5 YouTube Music Videos That Suck the Fun Out of Sex
YouTube is filled with music videos from nobodies who still sing about sex as though it's something they have to tolerate. They sing about sex because they think they have to, but they are mean to it, they are dismissive of it and they do their best to just suck the magic out of it for anyone watching.
Music icons must be sick to death of sex. At some point I assume every rock star, every hip-hop mogul, every first chair flutist has to reach a tipping point where the joy of riding people silly stops feeling like a perk and starts to feel like a chore. Sex, after all, is as intrinsic to their job as angst, drugs and eyeliner. I can certainly sympathize. I worked in a restaurant for a year where I could have all the free pizza I wanted, and sure enough, within four months I was sickened just by the thought of having to nail any of my co-workers again. The point being that swapping forensics loses its luster when it's thrusting at you from all directions. It's the reason that every music video featuring writhing, half-naked models will also show a famous musician just wandering through the mess, looking listless and bored. Here, we'll let this Nelly album cover illustrate:
"Meh."
But I'm always amazed by the young artists who have gained no purchase in fame, yet insist on being just as careless with sexuality as real celebrities. YouTube is filled with music videos from nobodies who sing about sex as though it's something they have to tolerate. They sing about sex because they think they have to, but they are mean to it, they are dismissive of it and they do their best to just suck the magic out of it for anyone watching. I for one don't believe these people. I don't think they have a surplus of sex stored away somewhere, and I'm calling their bluff. The following five are the worst offenders, and if you happen to know one of these artists personally, please sit down and ask him or her to try to be a little nicer, a little gentler with my favorite pastime.
"Pound on My Muffin" -- Shira
Prepare yourself as this music video whisks you away on an adventure in logic jumps. If you forgot to pack a suitcase, no problem -- Shira is carrying plenty of baggage in her face. In fact, for the sake of clarity, before watching this video you should know that the "muffin" being pounded is apparently a metaphor for "vagina" in the world she's created, and not "face and head," as you might have assumed. Also, muffins and cupcakes are synonymous here. I'm telling you this now because Shira doesn't give you any time to stop and marvel at these glaring holes in common sense, not when there's all that muffin pounding to get to.
The music video opens with Shira singing "I know you miss this muffin" while carrying a cupcake into a bakery. The proprietor looks at the cupcake, smells it, decides he likes the scent of heavy-handed symbolism and makes a shockingly bad business decision by paying money to someone else for a product he exclusively sells. Only 20 seconds in and already I'm nauseous with confusion. In the rest of the song, Shira rides around on top of a Camaro rapping through the thinly veiled analogy of desserts about how much guys like physically abusing her genitals. As a guy, I'm pretty confident that neither one of us would actually enjoy that. Shira really has to hate sex to think this adequately describes intercourse. It's the most halfhearted and depressing offer of sexuality to an audience since the ass-to-ass scene in Requiem for a Dream
.
Crowning Moment in Sexual Misery:
As Shira furiously grinds and sweats through the chorus, insisting that guys want nothing more than to pound on her muffin, the shots are interspersed with a man, fully clothed, dead asleep.
The face of o'erflowing lust.
"Diggin It" -- Hayla
With choreographed dancing, costume changes and fire handlers, "Diggin It" could easily be mistaken for a real music video, at least in the brief moments where the camera is too far away to see Hayla's face. Now, your first thought as you watch this may be (as mine was), "Oh hey, my mom's friend made a music video." That's not the case. Hayla just has a look to her that's common among older women, due almost exclusively to the fact that she is really really old.
Sadly, all the location changes, the elaborate set design and the young backup dancers can't mask the fact that this music video is unquestionably one last, desperate grasp of an aging woman at sexual relevance. Her face is so bloated with collagen that it looks like she's allergic to rapping.
"Do either of you have some Benadryl in your purse?"
Incidentally, Hayla tries to squeeze every genre of music into one song, and she even throws in an air siren, just in case that's what kids are into these days. But the most uncomfortable aspect of this video is, hands down, the aggressive sexuality. She slips around on a leather couch that's roughly the same texture as her skin, rubbing her legs together and singing about how she wants to own tonight. Then she strips down to a midriff top and hot pants to dance and stare you down, just like your mom's friend Cheryl did when you were back at home during that summer break from college. She said no one would have to know, but you would know
. You would always know.
"Oh, also. Will you tell your mom I won't be at the book club this week?"
Crowning Moment in Sexual Misery:
One of the pivotal lines in the song is "The bigger the dick-ah, the quick-ah." It's never really clear what exactly is getting proportionally quicker with the size of a dick-ah, so we're left to terrify ourselves with the possibilities. I'm going to assume she means stem-cell research for geriatric immortality.
"Jingle Bells Swag" -- Money Boy
If you've found yourself thinking "Christmas is a great holiday and all, but it would be 10 times better if it just had more insinuations of hardcore sex," then Money Boy made this song for you. His verses are all in German, but he has tapped into the universal language of Christmas humping, so nothing is lost on the viewer.
While I admire the ambitiousness of trying to squeeze sex and holiday spirit into such tiny Santa outfits, "Jingle Bells Swag" is a nice reminder that just because something is ambitious doesn't mean it's a good idea. Even if your impetus for celebrating Christmas isn't structured around religion, it's a holiday that's synonymous with families coming together, and trying to hogtie sex to that tradition feels gross. Granted, it has its touching moments. Money Boy notices at 1:57 that his friend doesn't have a bra on, so, being thoughtful, he gives her one for Christmas at 2:17. But any semblance of real-life relationships devolves pretty quickly when he gives the other girl a bra, too, just 15 seconds later, and no one is upset about that fact. Instead, the girls strip for him and they all share some seasonal drink in plastic cups. Jingle Bells Swag, indeed.
Crowning Moment in Sexual Misery:
While singing "Merry Merry Christmas," Money Boy stuffs bills into the underwear of a stripper. It's particularly sad because until this point I had assumed they were at least acquaintances, but in a single act it's clear that Money Boy is spending Christmas with strippers and paying them to be there. Suddenly it's the saddest Christmas song I've ever heard.
"If Its True" -- R..A..E..D
At first blush, "If Its True" seems like it's deliberately insulting every one of your senses at once. This video goes wrong in every direction right from the start; production value, premise, editing and lyrics all fight over which one gets to be the shittiest part. Still, I'm asking you to look past all of that for now and really concentrate on R..A..E..D's ham-fisted mishandling of sex, because it's really spectacular.
Now, if you managed to get through more than three minutes of R..A..E..D's panicked mumbling, then congratulations, you got to see a healthy dose of real women stripping in what they probably hoped would be a legitimate music video. Even all of our collective sympathy could never outweigh the embarrassment these girls surely felt when the camera started rolling and a sweaty R..A..E..D turned his hat sideways before launching into his five-and-a-half-minute asthma attack. You can even see the humiliation plastered on their faces as they crawl around and swing on poles. They are doing everything within their power to somehow strip this mess into a better song, and it's just not working. In a single music video, R..A..E..D inadvertently attaches more shame to sex than any religion ever could. He steamrolls over any subtlety, any playful eroticism, and ends up sounding like a flustered kid talking to himself while working up the courage to ask a girl to literally spread her legs.
Crowning Moment in Sexual Misery:
"Muhfee crum pah mess IS IT TRUUUUUE?"
At 2:18, the camera angle shifts between the stripper's legs, and it's the first time the woman and R..A..E..D are in the same shot. Before this moment, we could have assumed that these poor strippers didn't know they were part of a train wreck, but at this moment it had to be crystal clear for them. She had to see him sing. A grown woman had to stand there with a camera between her legs as this nightmare unfolded right in front of her. A nightmare with which she would forever be affiliated and which she was helpless to stop.
"Grippin That Daddy" -- BrookerT
"Grippin That Daddy," from start to finish, feels like a reading comprehension test for robots on human sexuality. All the right elements are present -- temptation, passion, jealousy, pregnancy, lust -- but they're all thrown together like a meal in a blender. It is the clumsiest and most confused approach to seduction I've ever seen in a music video. Speaking of which, fair warning, if the prospect of penis mutilation by way of fabric scissors sounds unappealing to you, don't watch the very end.
While sex as a concept is certainly present, everything feels slightly off about it: The man gets pregnant, he's assaulted by his girlfriend/wife when he tells her and BrookerT grows increasingly more jealous and insecure throughout the song, all while rapping about what a sensational lay she is. Every aspect of the plot contradicts the lyrics of the song, plus BrookerT's relentless insistence that she's "tight" starts to feel suspiciously like a trap by the third verse. I wouldn't be surprised if in the last scene of the video, her wig fell slightly askew, revealing that she's actually some kind of male milking contraption designed to gather human sperm for fuel on behalf of the machines.
Crowning Moment in Sexual Misery:
After running out of similes for her snare-like vagina (vaginoose -- you're welcome, BrookerT), she spends the last few seconds of the video chasing her pregnant boyfriend around with scissors, then knocks him down and cuts off his genitals. BrookerT earned the No. 1 spot on this list because I don't feel any shame in saying that she terrifies me. I'm not even sure it's possible to intentionally misrepresent human sexuality as thoroughly as she has here.
"Trust me, I'm really a lot of fun."
You can follow Soren on Twitter or allow him to seduce you on Tumblr.
