Just my 2 cents, I do not think that Joni is saying that greed and lust
created HIV or AIDS. When I first heard this song, I was a little put off
by it, and I consider myself a good ole progressive liberal sympathetic to
the message that I think Joni is trying to convey. I just didn't like the
execution of the message in the song. I think Joni has some really clever
political songs ("Paved Paradise") and some moving social commentaries
("Cherokee Louise" or "Magdelane Laundries"), but this song really doesn't
do it for me. As others have pointed out, it's too eclectic, though I
think from Jim's lengthy analysis of the lyrics, he dislikes the eclectism
b/c it is a list that sounds like a liberal mantra with little fact or
reality behind it. I don't agree with his political interpretation, but I
do agree that as an aesthetic matter, the political message is watered
down and rendered absurd with its rapid fire laundry list of social,
economic and political ills.
Nevertheless, I think the line "Sex sells everything and sex kills" refers
to the fact that in a post-AIDS society, we continue to use sex to sell
products, we still valorize youth, beauty and sexuality -- the nubile body
of a woman or the muscular body of a man -- to sell beer, cars, Hollywood,
the music industry (the Backstreet Boys, Brittainy Spears), etc. etc. I
think the song is saying that corporations use and manipulate images of
sexuality to sell products, but they ignore the cultural messages that
these images project. Do these images create unrealistic expectations
about our bodies? About our sex lives? Are companies profiting off of
the American public's lack of self-esteem, on the one hand, (most
Americans are by medical standards out of shape and overweight), and at
the same time are they making profits from our excessive body-image
consciousness and encouraging us to neglect our minds and spirits? I
think this is a long-standing critique that Joni has had about consumer
society, and especially about the music industry. Furthermore, this lyric
may be an attempt to question whether these images of sex and sexuality
reproduce certain normative gender assumptions -- that women should look
and act like the sexy vixens that they seem to be in beer ads, and that
men should look and act like the macho studs they seem to be in the same
ads. Sex sells everything -- but are the media images of sex and
sexuality responsible images, especially in a post-AIDS world in which a
whole new generation of gay and lesbian activists have come to see the
political dimensions of sex and sexuality or in which unsafe sexual
practices may have a link to an unthinking, uncritical assimilation of
sexual images propagated by the media and advertising.
Not a defense of the song, which I always have to skip on the cd
player, but a possible interpretation of one of the lines that others have
argued doesn't make any sense.
Ciao,
Duane
