It really tickles me, it does - Quincy Jones having this discofunk hit with a cover of a Chas Jankel song named after the original Japanese title of a triple-X rated film of extreme erotica - known in the West as either In The Realm of the Senses or Empire of the Senses.
And there's everybody in the Top of the Pops studio dancing away completely oblivious!
Spoilers alert (should you wish to watch said film), this is the plot:
In 1936 Tokyo, Sada Abe is a former prostitute who now works as a maid in a hotel. The hotel's owner Kichizo Ishida molests her, and the two begin an intense affair that consists of sexual experiments and various self-indulgences. Ishida leaves his wife to pursue his affair with Sada. Sada becomes increasingly possessive and jealous of Ishida, and Ishida more eager to please her. Their mutual obsession escalates until Ishida finds that she is most excited by strangling him during lovemaking and he is killed in this fashion. Sada then severs his penis. While she is shown next to him naked, it is mentioned that she will walk around with his penis inside her for several days. Words written with blood can be read on his chest: "Sada Kichi the two of us forever."
It's a bit like if Earth Wind and Fire had done a boogie-down version of Story of the Eye.
Ai No Corrida actually translates as "Bullfight of Love"
Now here's a slice of Japanese audio erotica that's far more sonically compelling
With an animation to go with it too
The relationship between disco and pornography is pretty direct - "Love to Love You Baby" as sexMuzak, Patrick Cowley's Moogy sideline in gay porn soundtracks and the eroto-spiritual inspiration he drew from San Francisco's bath houses
“Patrick was all about sexually charged atmospheres, places where rituals could happen. It was about mythologizing, really dramatizing the experience”” - Jorge Socarras, musical collaborator.
“When Patrick wasn’t at the studio, he was at the bathhouses” - Maurice Tani, business associate
Disco often evokes a “future-love paradise” redolent of sci-fi films like Barbarella (with its rapture-inducing Excessive Machine) or Logan’s Run (with its Love Shop) or Woody Allen’s Sleeper (with its Orgasmotron)
My contribution to the porno disco genre:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s876OvfvP0o
A tie-in with the dirty mag, I presume. Nearly fifty years on, something still stirs deep within me when I see glossy printed matter discarded in the gutter.
If I recall rightly, both Whitehouse the band and Whitehouse the wank mag were both named after Mary Whitehouse. You just reminded me of that.
DeleteI can take it. There's some good stuff on the whole mag/counter culture nexus in Peter Stanfield's 'Pin-Ups 1972'
DeleteVarious rock writers have written for porn mags. Either porno writing under another name, or actual articles about music. Lester Bangs wrote a big full-colour photo-illustrated piece on punk for one of the more mainstream skin mags (Penthouse maybe... or Hustler). I found it when in this building where we lived someone who worked in the industry chucked out a whole load of magazines, some porn and some counterculture papers - a big box left by the bins. Been meaning to post the Bangs piece on the Pantheon blog.
Delete(Bangs = a funny kind of byeline in the context of porn).
Mick Farren used to do some porn mag or erotica writing, there was a crossover between the underground press and the porn world - libidinal liberation, taboos overthrown etc. Plus a journo's got to make a living.
I used to know someone at Melody Maker who worked for the person who put out the Sex Maniacs diary and related publications. I think there was also events (Sex Maniacs's Ball?). I can't remember how he got into that line of work and whether I asked him if there were any perks to the job...
But anyway . . . I bought Quincy's 'The Dude' LP (which features the titular song here) on vinyl just a couple of months ago, after having had a cassette version in the 80s.
ReplyDeleteI dunno why, but I somehow feel this is tangentially germane:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hj8r9JL0Cg
Got 11 minutes in and had to stop. It really brings out this disturbed and grotesque aspect of MJ's performance mode, the shrieks seem more like pain than ecstasy. Without the melodic stretches in between the irruptive yelps and squeals that punctuate the original songs, just strung together endlessly, it resembles one of those Amazonian shamanic rituals where they've all taken ahayuasca and are tripping balls, seeing spirits in the trees.... or like a terminally Tourettic series of fits and outbursts...
DeleteI wouldn't say it was erotic, no..
Yeah but porn is pretty grotesque too. There's a very thin line between phwoar and urgh.
DeleteStepping away from disco, the most prominent reference to Story of the Eye in popular music is the video to Bjork's Venus as a Boy. The lyrics, though saucy, are not directly inspired by Story of the Eye (I has assumed for a long time that they were, and that annoyed me, as I considered it a most misguided sanitising of Bataille; now I know differently, I rather wish they were, as the idea of Bataille the male Venus is pretty funny): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z5aPaDwAkU
ReplyDeleteLooking up other songs that refer to Story of Bataille, I found this rather good track by Of Montreal, The Past is a Grotesque Animal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3RAI8Ntamw
To my mind, it's pretty easy to view disco through a Bataillean lens, what with the whole loss-of-self-via-ecstatic-communion malarkey. Mind, I guess that applies to most dance music. And as such, remember this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5o5i0z4mfY
For years after I heard this, still blissfully unaware of the work of Nagisa Oshima, I puzzled over whether the lyrics were “I know Corrida”, or “I no Corrida”, in a slang way a bit like “Me no pop eye”.
ReplyDeleteI didn’t even think of the possibility that it could have been “Eye no corrida”.
“Ai No Corrida” is a much better title than “In the Realm of the Senses”, which gives you a completely misleading idea of what the film is about. It’s just a shame that “The Bullfight of Love” sounds so clunky in English.
ReplyDeleteThere is also a great Spanish pun there that is completely lost in the English version: “corrida” is apparently a slang word for an orgasm.