In the brilliant, sardonic, and deeply political Dark Brothers movie New Wave Hookers 2, the theme of the original New Wave Hookers is made topical with a cleverness that is not, alas, typical of the genre. Whereas the first movie takes as its premise the idea that new-wave music can transform the girl next door into a raging slut (which is hilarious enough), the sequel delves into the contemporary archaeology of cults: the American obsession with white-bread normalcy subverted. Here the moral pollutant of new-wave music is present as a sign of ultimate female dominance. The Powers That Be hunt down the cultists but to no avail. New-wave music and sexual perversion enjoy a well-deserved triumph.
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It seems obvious enough, then, that porn should branch out into the world of audio. But even here there is, shall we say, a failure of vision. The two recently released erotic CDs Cyborgasm and Private Erotica do not present themselves as merely vehicles for the erotic voice, or as an occasion to listen in on the slurping sounds of sex. As if that could not possibly be sufficiently arousing, this audio erotica is presented as “Virtual Audio” (Cyborgasm) and as “Real Life Experiences in Virtual Reality” (Private Erotica). As the IMAX movies blanket one’s field of vision with an image that is so real it tricks the brain into believing that what we see is where we are, so virtual audio gives us a front-to-back as well as a left-to-right stereo field. And the result, yes, is that your brain is sometimes tricked into believing that you are there. (Whether or not you want to be there is another question.) Both CDs need to be listened to with headphones to get the full effect, and technically speaking Cyborgasm is more convincing than Private Erotica. The VR hype is redundant in any case, since a good voice in regular stereo (hell, in mono) ought to do the trick, if it says the right things, in the right way. The “3-D” sound presented here, while sometimes convincing, often just bounces the sounds back and forth from ear to ear at a rate that suggests not so much an encounter in libidinal cyberspace as a new, eroticized version of tennis.
On Private Erotica (put out by A Lasting Impression Music Corporation) the cover graphics are graphic, and the grunting is gruntlike. If listening to your neighbors entertaining themselves in the bedroom gets you hot, this might do it for you. After all, you can always make up your own stories. Private Erotica is almost devoid of dialogue or indeed speech of any kind, contenting itself with a mixture of gay and straight scenarios producing both duet and solo renditions of the aural orgasm. The sex is mostly vanilla, as far as one can tell; in other words, no hint of bondage, games, or pain. The “CyberSex!” song that tops and bottoms the whole thing is courtesy of Tone Def (who last year brought us the anti-Republican single “Bushwack”), and unfortunately it has all the musical shortcomings of that piece.
Cyborgasm aims to provide a script for every fetish. But it has no loops that suck you in, because it wants to push that narrative forward toward its inevitable climax. The result sounds a bit like a radio play, which is suggestive for the future of the form.
Lesson #4: It may be offensive, it may be silly, it may be low-budget (usually the reason it’s silly), it may be sexist, but boring it is not. Adult videos do, after all, constitute the largest portion of the market in home video rentals. Whether audio porn can cut into that market is going to depend in part on how people feel about sexual experiences that take place under headphones. Like so many VR ideas, you have to wonder simply at the practicality of the technology, and the extent to which it is predicated on solo excursions into pleasure. Solo excursions are fine (especially now that masturbation is considered politically correct safe sex), but adult movies have a solid foundation in the couples market–a shared experience.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Jeff Heller.
