XXX: Music from Thinking XXX
Harvard Independent – Arts Issue: 12/2/04 Sexy CD Review: XXX: Music from Thinking XXX By Shane Wilson Comics writer Warren Ellis has a theory about the future: it’s porn. Flying cars, jetpacks, a global network of pneumatic tube exchange: all the technological quantum leaps promised to us by generations of popular mechanics have failed to materialize, while wholly unforeseen phenomena – bukkake, the ass milkshake, a global network of pneumatic boob exchange – have thrust and ground their way to the fore. Want to see the face of the future? Just crack open your e-mail inbox. The upskirt pics, barnyard romps, and screeching phalluses spunking up your ethernet cables are Jules Verne’s wicked stepchildren. Welcome to Thigh Captain’s World of Tomorrow. Right on cue, the past few years have witnessed a great upswing in mainstream fascination with porn – not that English comic book writers aren’t mainstream enough already, right, guys? – as the mass media discover that even upstanding soccer moms and recliner-bound Nascar dads burn with a secret gonorrheal desire to learn if, beneath the waxed and lubed integuments of their favorite surreptitiously- glimpsed porn-star corpora, there lurks something like a…soul. Into the breach steps artist Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, whose sprawling, genre-hopping XXX project, already encompassing a photography exhibition and a book, has now given birth to an HBO documentary (Thinking XXX) and an accompanying soundtrack. Centered on a series of photo shoots in which Greenfield-Sanders shot some of Porn Valley’s finest in both white- and skyclad glory (as the Jainists would have it), XXX – not to be confused with the Molson beer or the Vin Diesel movie, both of which appeal more to people who watch porn than to people who watch documentaries about porn – purports to humanize America’s fleshlings and reveal the warm, beating heart beneath the warm, beating…well, you get the picture. Judging from the Thinking XXX soundtrack, however, I have a sneaking suspicion that the project’s true intent is not to humanize porn’s dramatis personae but to dehumanize its audience. Dishing out some 55 minutes of meticulously polished Eurotrash techno, with a pinch of halfhearted chicklit rapping and a dash of Velvet Underground to round out the flavor, the soundtrack evokes less the sweaty, slimy, disease-prone exertions of real-life mammalian copulation than the drab, fluorescent abstraction of middle management. From the unrepentantly repetitive pulsing of Rabbit in the Moon’s excruciating eight-minute “Timebomb” to the muttered, sleepy come-ons of Princess Superstar’s lyrics on Felix da Housecat’s “Coochie Coo,” this album sounds so sterile I half-wonder if it went for a spin through the autoclave before getting shipped out to stores. If what I’ve been told is true, that Porn Land’s backend business (so to speak) is conducted with perfect anonymity in unassuming office buildings throughout Middle America, then XXX is soundtrack par excellence, a sonic contraption precisely calibrated to the PowerPoint penetration of this Dilbertesque pubic cubescape. Interesting as such lifelessness may be as a kind of formal critique of the twenty-first century’s mechanized, bureaucratic take on prurience, it doesn’t exactly make for riveting listening. No matter how many times I tried to focus in on all the nuances and subtleties that some more techno-savvy observer could no doubt discern within soporific tracks like Ladytron’s “Sugar” or the usually captivating Goldfrapp’s “Train,” I kept zoning out, allowing the blips and twitter to fade into ambient noise. Don’t expect the warm-blooded bass lines or salacious wakkachikkas of the golden-age porn score; XXX plays more like elevator music for nymphomaniacs – the ugly ones. But if the music doesn’t grab you, the packaging might at least have you grabbing yourself. Ingeniously sheathed in a condom-like slipcase depicting slutica maxima Jenna Jameson on the front and some male porn dude whom I swear I don’t recognize, honest, on the back – both fully clothed – the CD lulls you into a false sense of security, as you draw back the cover to reveal – gasp! – Jenna’s bouncing boobies and what’s-his-name’s handsome schlong. Let’s be honest: it’s pretty cool. In keeping with the soul- crushing anti-sexuality of the music, though, any potential titillation is immediately squelched by the disquietingly matter-of-fact expressions on our lusty playpals’ faces, which seem less pre-coital than pre-toenail-clipping. These people drop trou for a living and don’t give it a second thought. Is this, then, the face of the future – ever blank, ever distant, ever primed for bukkake? I kind of hope not. But if Mars is off the table (Bushie’s quickly-forgotten fictitious initiative notwithstanding), I guess porn is the final frontier. So load XXX onto your iPod, pop in your headphones, and groove to some soulless electrofuck, as we turn and turn in the widening sperm-gyre, and things fall apart. Meet Shane Wilson ’07 (skwilson@fas), thigh captain.