In 1997, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson was racking up a lot of “firsts.” He released his first major feature, Boogie Nights, which garnered his first Oscar nomination. Moreover, Boogie Nights was the first widely celebrated Hollywood film about the Golden Age of pornography. Set in 1970s San Fernando Valley, California (aka “Porn Valley”), the film chronicles the rise, fall, and redemption of fictional adult film star Dirk Diggler and his adopted family of pornstars, directors, and one particularly eager Boom Operator. But despite the movie’s racy subject matter, its initial frames unfold like a glittering homage to ‘70s club culture. There’s a nightclub marquee, a neon dancefloor, the graceful twirl of a babe on roller skates—and it all shakes to the tune of the Emotions’ 1977 megahit “Best of My Love.” Like any successful period film, Boogie Nights is punctuated by the hits of its respective eras; there’s “Low Rider” by War, “You Sexy Thing” by Hot Chocolate, and a brilliant sync of Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” with a particularly tense scene at a drug lord’s lair. Though it’s not the focus of the film, the Boogie Nights soundtrack reminds me that there once was an implicit relationship between music and pornography.
This topic is fresh in my mind in part because I recently re-watched Boogie Nights for the first time in over 10 years, but also because of a recent announcement from Pornhub, the most visited adult film site on the web. According to a statement from the website, Pornhub is set to feature a new series of films as part of “The Visionaries Directors’ Club.” The movies will be directed by “creatives of all kinds” and will aim to “diversify porn production and help create more varied content—paying particular attention to Pornhub’s female audience.” First up in the Visionaries Directors’ Club is “The Gift,” an all-female porno directed by New York rapper Young M.A. According to Pornhub, “The Gift” will feature the MC’s music in “key scenes,” though the recently-released trailer does not reveal the placement of her songs.
As it turns out, Young M.A.’s tracks score everything but “key scenes” in “The Gift,” a porno that finds birthday girl Gina Valentina getting lured to an L.A. dream home by her girlfriend (Honey Gold), where eight other women are getting it on all over the house. After calling 555-6969 to get the mansion’s address (it’s on Cumming Street), Valentina approaches the house precariously to the bump of Young M.A.’s “Hot Sauce.” This brief scene summarizes how the rapper’s music will be utilized throughout the movie: largely as background noise while Valentina traverses from room to room, discovering what fleshy delights await her. The ominous synths of “Same Set” trail Valentina as she walks away from two women in the kitchen getting creative with a can of whip cream; “Walk” slinks along as Valentina, er, walks from one end of the pool to the next; and “Praktice” creeps in after Gold and Valentina recover from their cumulative 83 orgasms, kissing and hugging as we fade to credits. As I suspected, the music in “The Gift” was not integral to the action, but relegated to interim shots, filling the space between hi-def fucking like a sonic crossfade.
There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. I personally associate porn music with either cheesy European orgy scenes or softcore X Art films. But music wasn’t always shoved to the sidelines in erotic movies. While contemporary porn either limits music to intro and outro scenes, or omits it altogether, a soundtrack was once crucial to the porno narrative. Take the most famous porn of all time: 1972’s Deep Throat. Not only did Jerry Gerard’s masterpiece boast a 60 minute runtime, but it kicked off with a credit reel commensurate with feature films (the Key Grip doesn’t mean what you’d expect). And, like a Hollywood movie, one of its most notable features (aside from Linda Lovelace’s roomy esophagus) was the music that accompanied nearly every scene. The opening shot of Lovelace driving home through suburbia is set to a bizarre, carnivalesque synth track. An early scene involving Lovelace’s friend receiving cunnilingus in the kitchen rolls to a funky psych jam, while she utters memorable lines like, “Mind if I smoke, while you’re eating?” And then of course, there is the inexplicable Deep Throat theme song, which is part church organ hymn and randy ballad. The lyrics are beyond silly: “Deep throat/Deeper than deep throat,” sings a male voice hovering just above the Hammond B3. “That’s all she wrote.” Every word that rhymes with “throat” is thrown in here, even “goat,” because like most things in pornography, it is subtle. While the film’s soundtrack certainly doesn’t aid arousal, it is indicative of Golden Age pornography’s tone – fun, narrative, fantastical, and slightly absurd.
On Pornhub’s “Vintage” category page, you can watch the original, full-length cut of Deep Throat, but you can also scroll through decades of adult films, many of which are based on similarly ramshackle plots. There’s “Married Wife Cheats on Hubby,” a “Baywatch” parody called, you guessed it, “Babewatch,” and one simply titled “Vampires.” Many of these oldies feature music more prominently that contemporary pornography—though none as bewildering as the Deep Throat OST. Watching vintage porn often feels like more of a novelty than anything truly seductive, and a big part of that is the music (and the proliferation of mustaches). Quite frankly, it’s distracting, and I think that would remain the case if the songs used were actually good. A great song is a powerful thing, and would likely rip the viewer away from whatever the tiny bodies on their laptop are doing at the moment. Ultimately, it makes sense that porn consumers want crisp, uninterrupted audio to go with their high definition, tight angle shots. Sure, Pornhub offers sections for “vintage” porn and movies that sync top hits to hardcore sex scenes, but these are by no means the most popular categories on the site.
So what does the Visionaries Directors’ Club mean for the long term relationship between music and pornography? Probably not too much. But the series could be a possibility for Pornhub to lend the director’s chair to artists with radical and nuanced takes on sexuality, especially since their goal with the project is to “diversify porn production and help create more varied content.” What if the directors they recruited already had a rich visual language of their own, and plenty of work investigating sexuality and the human body? What if these Visionaries reflected a few of the niche communities that the porn community relies on? What would pornos directed by folks like Jenny Hval, Genesis P-Orridge, SOPHIE, Diamanda Galas, CupcakKe, or Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas look like, for instance? Something tells me we’ll never find out.
