I suppose it was inevitable that sex work would feature in rock songs, after all anything else transgressive, sex and drugs and rock and roll and all that. But how many of these songs are actually any good? I am sure I am not the only person to be sick of hearing Roxanne, who apparently doesn’t have to sell her body through the night. Some of us get fed up with repeating that sex workers do not “sell their bodies” any more than people having non transactional sex “give” their bodies.
But other songs don’t seem to me to be much better. Away from the dull cliches of Roxanne we have songs that invest sex work with a false glamour. Blondie’s Call Me is a sing about a gigolo, and really there aren’t many of these, despite the dreams of some men of making a living this way. Women don’t often pay for sex, they generally don’t need to. And however well endowed or good at waving the wand, the male of the species can only get properly hard so often, so is not going to be seeing too many clients on a given day. A great song and let’s face it, pretty much everything that Blondie recorded is great isn’t it?
Then you get the songs that glamourise, maybe a little ironically, sex work. Killer Queen is one such song. Caviar and cigarettes/well versed in etiquette and so but you know what? This is cliché too, enticing cliché, and I reckon I could get off on the idea of making out with a beautiful woman…
