"Bow Chicka What?"

Something in the first comment here at the new place (by my current #1 blog groupie, Marie from Maine) inspired me:

I don’t lower myself to watch porn. I prefer it standing up because then I can dance to the jazzy muzak that seems to be the background of every porn movie. Wonder if I could get a mix of that for my iPod.

Well, that sounded extremely Googlable, but the first thing I discovered when I began my “scholarly research” was that there are a lot of bands in a wide variety of musical styles that try to show how edgy they are by having the word “Porn” in their names.

The next thing I discovered was that “Bow Chicka Wow Wow” is not the universally accepted identifier for Sex Movie Music I thought it was. Some refer to “Boom Chicka” or “Bowm Chika” or “Chicka Wah Wah” or even “Chikka Wakka”. And there is no standardized spelling of Chica/Chicka/Chika/Chikka… So while The Internet IS for Porn, finding Porn Music is more of a challenge. (And that last link doesn’t count.)

The formerly-beloved BoingBoing blog once posted links to places you could buy X-Rated Soundtracks (semi-surprisingly they haven’t unpublished it; Miss Violet must not have contributed to the list). But BB has been hoaxed (for what, the 500th time?), because the ‘star’ of the post is a totally fictitious German musikmeister named Klaus Harmony with a straight-faced ‘tribute’ website and three ‘posthumous’ albums of gloriously cheesy bow-chicka tunes. Boing Boing also had a link to Movie Grooves, an online store with a section of “Erotic & Porno Soundtrack” albums (on CD and Vinyl), most of which were either out of stock or out of print.

I had to dig deeper (I may regret that wording) to find FluffertraX, the site of a party DJ who has most of the records no longer available at Movie Grooves and who set up a live365.com-hosted stream of his collection. (Go there soon – you never know when the Copyright Nazis will shut it down) When I listened to it (for purely scientific research purposes, of course), the first commercial that live365 inserted between songs was for Walmart, which is one store that would never sell Porno Soundtracks. I LOLed.

Then I discovered Comfort Stand Recordings, a distributor of FREE mp3s by mostly unknown artists (now defunct, but their website and downloads still live) who made a compilation album titled “Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka” an obviously more artsy approach to the genre, with a cringingly delightful final track titled “Whose Fantasy Is This, Anyway”. But remember to listen to it with your headphones on – like much of the “porn music” I found, it includes some NSFW bits of dialogue and sound effects.

There’s a lot of other interesting music on the Comfort Stand site (why didn’t I find this when they were active in ’04-’05?), including the very SFW recordings of the Dondero High School Choir’s “Pop Concerts”, which are my kind of High School Musical. The Pop Concert was an annual event that started in 1971, about the same time I was in high school band (come on, you knew I was a “band geek”, right?). Our band director won friends among the student body and enemies in the administration by adding brass-band-arrangements of rock songs like “In A Gadda Da Vida” to our repertoire. But the band won more trophies at parades and band reviews (sometimes marching to “In A Gadda”) than the football team won games, and the administration wisely chose not to argue with success. The band was also one of the few activities at what was at the time an all-boys school where you had official contact with girls, in the form of a drill team recruited from an all-girls school who marched with us in all the major parades and rode with us on the same bus for up to 3 hours each way. On the longer trips we couldn’t ride the bus in uniform (parade judges deduct points for wrinkled and rumpled), and the band uniforms hanging from the overhead racks made it almost impossible for the band director to see what was going on more than halfway back in the bus. But he didn’t care – he was the cool dude who got us arrangements of rock songs.

Which is why, to this day, “the back of the bus” doesn’t have a negative connotation for me. And I consider high school bands playing ’70s rock songs to be more of a turn-on than any “porn music”. Bow chicka wow wow.