What follows is an adaptation of an interview I did recently with Mark Allen of wmfu.org - for the original, including hilarious pictures Mark found, as well as some amazing source sound files, go to http://tinyurl.com/nkhlav .

So you think the opinion that 70’s porn music is the “peak” of the genre is a myth?

Yup. To me, 1970´s porn music is basically the cinematic incarnation of a nightmarish high-school band performing a soundtrack to a disco musical that never existed.

I think of ’70’s porn-fuck-funk as one of the best-known examples of the “it´s so bad, it´s bad“ phenomenon. Fender Fuzz, wa-wa pedals, and toothpaste-bass somehow became the instruments of choice for expressing juvenile male wonder at the what had to have been some of the hairiest filmed pussies in the history of mankind. It´s like if you took the worst genre in the history of contemporary American music (disco, narrowly edging out big-pants trance for sheer lack of imagination and brazen reliance upon the fact that 90 percent of the audience is too busy engaging in an expensive urban mating ritual to complain how bad the melody sounds) and paid a group of mustachioed degenerates sixty bucks apiece to “jam” for a couple of hours so you could give your badly-lit, badly-shot, ill-conceived glorified stag film some non-diegetic musical punch it didn´t need in the first place.

How did this happen? Movie-music is all about establishing mood. Yet the mood that was established time and time again in your typical 1970´s porno, regardless of plot point, was what I like to call “corduroy bop”: a cheesy, sleazebag, cornball vintage that´s amusing once, but insufferable any more than that. (I particularly hate how the words “bow-chicka bow-bow” have become synonymous for “let´s get it on” in our contemporary culture.)

Yet 1970´s porn music isn´t a failure just because it´s bad. All aspects of porn, from the faked orgasms to the terrifically sub-literate scripts, have always been “bad.” (That’s what good about porn.) No, the music fails here because it doesn’t match up with the visual register of its movies. Directors were working with film in the 1970´s, occasionally 35 mm, but for the most part 16 mm reversal - blotchy, grainy, and orangey, shot by guys for whom keeping in focus and avoiding giant patches of shadow were massive accomplishments. The dialogue was often dubbed in later, like in a terrible Italian horror movie, or just tossed off in a “one take is for damn sure all you get, Johnny!” way.

Porn, the myopic, mysterious, bastard child borne of the 1970´s, wanted equally strange sonic accompaniment. A truly ideal porno soundtrack would have been one part Frank Zappa at his most satirical, two parts Jello Biafra at his most nasal, three parts Stevie Wonder at his most seductively braided, and twelve parts Gil-Scott Heron taking a naked black power shower with R. Crumb and Al Goldstein at the same time.

“…Whitey on the Moon”

But Porn-disco failed to rise to the occasion. It failed to ironicize - or even complement - the first acts of public copulation broached on a grand scale in the history of American civilization. ‘70´s porn, given the right backbeat, could have invoked all that was dead and dying and wrong with the “Me” decade: the slow, stagnating crumble of the hippie movement, Kissinger´s violently engineered overthrow of Socialist Chile, the crushing depression that was Yankee baseball, the feathered weirdness of Joni Mitchell, Jimmie Walker’s methamphetamine-spiced exclamations on “Good Times,” DDT, Edsels, Charley Hustle, leisure suits, feminism, Dylan’s wacko Christian period, Billy Beer, O.J. Simpson running like a crazed gazelle through airports, bearded Scorcese running off a string of incredible movies, Kesey doing acid in Eugene all by himself and staring at his hands sadly, the ominous rise of the corporate Reich.

Instead, we just got the leisure suits.

So what do you like about 80´s porn music?

Nothing. That’s my whole point. 1980´s porn music reeks of repetition, stupidity, loneliness, unoriginality, and unrelenting sadness. Yet because of the instrumentation used, it works. ’80’s soundtracks actually speak to the visceral experience of masturbation itself: it´s like the dull, throbbing death-beat of your heart in your head as you forsake real life and real partners for yet another unhealthy, scared wank.

‘70´s porn music is busy; conversely, ‘80´s porn music is solitary. The advent of the analog-synth movement meant that one lonely loser could score your whole movie for you, and with the exception of anomalies like Greg Dark´s 1984 masterpiece “New Wave Hookers,” (the precursor to today’s alt-porn fad), that’s exactly what happened. By the middle of the decade, you had almost zero live accompaniment in porn. No hairy-forearmed California funk-rednecks getting together to polish off a rack of beers and “jam”; instead, you got the director’s sweaty cousin visiting Reseda on vacation from junior college sitting in a room with a carton of Virginia Slims and a giant MIDI hooked up to an Apple IIe hooked up to a Betamax mixing board hooked up to a Grass Valley switcher patching six-second compu-bonk-loops designed to make Randy Spears and Danielle Rogers’ urgent groanings and moanings a fundamental property of the score itself. And it worked, if for no other reason than butt-rock and “Press Your Luck” did: this was the Reagan ’80’s, and the collective appetite for mindless conspicuous consumption was well-nigh insatiable.

Just as importantly, ’80’s porn-tunes were kosher on the visual tip, complementing videotape’s bleary, vacant resolution to perfection. The one-two punch of synth and Super-VHS embodied all that was sad, plastic, and hopeless in our culture. And happily, the pumped-up physiques of the actors followed suit. The women, for the first time, bore false tiddy; many black men sported memorably immense, almost unusable members that took over half an hour to engorge. Does anyone besides Clarence Thomas remember “Long Dong Silver?” It was a decade of shiny ego, useless excess: Nancy Reagan on Diff’rent Strokes, death squads in Honduras, Q-bert-dominated Colecovision, Keith Hernandez hitting line-drive triples off the wall in right, Savings and Loan crises, and your dad trying to grow a moustache one summer that looked terrible. Porn, more than any other form of expression, reveled in the abject poverty of human connection - triumphant in the majestic cheapness of its medium.

So what’s the upshot of all this? Where do we stand today, at least in terms of porn-music?

Well, as is always the case with porno, it’s a question of technology. Nowadays, adult film´s got the stain of the internet all over it: the viewing process brings with it a tinge of computer-screen radiation, an insane amount of procrastination-guilt, and the taste for multifarious conquest (i.e., having three or four clips playing at the same time and having a wank to all of them simultaneously. Or maybe that´s just me.)

My sense is that the internet has both perfected and murdered the genre at the same time. It gets right to the point, like an efficient little monster, but there’s no chase left in it. No one makes films anymore; why should they? No one watches films. People watch scenes. There’s hardly even a star system to speak of - why would you bother to watch Jenna Jameson for the bazillionth time when there’s this random new hot girl from MoFo’s who’s right up in your face?

Likewise, the music’s lost its purpose. Oh, you can still find music in internet porn, at least some of the time - there will always be porn music, for people like to throw in a beat when the action devolves into pure, animal rutting - but it’s hardly the must-have that it once was. Scores on the internet are quite beside the point, and in their fragmentation and mismanaged authorship the music that does exist lacks the dumb grandeur of previous days. But let’s not weep for our fates, for nothing stays the same forever. Bonafide perfection is rarely achieved mulitple times in any one epoch.