “However, in scientific literature, there is little empirical evidence to determine if there is a positive relationship between these three phenomena, despite biological, psychological, and social reasons that would suggest they are connected.”
While the study did, interestingly, find a slight connection, “particularly among male performers and female listeners of rock and ‘harder’ music”, it also concluded that the “evidence was limited”. In essence, it seems even scientific evidence points towards the fact that the phrase relates more to a general non-conformist subversion than anything else.
After all, even though the Ian Dury & The Blockheads song was released in 1977, it harked back to the beginnings of counterculture, which was not primarily about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll but simply going about life in a different fashion to the war-scourged era that they had grown up in.
It just so happened that as their revolution arose, it coincided with pop culture, the pill, and an onslaught of psychedelics. Thus, this triumvirate became an umbrella of the revolution that took about 15 years and the mind of Ian Dury to hone into a tagline.
Oh, and as for its famed first utterance, well, Dury rattles it off right out of the block with the opening seconds (and as is always the case with the ‘Mandela-effect-like’ twists and turns of modern culture, it arrived with a few vogue ‘ands’ thrown in for good measure)…
“Sex and drugs and rock and roll
Ian Dury, 1977
Is all my brain and body need
Sex and drugs and rock and roll
Very good indeed”
