The Great Super Bowl Rogue Breast Disaster of 2004 reached truly epic levels of overexposure, with every pundit, columnist, blogger, and dude standing behind you at Subway scrambling to weigh in on the moral outrage of it all. But in our haste to denounce either our shot-to-hell sense of human decency or the Puritan prudes who can't handle a little prime-time T&A, we've missed the real story, the real point, the real outrage here.
Mad Hawkins
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7:30 p.m. Sunday, April 25. Tickets cost $49.50-$76.50. Call 954-835-8000.
Office Depot Center, 1 Panthers Pkwy., Sunrise
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Janet Jackson wasn't offensive because she got carried away with being sexy and titillating. She was offensive because she was neither sexy nor titillating in the slightest. We don't know how to be sexy anymore. Rock culture has irreparably split into two polarized halves: You're either a deadly serious "artist" with Important Things to Say and all the sex appeal of a largemouth bass or you're teen-pop jailbait whose "songs" unfold like acid-hit lap-dance routines that slap you across the face with all the subtlety of, well, a large-mouth bass. The hallowed middle ground no longer exists; you can have actual musical talent or you can have sex appeal. Not both.
And I'm sorry, Ms. Jackson, but you're exhibit A: After a quite-splendid mainstream run (Rhythm Nation represents!), her career since the mid-'90s has sunk ever deeper into a swirling sea of retarded sexuality. Janet tried to straddle the artist/sex symbol line but merely crossed over and ended up straddling everything else. Sadly, the Super Bowl only serves as the climax to her shocking soft-core-porn death spiral of absurd "wardrobe malfunctions," awkward bondage references, and increasingly ludicrous lyrics: "Got a nice package alright/Guess I'm gonna have to ride it tonight."
Where have our genuinely talented sex symbols gone? Why must Blender be so head-thwackingly lewd and vapid and Magnet so sexless and staid? R&B pop-rap studs like Ja Rule and 50 Cent are saddled with washboard abs and wet-cardboard personalities. A flock of synchronized-swimming nuns packs more sex appeal than any Creed-biting "modern rock" front man, and the entire once-promising '90s "alternative" stable has lapsed into self-importance (Eddie), self-loathing (Trent), or self-crappifying (Billy).
The indie-rock realm is infinitely worse, where a single ounce of sexuality gets dismissed as pandering inauthenticity. Ask Liz Phair, who first surfaced as the nerdy virginal rock critic's ultimate wet dream -- lithe, blond, uncouth, unbelievably horny, and responsible for a concept album about Exile on Main Street-- only to withstand 2003's most public flogging when she attempted her own Janet Jackson leap in reverse, from sexpot artiste to pop princess, and wound up bleating on about "hot white cum." And don't you even bring up Karen O, the inexplicably lusted-after Yeah Yeah Yeahs front woman, who in reality looks like she dresses in the dark while falling down an elevator shaft and only continues New York City's hallowed tradition of selling the world shit by pretending it's shinola: She's electroclash in convenient female form. Ain't nobody bringing the pain and the pleasure like, oh, say, Prince.
We need Prince so very badly right now. The Grammys would indicate we have him again, but is it really him? Is this the Lovesexy Prince or Graffiti Bridge Prince? Let us pray it's the former. Imagine Prince's Super Bowl half-time show. The buttless pants alone would be majestic. Has anyone ever aligned the planets of raw sexuality and artistic greatness with such towering bravado? Can anyone else in the universe possibly sing songs like "Gett Off," "Cream," "Dirty Mind," or "Little Red Corvette" without sounding like a juiced-up asshole? Has anyone in any artistic medium every made pure animalistic lust feel so natural, so unforced, so nonthreatening, so necessary? How did he do it? How did we not appreciate him sufficiently while he did it? Even his ongoing public collapse -- label squabbles, smooth jazz excursions, this whole Jehovah's Witness business -- bears a certain psychotic sensuality. But his comeback chances -- even with Beyoncé by his side -- are hopelessly slim as a result.
What Janet Jackson actually exposed to the world on Super Bowl Sunday was a void, a nonentity, a vacuum. Our nation's very own Prince deficit. Who will rise to the challenge of replacing him and reconnecting the sexual with the artistically worthwhile? Andre 3000? Sure, The Love Below is a trip -- the bright-pink smoking revolver he's brandishing on the cover says it all. But in interviews, he comes across as just another sad sack lookin' for Ms. Right, a gigolo surrounded by sexpots but desperate for looove. Spare me, spare yourself, spare the children. As a nation and as a musical culture, we've never been more sex-obsessed and never been less sexy.
This is what it sounds like when doves cry.
