In a recent paper, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley explored how Chinese and American citizens react to music in a subjective sense: Do they like it? How much do they like it? How would they describe it? The results are fascinating. The human brain's reaction to music is reflected in how we each subjectively experience it.
Here’s an excellent “plain English” summary of the research. I also love data visualizations, and the authors have given us a great one that’s truly interactive. The gist of the research is that the authors of the paper identified 13 emotions, or emotional ranges, that all people experience when listening to music. Among these is an emotion that they call “Erotic/Desirous,” and the song that created the strongest erotic/desirous feelings was Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” You might say Green can claim to have created the greatest make out song in the world.
“Let’s Stay Together” showed up in a German study in a very similar context. But appearing in two studies is not exactly definitive. And this is where my curiosity kicked in.
I became a scientist because I was curious about how the world worked. Science allows me to keep being curious. Heck, it requires me to keep being curious. I never know where my curiosity will lead me. I started out planning to write about a growing body of research that shows some brain reactions to music are universal. The Berkeley paper made my point and gave me a hook.
I conducted a simple experiment: I entered keywords such as “makeout song” into various search engines, along with the tags “best,” “greatest,” and “top.” From there I tabulated the results; the consensus, based on 21 different online ratings, is that Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” is the greatest make out song of all time. I am not a fan, though I really like “Sexual Healing,” which happens to be the other Marvin Gaye song on the top 10 list. I want all the mathematicians and statisticians to know that I am aware that this left my results open to recency bias and accessibility bias, among other issues, and I am working on a more robust approach. All the same, here’s the list that my research generated.
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“Let’s Get It On,” Marvin Gaye
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“Wicked Game,” Chris Isaak
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“All Night,” Beyonce
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“One and Only,” Adele
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“When You’re Smiling and Astride Me,” Father John Misty
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“Let’s Stay Together,” Al Green
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“212,” Azealia Banks
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“Untitled (How Does It Feel),” D’Angelo
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“Lay it Down,” Al Green
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“Sledgehammer,” Peter Gabriel—tied with “Sexual Healing,” Marvin Gaye
Before we go any further, I should tell you that I’m obsessed with make out songs—and why. I have Asperger’s, and I can’t read social cues very well, so I have no idea how to tell when my wife is “in the mood.” She solved this by picking a make out song, an idea she got from my previous significant others, with whom I had the same problem.
My partners, current and former, each picked a song: a make out song, a “Hey! Let’s get it on” song. If they turned on their chosen song, it meant they wanted to play couch rugby. This system prevented needless stress and confusion in our relationships.
Contrary to the Berkeley and German studies, none of my partners’ make out songs are the same: They’re as different as the women who picked them. Further, each woman’s song changed several times during our years together. It is this change in selection that ultimately fascinates me most: I want to know how they were picking them, and why their picks changed over time.
To explore this, I started with a readily available focus group—my wife and her friends. These four women can become very vocal when hanging out together, particularly when they have imbibed freely.
My wife got things off to a great start. “When I was a teenager, anything on the radio was a make out song.” Then her friend Marlene started singing Meat Loaf’s epic “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
“Well I want to make your motor run
And now our bodies are oh so close and tight
It never felt so good, it never felt so right
And we're glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife
Glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife
C'mon hold on tight
Oh c'mon hold on tight”
“It is a good thing no boy knew how hot that song made me,” she added.
“For me, it was Marvin Gaye. Anything by Marvin Gaye,” Caroline, aligning with my research, threw in. For the next 10 minutes they argued over the best Marvin Gaye make out song. They finally settled on “Let’s Get It On,” though everyone agreed that neither “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” or “Let’s Get It On” did it for them now.
Okay, I did a bit of a bait and switch there. I couldn’t find a “Let’s Get It On” video that I liked, so I stuck in Marvin Gaye’s most Erotic/Desirous song, “Sexual Healing,” instead.
Somewhere in their 30s, my wife and her friends report, what they considered a great make out song changed. “It is like it had to be more upfront, more complex, more exotic,” Gabby said of her change of tune. “I didn’t want smooth anymore. I wanted something like Another Level singing “Freak Me.”
“Let me lick you up and down
Til' you say stop (every time I think about your love, I want to lick you down)
Let me play with your body baby make you real hot (and when you get so freaky girl)
(You know I want to love you now) let me do all the things you want me to do
'Cause tonight baby I wanna get freaky with you”
My wife sang the entire song from memory—the Another Level version, not Silk’s original, which I prefer; there are differences in both the lyrics and arrangement.
As I listened to them, I wondered if maybe their tastes didn’t change, but rather our cultural tastes did. It isn’t a straight line, but there is a pattern in the data. I think we went from men singing about how much they wanted a woman, to men singing about how hard they would work to satisfy a woman, to women singing about their own sexuality, with and without men. But age is still a factor ... I think.
“Now, it is all about energy,” Marlene said. “I’m exhausted all the time. If I am going to get in the mood, I need something that shoots energy into me.” Everyone agreed—my wife and her friends are all in their mid-50s and mid-career, still parenting while also looking after aging parents and siblings. They also seem to sit on the board of just about every organization in our community. It would be a miracle if they weren’t exhausted.
My wife and her friends also have playlists for activities outside the bedroom. For housework, Marlene and Gabby play “Rock the Casbah” by the Clash, which came up in the Berkeley research as the “most energy-producing” song. My wife uses Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” in the same way, while Caroline turns to “Yellow Submarine.”
But they were blunt about their changing interests.
[Author’s note: This is where having an editor comes in very handy. DK staffer Jessica Sutherland, whose work you have probably read here, edited this for me. She wrote me an email that said: “Just below the Clash video, you cite the women in your study group’s changing interests. Every time I’ve read this, I’ve felt, by the list of songs mentioned, that your group of women are talking about songs for masturbation. Are you dodging that? Let’s be a little more open about that!”
I was sitting here, typing and occasionally sipping coffee, when I read, "that your group of women are talking about songs for masturbation". I nearly choked and I had to clean my monitor screen. Because of course they are! And I had no idea. I am such an idiot! I read Jessica’s comment to my wife her response was, after she stopped laughing, "have you been clear with her about just how bad your Asperger's is?"]
“I don’t want a man singing at me anymore,” Caroline said.
“I want a woman singing about me,” Gabby said.
“Like Joan Osborne’s ‘Right Hand Man,’” my wife offered.
“I just switched,” Marlene said, “from P!nk’s ‘Fingers’ to ‘She Bop.’”
“How could we forget Cyndi [Lauper]?” Gabby exclaimed.
“Cyndi changed my life,” Caroline said.
Suddenly, four women were dancing in my living room, singing about masturbating and gay porn (though Lauper sings that she thought it was a women’s magazine).
We-hell I see them every night in tight blue jeans
In the pages of a Blue Boy magazine
Hey I've been thinking of a new sensation
I'm picking up good vibration
Ooh she bop, she bop
The story goes that Lauper recorded the song while naked and “tickling herself.” We know this because Lauper made sure the whole world knew. On the record, she can be heard struggling not to giggle, eventually losing the battle. The video is pretty tame in comparison.
In 1984, Lauper launched a cultural revolution, daring to say that women not only could and did masturbate, but could actually sing about it … on mainstream radio, and in concert.
Her courage also got her a spot on the PMRC Filthy 15. Music has always been political, but in 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center, which is forever associated with Tipper Gore, came up with a proposed rating system for records. These concerned parents curated a list they called the “Filthy 15,” which they considered the dirtiest songs in music. “She Bop” figured prominently and, as Lucy O’Brien argues in She Bop II: the definitive history of women in rock, pop, and soul, that notoriety gave it cultural importance and inspired many female artists—including Lady Gaga and Rihanna.
I can’t help wondering if sex-positive singers like Halsey, P!nk, Rihanna, and Peaches would score well on the Erotic/Desirous scale in China or Germany. Their work certainly showed up in my research. I also wonder if the changes my wife and her friends have experienced in their choice of make out songs is due to getting older, or because they came of age in a post-feminist world. How can we separate our culture from biology? Nurture from nature?
We think we know that dopamine release explains music’s power over us, but that theory opens the door to so many more questions. Dopamine is one of the most-studied substances in the history of science; there are at least 111,000 research papers published about it. It is a neurotransmitter, sometimes called the “feel good” brain chemical, because it provides us with pleasure—but it does so much more than that.
That’s right: This one chemical can lead us to feel:
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Amusement
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Defiance
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Joyfulness
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Annoyance
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Sadness
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Calmness
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Beauty
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Anxiety
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Triumphant
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Dreaminess
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Energized
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Scared
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Desirous
In just one of those 111,000 papers, dopamine and music are studied to better understand their impact on patients with Parkinson’s disease, and on those who have had strokes. But how, exactly, does a music-driven rise in dopamine mediate all 13 emotional responses? Why does Cyndi Lauper turn my wife and her friends on, while the Clash energizes them, and Leonard Cohen succeeds in filling them with both joy and sadness? How—biologically, neurologically, and anatomically—does that work? And what is the evolutionary significance of this?
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The opportunities for using the universal, emotional power of music are immense. Think about political campaign music. As a candidate, how many of those 13 buttons do you think you might be interested in pushing at a campaign event, or in a political ad? Music is easy to use, but it’s also just as easy to abuse it as a tool to motivate voters. Donald Trump’s people are masters at using music to add to the fervor of his rally audiences. (Of course, in typical Trump fashion, he often “forgets” to ask for permission.)
Yet all the same questions apply to rally music: Does our response to campaign music change with age? Can we reverse those changes? Does a person’s response vary by gender or race? By occupation or educational level? By religion or religious practice?
What about small changes in music—can they make a real difference in our emotional response to a song? As noted above, my wife and her friends prefer Another Level’s version of “Freak Me” to Silk’s as a make out song. Yet I disagree, and my scientist’s mind wants to know why. You can make up your own mind by comparing them.
It is worth noting that “Freak Me” was written and sung to appeal to a heterosexual female audience; both versions share that focus and approach.
Another of those Asperger’s moments I had writing this was discovering that my wife’s housework song, “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel, was a simple attempt to stick as many word’s for penis as possible into one song. My wife, of course, has known that “all along.” It amuses her to count all the “dick words.”
It must amuse or arouse a lot of people, because while it wasn’t near the top of any of the lists of sexy songs I identified in preparing this piece, it was still on many of the lists. Even knowing there were all these dick references, I couldn’t spot them. My wife had to sit me down and play it with frequent pauses and replay each one for me to understand that “Sledgehammer” is a true tribute to penises, and a funny one at that. It also raises a fascinating question: Why are there so many words for the male sexual organ? Wouldn’t three or four have done the job?
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Listening to music is a bit like drinking wine or tasting whisky: There are layers of complexity and the listening context matters as much as one’s ear or palate. From my own experience, and my nascent research, it’s fair to say that—from make out songs to campaign anthems—music is a powerful and valuable tool in social settings. The most important question, however, is: Can music be more than that?
How might we use music as a treatment for emotional distress, sexual dysfunction, mental disease, trauma, or even neurological disorders? There’s some work in this field already, and hopefully there will be much more. This video from social worker Naomi Feil, who works with the elderly, offers just one inspirational glimpse into what is possible with the power of music.
My curiosity has led me this far, and I am determined to unravel some of these mysteries. Considering we’re all under lockdown, it’s not like there’s much else to do.
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