Sexy Sirens Sell Songs

Whatever happened to talent being enough to get to the top? I am talking here about female singers, who appear to be little more than strippers these days. Now I know that sounds like some old reactionary, raging against a world from which he increasingly feels estranged, and on some subjects that accusation may have an element of truth, but I feel that I can safely refute such a charge in this argument.

Let us go back to the 1950's when the top female singers included Doris Day, Judy Garland, Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday.

Doris Day  -  Rosemary Clooney

or the 1960's when the top female singers included Lulu, Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield, Jackie Trent and others.

Petula Clark - Dusty Springfield

Similarly in the 1970's Diana Ross, Donna Summer, Tina Turner, and Kate Bush were the chanteuse's of the decade ....

Kate Bush - Donna Summer

Now the one thing they had in common was that their voices sold the songs, not their bodies .... oh sure, they would occasionally appear in 'risqué' publicity photos, such as these below, but they were hardly anything you couldn't show your mother, or their mothers.

Doris Day - Rosemary Clooney - Risqué But Not Rude

But suddenly things started to change through the late 1980's and into the 1990's .... sex had always sold records but never more than the lyrics or tunes, partly because records always sold more by radio than TV ..... but the charge towards nudity as the seller was really led by the rise of MTV video's. The high princess of this change was Kylie Minogue, a pop pixie from Australia who had been around for a while, but when she released the video for the single "Spinning Around" in September 2000, it became her first number one in the United Kingdom in ten years, and largely because the accompanying video featured her in very revealing gold hot pants.

Kylie Minougue - Hot Pants

This success was apparently duly noted by record producers around the globe and more of this kind of flesh flashing video was marketed by female singers .... but more importantly a legion of young wannabe girl singers, growing up in the first decade of the century learnt that what sold records was skin. Kylie herself incorporated what she described as 'Burlesque' into her videos and stage act, and broke into the US club charts with the single "Can't Get You Out of My Head", which was her biggest ever hit, reaching number one in more than forty countries, and which featured as near nudity as could be achieved ..... without quite crossing the line.

Kylie Minougue - Risqué

This mega success seemed to cross some sort of Rubicon for both the video producers and the female singers of the last decade, because we now have seen a procession of singers such as Lil Kim, Rihanna, Lady Gaga and now Miley Cyrus (a right little twerker), who seem to be in a competition to be the first to cross the final red line, and promote a record single with a nude video of themselves ..... so much so, that there have been increasingly vocal calls to get music videos age rated before their release, with an 18+ rating for many of the girl singers. Needless to say, the music business is trying desperately to prevent this, because it would probably remove half their female acts from the young teen market.

Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus - Risque or Porn?

In the last twenty years or so, we have descended a long way on the path that has led to women selling their bodies for money on TV videos, using the excuse of a record single as the raison d'être, and so far the bottom of the barrel doesn't seem to have been scraped.