The eleventh installment of a recurring feature where we listen to and analyse the latest number one Australian single so you don't have to.
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'Dirty Talk'
Wynter Gordon
(WMG)
'Dirty Talk' by Wynter Gordon is a fairly unlikely song to be sitting at #1 this week. Firstly, it hasn't even troubled the Billboard Hot 100 – it joins a select club, of songs by Americans which were much more successful in Australia, like 'Penny Arcade' by Roy Orbison and 'Boom Shake The Room' by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (both of which were big #1 singles here but are routinely left off Best Of albums in US). Secondly, it was originally released as a single in the US almost a year ago, in March 2010. In the world of chart pop, being new and up to date is everything, and songs from a year ago are old news. And unlike Orbison and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, Wynter Gordon has barely ever troubled the Australian charts before. The song's producer, Jupiter Ace, isn't a celebrity, and hasn't had any previous hits here. But here we are.
Wynter Gordon - 'Dirty Talk'
How is it that 'Dirty Talk' managed to get to #1 in 2011? Perhaps it is literally dumb luck. When you read biographies of musicians and bands, they almost always paint a picture of the musicians as
meant for success. As inevitable stars. But, in real life, success is random, improbable. For every band you hear of, there's another fifty with a similar amount of talent who never got a touring company's backing, or a record company's backing, or weren't in the right place at the right time. The Beatles' demos had already been turned down by every record label in London, including EMI, when George Martin took them on (and, let's face it, 'Love Me Do' gave very few clues that 'A Day In The Life' would be in the future). As far as the band were concerned, they were always going to be famous. But you could also say that about every also-ran from Australian Idol.
Many - if not most - famous musicians have some musical secrets in their closet, musical projects that never got big. There's
footage of Lady Gaga from 2005 singing a couple of songs at a talent show, where she sounds somewhere between Norah Jones and Fiona Apple. Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor had a long history of
playing keyboards in tacky 1980s pop bands. In the mid 1960s Neil Young was
in a band called the Mynah Birds with Rick James (yes, the mad funk star Rick James). Usually, in music biographies, these former music lives are portrayed as formative learning experiences that improved their music in the end. But a lot of the time, it's just luck as to who gets big. The recorded works of the Mynah Birds – a single - doesn't hold a candle to
After The Gold Rush or 'Superfreak', but who knows what they might have been capable of with a little luck - Rick James recorded that single while AWOL from the US Navy, and was soon handed into the FBI. The album they were going to record was never started. Perhaps, in an alternate universe, that Mynah Birds album would now be considered seminal by magazines like Mojo and Uncut. But for every Mynah Birds we now know because the people in the band later became famous, there are hundreds of bands and artists who never made it despite having the potential.
All of which is to say that 'Dirty Talk' could easily have never gotten into the charts. I'm not saying here that 'Dirty Talk' doesn't deserve to be #1 – it's catchy enough. I am slightly baffled that it's not called 'No Angel', considering the vocal hook in the chorus -
“I am no angel” - which is presumably currently stuck in several heads. Gordon and Jupiter Ace know that it's the hook – it's pretty much the first and last thing you hear in the song; you hear it twelve times all up if you listen to the song in full. The prominent syncopated synth part, reminiscent of the kind of keyboard parts you'd hear on early 1990s disco tracks, like 'Be My Lover' by La Bouche, or 'Sing Hallelujah' by Dr Alban, is also pretty catchy. And, interestingly for a song that was first released almost a year ago, 'Dirty Talk' features Gordon almost speaking a lower register
“dirty talk” at the end of sections, which is almost identical to the
“dirty bit” hook in The Black Eyed Peas' “The Time (Dirty Bit)”.
But the song is not quite as fine-tuned for massive success as, say, 'Dynamite' by Taio Cruz or 'Bad Romance' by Lady Gaga – songs that were always going to be hits in the right place and right time. Beyond the chorus hook and the requisite middle-8 buildup, there's not much sense of tension and release in 'Dirty Talk', of dynamics pushing and pulling. It's a static and samey song, with a bland and possibly out-of-date David Guetta-style club beat under a relatively anonymous vocal – it sounds safe and airless. Gordon's vocals resemble Rihanna's, but don't have her presence, don't quite let her personality and sexuality shine through the vocals and the autotune. And for a song called 'Dirty Talk', which is clearly meant to be racy and provocative, this is a problem.
Songs about sex only work insofar as you believe that the song accurately expresses the sexual self of the singer. The way we act sexually says a lot about our inner selves. Good sex requires a letting go of inhibitions, and an emotional honesty – you have to be comfortable with what your desires are to have good sex, and those desires are often things you wouldn't necessarily tell your boss about. So, for sexual songs to work, they need to reveal something about the singer. The words in 'Take It Off' sound all too plausible coming out of Ke$ha' bratty mouth - it would not surprise you if she actually went to a club with glitter on the floor and instructed all clubgoers to remove their clothing. In contrast, Christina Aguilera's single 'Not Myself Tonight' bombed last year because she very much seemed like she was trying too hard to provoke, to be unnaturally sexual. It seemed inauthentic. At the same time, sexual songs are only going to strike a chord if they also match the sexuality of the audience; you believe, listening to Peaches' 'Fuck The Pain Away', that Peaches might want to do exactly that. But fewer people will identify with that sentiment than perhaps will identify with wanting someone to make them feel like they are Rihanna's 'Only Girl In The World' in bed.
'Dirty Talk', as you might guess from the title, features rather racy lyrics. It's a list song, like Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start The Fire', where Gordon lists things that might feature in dirty talk, such as “S&M on the floor”, hot wax, blindfolds, “cherry pop tag team”, feathers, and a “nasty pose in a video”. But for a song that mentions a desire for S&M, it comes off as surprisingly timid; you get little impression of Gordon's sexual self. List songs by nature sacrifice context and narrative for the sake of shoving in as many references as possible, and the list in the verses here comes across as the contents of an adult store catalogue rather than Gordon's secret sexual desires. One distinctly get the impression that Gordon might have included, say, the line “nasty pose in a video” because it rhymed, rather than because it is something that might turn her on.
Additionally, the other lyrics in the chorus are surprisingly vague and unexciting; it's hard to think of blander, more drab sentiment about sex than
“I like it when you do that stuff to me” or
“I want to do some dirty things to you tonight”, outside of Shane Warne's text messages. Because of the shopping list format and the bland sentiment, the song is devoid of context: we have no idea who is telling her dirty things, we have no idea what part of her adult store shopping list really gets her going, and we have only a very vague idea of what she actually wants to do to him tonight. Does she want to tie him up? Tickle him with a feather? Wear the panties her mother laid out for her? Make him listen to Celine Dion? Screw him? We don't know! And because we don't know, the song doesn't work as well as it might. This kind of uncertainty might work if Gordon's voice was suggestive, coquettish; instead, she sounds uncomfortable singing this stuff. She sounds out-of-breath. She sounds worried; especially with the minor key backing music behind her.
The song ends up being emotionally incoherent. She's not sexually confident enough and specific enough for the song to sound like a vibrant expression of sexuality, like Rihanna's 'Rude Boy'. But similarly, she doesn't quite come off as shy or coquettish enough for the song to work on a “your dirty talk makes me want all this stuff even though I shouldn't” level, which could also be a powerful angle for a song like this (it worked for Katy Perry with 'I Kissed A Girl', after all). But perhaps the song is appealing to the teenage girls who make up a lot of the audience of chart pop, precisely because of this emotional incoherence. Sex is confusing and embarrassing enough without excessive hormones racing through your body, and teenage girls are subject to a lot of contradictory and confusing messages about sex from society. The media, their peers, etc. Perhaps the mixed messages I'm getting from 'Dirty Talk' echo the mixed messages in the heads of your average teenage girl. Either that or the average teenage girl these days is really into hot wax and blindfolds. Vaguely.
Tim Byron