Too Hot for The COA: My First Album

You know how sometimes a producer ends up with a show, song or whatever that is too hot for its original venue, so it gets released separately? This is one of those kinds of posts.

The current topic at The Coalition of Awesomeness is "The first album you either owned or loved", and my first album had a particular single with rather suggestive lyrics. Because at the Coalition, we like to keep things relatively family-friendly, the fact that I would end up getting into detail about the song in question would have been really awkward, as I would have had to be really euphemistic, and it wouldn't have been as much fun for me.

But then I thought to myself and remembered that I too had a blog with which to discuss this matter uncensored. I can let it all hang out here.

Anyway, when you were 8 or 9, you might not have gotten what a song you enjoyed was really about, or the subtle undertones present in the lyrics that immediately jump out at you as an adult.

Since we are all adults here, see if there is something in the lyrics for Point of No Return by Expose that really strikes you as perhaps salacious.

The common road,
seems just like a dream
It's a mystery to me
Fills me within when we're together
Oh baby can't you see
I like to feel the passion
To the point of no return
I will be in full reaction
I want to take you in my arms
You're taking me to the point of no return
You're taking me to the point of no return
It took so long, and I treasure now
The love you gave to me
And when you smile
It warms my heart and me
Oh baby can't you see
I like to feel the passion to
the point of no return
Oh baby, I will be in full reaction
I want to take you in my arms
You're taking me to the point of no return
You're taking me to the point of no return
I wanna be with you baby
I wanna be by your side
I wanna be with you baby
I'm gonna love you every night
You're taking me to the point of no return
You're taking me to the point of no return
You're taking me to the point of no return
You're taking me to the point of no return
You're taking me to the point of no return

I may just have a dirty mind, so could just be seeing references to the female orgasm somewhere that it really isn't. It has happened before. But I don't think I'm wrong here or really stretching to see that.

The weird thing is, the thought randomly occurred to me one night when I was remembering the song back in my early 20's, because I started singing the chorus to myself with the accompanying grunts. That was my Oh moment (but I didn't make an O face). And then I listened to it recently for the aforementioned Coalition of Awesomeness topic, and it was so obvious now.

I mean, as an adult, I get what She-Bop by Cyndi Lauper is about now too... and the video makes it plain (but stylishly rendered... it was the 1980's after all) that it is about the feminine excesses of masturbatory bliss.

And by the time I got around to I Touch Myself by The Divinyls and Icicle by Tori Amos, well, I was older and/or things were just less subtle. (Is it sad that every time I think about Icicle, I always preface it with the line "This one time at Bible Camp..."?) And I guess the less I say about the back catalog of Salt N Pepa, the better. But there is a certain joy (and let's be honest, heartbreak) in discovering the dirty undertones of a song that you liked as a child.

The strange thing is, I can basically pick out two major elements from this single song which ended up being things which characterized the majority of music I would like as an adult.

Female singers: Yes, I love female singers. Almost as far back as I can remember, I've enjoyed listening to women sing more then men, and it is a trend which I believe started with Point of No Return. My Last.fm charts, as rudimentary as there are at this point, do reveal that fact. From Expose through The Bangles and into the 1990's with Juliana Hatfield, Bjork, the aforementioned Tori Amos and PJ Harvey and into the past decade with Sleater Kinney, Edith Frost, The Cardigans and so many others over the past 25 years.

Keyboards/Electronic Elements: Granted the way I drifted was into music that had some of those same elements, but used in different ways. Of course I like a wide variety of electronic music now, but it goes deeper than that. I generally like almost anything with strong keyboards. Stereolab, Broadcast, Saint Etienne, Krautrock in general, old Doors records, Wendy Carlos, progressive rock (gasp!), chiptunes, Bach, lounge and so many others. I love farfisas and moogs and mellotrons (oh my!).

In fact, a lot of the music I like these days fits into both those categories at once. I think the reason I liked Make it Through by Bis the first time I heard it was because it sounded almost like a riff on Point of No Return, which I realized as I was writing this.

Strangely enough, songs featuring orgasms doesn't end up high on that list. I guess if they did, I'd like the music of Prince a lot more. But I think that is a story for another day.

Now if you too see what I see in Point of No Return, allow me to scar you for life by showing you a preteen boy singing that same song on Kids Incorporated.