Introduction

This special issue for Porn Studies was conceived while I was grappling with the question of what makes something erotic or pornographic. I deal specifically with chanteys, sailing work songs of the sea, and my question began to evolve into a deeper inquiry that stretched out into other musical genres and spaces. I was curious about not just how we define erotic or pornographic music: I was interested in what makes music sensual, erotic, and even pornographic. How do we gesture at sensuality in musical space? How do we write sex into our music? Is sexuality and eroticism bound up with music-making? How do we define the erotic? In my own work, I think very deeply about the connections between and among breath, body, voice, and action and also what the connections or intersections mean and communicate. To me, music is intimately bound to the expression of self and even forms a kind of erotic act. I first began to consider the corporeality and potential sensuality of music through the work of Roland Barthes in his ‘Grain of the Voice’ where he notes that ‘The “grain” [of the voice] is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue: perhaps the letter, almost certainly significance’ (Barthes 1977, 182; original emphasis). He is speaking here about vocal utterance, that within language is the very grain of meaning-making. It is an embodied action that is meaning itself. The work of Dominic Symonds deepens Barthes’ writing and connects it specifically to music where he opines that ‘we perhaps lose sight of the central correlative that infuses music (vocalization, utterance) with meaning at the very origin of human sound: its relationship to and expression of human corporeality’ (Symonds 2007, 175). Music is a sensual, embodied expression: it is an act that accesses almost all of our senses and is meaning-making in action, but it is also stimulating, arousing, provocative, and evocative. We have to think about music, and music-making, as something intimately bound up with the body, our bodies, connecting with the world around us.

The articles that are part of this special issue converge in thinking about music and pornography as well as music and eroticism. Chiefly, they investigate the ways in which music is embodied and embodying, how songs and different genres participate in meaning-making, the implications of race/class/gender/sexuality in specific contexts, the conflation of sensuality and eroticism, as well as the situatedness of song and genre and the impact of context on specific exchanges. Taken together, the articles weave together a complicated response to how eroticism and music join and demonstrate the ways in which music and the erotic infiltrate and are even imbedded within our daily lives. The music and sound that each author investigates are each certainly embodied, as Barthes outlines, but the specific contribution these articles make is in demonstrating that the embodiment is not only a physical reality. They prove that music is an embodied action predicated on the period in which songs are sung, influenced by the individuals participating in the music-making and sharing, embedded and influenced by the context in which the sounds and genres happen, and are evolving, just as the nature of music-making is an evolving practice. Songs, music, and even sound-making, thus, are embodied by the physicality, but they also carry a weight and an arguable body of their own through the specific and almost sentient ways in which they infiltrate space, culture, history, and future.

The contributions to this special issue first consider the power of language, song, and meaning-making. Whether we are considering pornicorridos or the connection between the Wah pedal/racism/pornography, porn discourse as call and response, or chanteys as bawdy cultural objects, the conversations generated are ones that ask scholars to consider the inherent sensuality and communicative power of music and sound, but especially imbedded meanings, circulations, and the taken for granted. When thinking about Seth Wilder’s investigation of the Wah pedal and its attachment to memes and immediate cultural associations, we are asked to make a deeper inquiry into the tie between and among racism, sexuality, music, and cultural consciousnesses that are so taken for granted, so woven into the fabric of our lives that we do not consider the origins or what those connections ultimately communicate within the wider culture. In ‘A Baadasssss Song: The Wah Pedal, a Porn Meme, and the Blaxploitation Sonotope’, Wilder writes that ‘Beyond representing a soundtrack, this onomatopoeia [“bow-chicka-bow-wow”] has become a signifier for hardcore pornography, even sex itself’. In the USA, and arguably elsewhere, this sonic signifier makes sense because it is rooted in our cultural consciousness: it is a product of our culture and is a product that shapes culture. Understanding where the onomatopoeia derived exposes the racist undertones of the cultural joke, just as highlighting hegemonic discourse in pornography uncovers the pervasive quality of hierarchical understandings of sex in gay male pornography that Steven Dashiell investigates in his contribution ‘“You Feel That?” Examining Gay Porn Discourse as Hegemonic Discursive Soundtrack’. Dashiell’s work asks that we think about pornography differently, arguably queering the way that we view music and discourse within pornographic scenes. He looks to the taken-for-granted aspects of pornography, the exchanges between partners, to understand how those discourses create meaning, articulate hierarchical positions, and further embed a hegemonic idea of erotic position and ordering. Looking only at the exchanges themselves, we potentially gloss over what we are experiencing and do not necessarily see the musicality of the discourse nor the imbedded hegemonic quality inherent. There is a music, arguably, a connecting song, between Dashiell and Wilder in that they make the familiar strange; they ask that we listen closely to the images and objects that surround us to understand how they work to shape our perception of the world.

Category and demarcating space are each also distinct parts of the research included in this special issue. Definitions matter, meaning matters, and understanding how items function within and impact space are each predicated on understanding what a musical item is, as well as the varying parts of its history and also its attachment to the world outside it. My own work, ‘“The Words Which Sailor John Put to Them When Unrestrained Were the Verist Filth”: Situating Chanteys in the Field of Porn Studies’, in discussing the lines that divide pornography and bawdry seeks to underscore the ways in which meaning-making occurs at the categorical level, the way by which content is actually shaped by the categorical framework placed on it. Indeed, we might think about all of the investigative pieces in this issue as highlighting the ways in which song, music, and pornography are actively a part of shaping discourse and social space, making meanings and impacting our conceptions of and relationships with the genres. Yessica Hernandez’s work, ‘A Vulgar Folklore: The Pornographic Fantasies of Pornocorridos’, accomplishes a similar demarcating of space where she investigates the arrival, evolution, and cultural-situatedness of pornocorridos, songs arguably similar to bawdy chanteys, and communicates the entrenched misogyny and sexual expectation in the songs. Hernandez advances the discussion, however, through introducing scholars to the current rise in female pornocorridos artists who are using the framework of this primarily male-dominated genre to carve out a new niche for female singers and their conceptions of sensuality and sex. These female-generated songs privilege a female-centred eroticism that explores sexuality in a similar fashion to the male pornocorridos singers, but functions to re-centre the female experience that is often violently cast aside in male versions of songs. Her work succeeds in demonstrating not only the importance of definitions, but also showcasing how power is garnered through understanding a particular genre and then appropriating it to combat the misogyny and sexism that was a part of the tradition historically. In order to accomplish such a task, singers need to understand the framework, the characteristics of the genre, in the same way that critical research into the chantey genre necessitates a firm understanding of the categories that attend that content.

Categorizing content, of course, aids in the process of meaning-making, and all of these articles gesture at the incredible importance and complexity of meaning-making through specific types, genres, and connections to musical space. Each of the contributors delves deeply into some aspect of meaning-making, within the context of song and pornography, but they do so in thinking about how the linguistic content, music itself, and even the reverberating impact of that musicality reaches out beyond the sound event itself. We filter into our songs and music our own emotions, feelings, and experiences, and in their circulation and consumption these sound events both recycle and shape cultural space. What the contributors are able to expose are the ways in which social perceptions are visited within song and musical space primarily because music provides a release valve for cultural anxieties, emotions, and sensations abounding from those perceptions. Wilder’s work clearly outlines how racism, sexism, and classism are bound up within the onomatopoeia ‘bow-chicka-bow-wow’ and how that joke or meme functions to ease some of the discomfort inherent in connections between hardcore pornography, Blaxploitation, and fears of urban cultures. Similarly, Hernandez connects to some of these same discomforts, visited within songs, where she contends that ‘pornocorridos transgress anxieties about sexual morality’. The songs literally are spaces through which singers grapple with the uncomfortable realities that attend their perceptions of sex, sexuality, wider society, and even the world, and they succeed in both venting those fears in song but also in recycling narratives and circulating them within and outside social groups. This process of filtering and circulation and even embedded nature has real and lasting implications on the people, spaces, and places that are refracted within those images.

In Wilder, Dashiell, and Hernandez, it is apparent that meaning-making and comfort occurs often at the expense of someone else, at the expense of certain spaces that are often erased in later iterations of those cultural objects. Hernandez aids in highlighting how one particular sub-culture of music paved the way for both the expression of an erotic curiosity, especially for men and young boys, but also how that was at the expense of young women and girls who eventually took up the same genre of music in order to regain a level of power and agency. In Dashiell’s work, this meaning-making is taken directly to the speech-act itself as it is couched within the framework of finite time, space, and engagement. His work asks that we consider the ways in which meaning is imbedded both in the utterance and also in the setting and how those utterances often recycle narratives of bottoms as being subservient and subordinated to the top. Indeed, within those constructions are the attending gendered interpretations of those positions where the subordinate is feminized to the more masculine and demanding top. Meaning-making, in what I have observed in chanteys, occurs at the level of categorization, as I discuss in the article; however, these cultural objects also attach in many ways to the work of Wilder, Dashiell, and Hernandez. They are call and response, they are embodied, they are insulated and protected, meaning that they are used in a finite space by specific individuals. Apparent within these sound events are the ideas and perceptions of hierarchies, erotic worlds, power, agency, and hegemony, among so many other readings. These analytical perspectives contribute to the conversation concerning how music functions to recycle, but also influence a culture like ‘pornocorridos [function] as a bonding experience’ and as ‘an opportunity to talk and laugh about sex’ – but they also directly impact the ways in which men and women view themselves and others in the sexual enterprise. They are keen investigations and observations concerning the collision of the pornographic and the cultural. They demonstrate the degree to which one might experience the pornographic in the everyday. Whether we are looking specifically at pornography, or music focused on erotic acts, or musical by-products of pornography that have infiltrated social worlds, it is apparent that meaning-making occurs even in those spaces that appear relatively self-explanatory.

Finally, the articles included in this special issue draw attention to how sound functions as a register of meaning. Just as Dashiell argues that ‘Sound and music play important parts of the pornographic experience’, each of the other contributors demonstrate the complex interworking of sound and meaning. For Dashiell, sound of discourse and type of discourse combine against the backdrop of the pornographic landscape to support a hierarchical rendering of sexual positions. The sound of the onomatopoeia ‘bow-chicka-bow-wow’ ‘has become a sonic signifier for hardcore pornography and even sex itself’, demonstrating in a similar way to Dashiell’s work that sounds, utterances, and music are registers and also generators of meaning. Pornocorridos and chanteys similarly attach to the function of sound, but do so in thinking about how the content and context of songs facilitate bonding and connection, and register meaning. The sounds of the words as they are being sung attach to history and culture: music is language and language is music. Hernandez mentions that many pornocorridos from Grupo Marrano ‘are packaged as pornographic texts that use lyricism and vocality, especially moaning, to conjure images of sexual acts and sexual scenarios’. The wedding of erotic lyrics and the soundscapes of sex each meld together not only to articulate the types of music, but appear to also orchestrate the ways in which sex and sexuality should be viewed and deployed.

In my work with chanteys, I have always been conscious of the ways in which sound and meaning come together to actively work on those who employ work songs. Indeed, that sentiment is what opened this introduction to this special issue. The sound of the chanteyman’s voice, as he sings out the first lines of song, signals to the other men that it is time to fall into line with both the song and the task at hand. The voice and the breath and the body are one, and there is meaning-making both in the sound of the voice, in the words that are sung, and in their application to the work that the sailor is expected to perform. These songs potentially shape and articulate the ways sailing men viewed the world, but more pointedly they shaped the actions and collectivity that was occurring within that present moment and among a particular group of men. As each of these scholars demonstrate throughout this special issue of Porn Studies, song unites and connects, but it also shapes the way we view the world and registers our own individual interpretations of it.

When it comes to erotic spaces and experiences, we are touching on perhaps the most intimate parts of ourselves and our desires, venting into the spaces of song and sound the myriad ways sex and sexuality are experienced and lived. This is what makes investigation into song such a powerful venture in that it focuses critical lenses on everyday musicality and what it might tell us about our collective experiences. Pornocorridos sung in Mexico, memes of the Wah pedal, gay pornographic discourse, and bawdy chanteys sung at sea are each snapshots into the complex ways in which song infiltrates culture but, more importantly, are representative of the connection between these objects and sounds, bodies, sensualities, circulations, and an embedded cultural experience of sex and sexuality. As I note in my own work, ‘Collections of erotic song are valuable artefacts that a particular group of individuals created, using the materials and language they had at their disposal, in a very specific and finite space and period of time’ and they can communicate so much to the scholarly world concerning erotic worlds and meaning-making.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.