Nineteen years ago my family and I went to stay with my uncle and aunt in Boston for the summer. I was just fourteen: gawky, awkward and very far from at ease with myself. America was everything I imagined it would be from the books I read and the films I watched. One warm evening my cousins (who seemed impossibly grown up and cool to me, being 16 and 20 at the time) and I drove to an outdoor concert an hour or so north of Boston. Although when asked I will always cite Elastica at Leeds Metropolitan Uni as my first live music experience, in honesty it was Paula Abdul & Color Me Badd in rural Massachusetts.
Paula Abdul I could take or leave, but I loved Color Me Badd. If anyone ever complains about the rise of raunch in pop culture, I draw their attention to Color Me Badd's 1992 hit I Wanna Sex You Up. Raunch has been around for as long as pop music and the lyrics to Rihanna's S&M, which caused such a stir recently, are no more shocking than I Wanna Sex You Up's "I wanna touch you in all the right places/I wanna make love to you/All night, all night." Is part of the issue that it's now women who are making their desires explicit (in both senses of the word)?
Listening to it now I realise that it's a truly bad song but it will always remind me of a hot July night when, very briefly, I felt grown-up, cool and American.
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