Day 55 - Sex (Berlin)

You may have been keeping track of my yearly countdowns that started SIX YEARS AGO, as a lark to count down to my fiftieth birthday, and if you are, I applaud, thank, and celebrate you! This year’s list will include songs by artists whom you’ve heard about perhaps multiple times in my lists. What can I say about that but that I am loyal and, since the first year was intended to be a one-and-done thing, I didn’t think I should just do retrospectives on the artists instead of trying to apple-pick favorites, which clearly is an impossible task for me. What you’ll also notice, as usual, is the list is ballad-heavy, with disco jangles and pop songs as typical runners up. I am nothing if not a predictable creature of habit. This, too, you also know if you’ve been reading my countdown blogs, and again I must thank you for finding me and my musical opinions even the least bit interesting. That being stated, you know Berlin as the band who released that earworm ballad in the late eighties, from that Tom Cruise movie with the planes and the testosterone. I know Berlin from their string of amazing hits that were part of my early love affair with new wave music. There is something about the voice of lead singer Teri Nunn that exudes sex and passion; it makes you want to close your eyes and move in whatever direction your body allows. I’ve already captured my love for their song No More Words in my first countdown six years ago, but that won’t stop me from adding another Berlin monster to this year’s countdown. In the post-Papa Don’t Preach era, while huge pop-acts like Madonna, George Michael and Salt n' Pepa were making everyone everywhere start talking about sex, Berlin subversively gave us a song called Sex (I’m A..) about bondage and role play and everything in between. It’s fast paced like a racing heart. It’s also perhaps a little demeaning to women and certainly not for the feminist, but then with Teri Nunn in control, maybe that’s just exactly what it IS. After all, in her own words, it’s a song called Sex, but she refers to each act as making love together. So, who’s to say that these alternate types of role play aren’t feminist after all? Certainly not I.