Please, just put anything on

There is a particular kind of ego death that happens while standing naked in front of a record player.

By this point the stylus had returned back to its home, leaving a deafening unromantic silence throughout the room. While crouched over a stack of albums conducting an urgent mental review of my entire collection. Too fast. Too slow. Too obvious. We’ve already had Led Zeppelin. Behind me, a voice carrying all the patience in the world (which somehow made it worse) said “can you just put anything on.”

I would like to report that I put anything on. In truth I stood there for another two minutes looking for the perfect album.

That moment turns up in my nightmares more than I’d care to admit, because it’s the point at which I noticed I’d been following instructions I don’t remember receiving. At no point did anyone ever sit me down and explain that sex requires a soundtrack. I mean for me personally, my entire sexual education amounted to no more than “don’t get anyone pregnant, bright spark.” And yet I and I assume many others arrived into adulthood already knowing it, the same way you arrive already knowing that airports are melancholy and hospitals are frightening before you’ve even stepped foot inside. As always, somebody put it there. 

And I have a fair idea who. 

It starts, as these things do, with a film that scandalised every cocktail party it ever reached. 

Ecstasy (Extase) is a Czechoslovakian picture from 1933, directed by Gustav Machatý and starring an eighteen-year-old Hedy Lamarr, several years before Hollywood and eight before she and George Antheil patented the frequency-hopping system your Bluetooth runs on. It is generally credited as the first non-pornographic film to depict both sexual intercourse and a female orgasm. 

The second part of that matters here, and it’s worth being precise about how the scene is actually captured. At no point do you see the sex. The camera holds on Lamarr’s face and is fixed there throughout. The entire scene contains absolutely no nudity in it, and there's surprisingly little dialogue throughout the film; it’s a nearly wordless picture. 

So ask yourself what’s telling you exactly what’s happening. It isn't the image. Remember, it’s a close-up of a woman’s face and a close-up could mean a dozen things from grief, fear, prayer (an endless list one could say). The give away is actually the music. 

And the music wasn't borrowed. Machatý's producers engaged Giuseppe Becce, one of the most sought-after film composers working in Europe at the time, and brought him on early so he could begin writing ahead of schedule. Which means the first orgasm in mainstream cinema was deliberately scored, by a professional, on commission — to tell an audience what it was looking at. The score isn't background music, either. It's the only narration in the room.

It cost her a decade of scandal. Pope Pius XI denounced the film. Australia banned it, along with much of the rest of the world. When the American distributor tried to bring a print into the United States in 1935, Customs seized it as obscene and immoral and a federal marshal burned the reel, so when the distributor appealed, he had no film left to show the court and lost. He came back a year later with a re-cut version and got in. But several states still banned it anyway.

Nobody really eased into any of this. The convention wasn't refined over decades of trial and error. It simply appeared, fully crafted, at the very moment the technology allowed sound and picture to be married on a strip of celluloid. Sex on screen has never been silent since, and the very first time it happened, the music was doing all the work.

Top Gun put Berlin's "Take My Breath Away" over Maverick and Charlie in 1986, and the needle-drop has held the position ever since, a song doing precisely the work its title advertises. Dirty Dancing reached back to Solomon Burke's "Cry to Me," a track from 1962, to make the summer of 63’ feel irresistible. And at the far end sits Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs, a British film from 2004 that dropped the pretence entirely and simply cut back and forth between a couple in bed and the gigs they'd been to, as if to concede that you were only ever here for the music.

By the time Fifty Shades of Grey arrived, the soundtrack wasn't accompanying the film. It was part of the marketing campaign, with a line of chart artists on payroll cranking out songs to order.

It's worth being clear about what the music is actually doing there, because it isn't what you'd assume.

Pornography, which isn’t in the business of subtlety, nor a reputation to uphold, does away with all of it. There's no long winded build up, no moment of unrelenting desire. Nobody is waiting for the chorus, and say what you like about the industry, good or bad because the Australian Taxation Office considers the income taxable, which is a firmer position than most people manage, but it is at least honest about what it's selling, and it doesn't need to be wrapped in a bow to sell it.

Which tells you the mainstream version has never been about arousal. It's about giving the audience permission. The music acts as a set of instructions to the audience, telling them this is love, this is a mistake, this is where it all goes wrong, you may be moved rather than embarrassed. It's there to manage the room and the awkwardness sitting in it.

And then it began to follow us home.

The domestic version had to wait for the hardware to catch up, and the hardware did take its time but when final arrived it was positioned for a one, two, three finish. 

Vinyl is a hostile format for this (trust me, I know). Twenty-ish minutes a side, then the pop, which means someone has to get up and cross the room mid-everything. An automatic turntable eases some of it, since it at least lifts and returns the stylus for you, but you still have to flip the darn thing, and there is no configuration of human limbs from which flipping a record looks composed. And if you lacked a turntable, you’d be left with the radio and a prayer.

Things did start to change, though. Philips had introduced the compact cassette back in 1963, but it was the seventies that brought cheap blank tape, and taping things at home became a habit rather than an expense. Ten to twenty songs, sequenced by you, in any order you chose, for reasons you'd never say out loud. It was the first format where the playlist was an object you made rather than a shelf you desperately raided. The mixtape is where curation became a gesture, and it's no accident it became a romantic one. After that, each new technology simply removed the frustrations of the last: the CD improved the sound and spared you the flip, MP3 put a thousand songs in your pocket, and then came streaming, which most of us assumed was the final evolution. Every problem, it seemed, had been solved.

But Spotify can now generate an Intimate Mix for you, using your own listening data.

Just think about that for a moment, because it's the end of a ninety-year tune. The very thing I was failing at in front of that record player, the anguish, second-guessing, has now been automated. You don't even need to curate anymore. You’re simply accepting a suggestion.

That is not a neutral development, because personalisation has a blind spot built into it. Spotify has no concept of a couple. Every recommendation it makes is assembled from one account, one listening history, one set of tastes. The Intimate Mix isn't a mix for the two of you. It's a mix for whoever's phone is connected.

Which gives you the modern version of my record-shelf humiliation. The algorithm hands over something calibrated so precisely to your own history that the other person spends the evening quietly wondering who on earth would pick this. The better it knows you, the stranger it sounds to them. A mixtape at least had a recipient. This has a user.

So when I ask whether the sex playlist is something we were sold, I'm not being rhetorical. It was designed and built deliberately, for an audience of one.

Going in, I assumed I'd find the obvious reasoning for why people use it, ya know, romance, Atmosphere. To make the whole event feel grander than Ben Hur.

But to my surprise the numbers disagreed with me.

A survey commissioned by ZipHealth, an online pharmacy that sells erectile dysfunction treatment (just trust me on this one with me) analysed 11,267 songs across 148 Spotify playlists tagged with sexual keywords, and separately asked 1,004 participants about their listening habits during sex. Forty-seven per cent said they listen to music. Fifty-three per cent said they don't, which is already a quiet rebuttal to the idea that any of this is universal.

But of the people who do, sixty-eight per cent said it helps reduce sexual performance anxiety.

So it’s less mood, romance or because it's beautiful but because it makes them less afraid.

The study has its caveats and I'll name them before anyone else does. It's brand-commissioned, it's self-reported, and any survey in which respondents estimate their own athletic prowess should be read in the spirit it was written. The numbers list Hip-hop listeners claimed 31.5 minutes on average and EDM listeners claimed 27.2. Depending on who you ask, that is either an eternity or the disappointment of the century.

But sixty-eight per cent isn't nothing, and the sponsor is the punchline with no punch. Because a company selling treatment for erectile dysfunction paid for research that says music reduces performance anxiety, because the anxiety is the product. That's the whole economy in a line. The thing I'd convinced myself was seduction turns out to be a coping mechanism, and a profitable enough one to fund its own survey.

The rest reads as low-budget comedy. The most common artist on these playlists is The Weeknd. The single most common track is "Super Freaky Girl." The average song runs three minutes and thirty-seven seconds, a unit of measurement I pray I never get compared to never to. So it’s not the Marvin Gaye of the imagination. It's just a reflection of the charts, same as any other Tuesday.

so, it’s Bearable but not perfect.

Sex is rather fantastic at exposing whatever you'd rather not have exposed. It's one of the very few situations in adult life where your guard comes fully down, and with someone new the window between a handshake and a first attempt at synchronisation is startlingly short. We are a species that needs to be approved of and is frightened of finding out we're not. It's why people are nervous on first dates. It's why you’ve just spent three hours beforehand, running through spotify, adjusting the running order, checking the BPM not too fast, not too slow (okay Goldilocks) as though the correct sequence of tracks were a form of insurance.

But it’s not really insurance. It's an arbitrarily set background. It's there so there's something in the room besides the two of you and whatever you're each panicking about which is a very human thing to want and I'd never sneer at it, having stood in front of that turntable behaving in exactly that way.

But it's worth asking what the noise is covering, and whether you'd survive its absence.

I have one data point and I'm aware it's not very scientific or that even constitutes a sample.

The best night I can remember had no music at all. Not by design, I think we simply forgot, which is its own small indictment of how carefully I try to plan these things. But what it lacked in stereophonic sound was made up in pace. Think Long pauses, talking. Kissing that didn't lead anywhere in particular and wasn't required to. Genuine laughing, the undignified kind. A pause in the middle for some tea, which I recognise is the least erotic sentence in this piece and which I stand by completely.

Nothing throughout was building to anything. Nothing had to land on a chorus or come together with a symphony of brass . It went on for hours because there was no reason to stop and no track listing telling us where we were meant or should be up to.

And it was better. Not marginally, and not in a way I've had to talk myself into since. It was the best of them, and it was the only one nobody had scored. At least from what I can remember but I suppose the fact it stands out so brightly is evidence that it mattered. 

So give it a go. The downside is negligible and the upside is that you learn something.

Yes, you'll hear things. Human bodies make loud and faintly ridiculous sounds, and the movies have never once told you so, because the movies have "Take My Breath Away" or an orchestra to pick things. You may both discover a noise you didn't know you had in you. In my experience that's survivable, and usually funny, which is not the worst thing to be at that particular moment.

The music will come back, and I'd never propose a life of silence — I'd think less of anyone who drove to work with the radio off. If you put something on and the whole evening is magical, then it was magical if not, oh well. I still switch a playlist back-on every now and again; like most good things on this planet, moderation has its uses. But it can sit one out every once in a while. I spent three hours building mine to cover a silence I had never actually tested.

Turns out there wasn't much in there that needed covering.