Love jam

[imomus]

Pop and porn have always been on a continuum with each other; sex, after all, is a major and perfectly legitimate element in most pop culture. The I Love Music forum currently has a thread going entitled Top Howevermany Transparent Sex Barely-Even-Euphemisms in Pop Music in case you need reminding of that fact. One of the many tragedies of the current Michael Jackson trial in California is the fact that, however it turns out, Michael will be culturally emasculated; he will never again be able to hiss and yelp out the sexual innuendos that once powered his music. Considering that he's a true genius of pop, and that the true genius of pop is sex, this will truly be a loss to the world, and a victory only for the new puritans -- the same people who reacted so violently to his sister Janet's "wardrobe malfunction" and made it part of their pre-election "culture wars" last year.



In Japan, a culture much less hung up about sex than the US, the continuum between porno and pop flows with much less turbulence. Culture stores like Book Off, Tsutaya and Village Vanguard shelve their stock with a smooth, unanxious transition from the "pure" to the "impure", the sexless to the sexy. Although there have recently been concerns in Japan about the too-easy availability of porn products to children, it's generally accepted that sex is part of the normal commercial landscape and doesn't do much harm. I'd say that, just as America's attitude has a lot to do with Christianity, Japan's is the result of their combination of a detachment religion (Buddhism) with a fertility and nature religion (Shinto).

Let's jam a bit further on this riff. When Avex recording artist Ai Otsuka released her Love Jam album last year, it was accompanied by a major poster campaign showing Ai's faced spattered suggestively with globs of jam. We don't need to call a semiologist to decode the sexual meaning of the Love Jam campaign, but just in case we missed it, porn site 100% Douga has Photoshopped the fig leaf (or should we say "the jam jar"?) of metaphor away entirely, reminding us that the fruit from which we make jam is nothing more than an attractive, glossy distribution system cunningly devised by strawberry plants to spread their DNA. They have quite a bit to teach us about pop marketing, those strawberries.

Comments

[alisgray.livejournal.com]

well, the other difference being that Janet J. had a renaissance of fame, whereas if her brother is convicted, he's quite likely to be murdered in prison.

our Michael hasn't sizzled as a sex object in the popular imagination for a very long time now. he's been busy building himself a totally different mystique.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Then again, neither Gary Glitter nor that pop producer convicted for paedophilia were murdered in prison. Perhaps celebrity kiddie-diddlers tend to get more protection than your average paedo.

[alisgray.livejournal.com]

Mr. Glitter appears to have been convicted 1) of child pornography, not of rape; still a serious charge, but not the same thing at all, 2) to have served his sentence in the United Kingdom, not the United States, 3) and his subject matter wasn't homosexual. The articles I found made it sound as if he felt more unsafe outside of prison.

Though frankly I hope you're right. Celebrity seems to have been pretty fatal lately for at least one Catholic priest convicted of molesting boys. I'll grant you that Jeff Dahlmer was probably in a different security level with different inmates, but he had 24 hour body guards and was murdered pretty quickly as well.