Word: squirms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Listeners often squirm at Smith's more explicit songs. In the title track of her Horses album, which is an incantation of violence and brutal sexuality, she sings of "white, shining silver studs with their noses in flames" and of a suicidal lover who "picked up a blade, and pressed it against his smooth throat." Redondo Beach, set against a catchy reggae beat, tells of lesbian love. Other Smith songs like the hard rocker Free Money are easier to take. In surrealistic blues like Birdland, her mordant fragments of verse can be evocative...
They have names like Ecstasy Unlimited, the Velvet Touch and This Is Heaven. They are in business mostly as "massage parlors," but when police try to shut them down, they squirm into some new designation-rap parlors, escort services, schools of sexual technique, nude encounter groups and even nude weight-lifting centers...
LYNDON JOHNSON HAD this little game he liked to play. He would call in one of his more uptight, straightlaced Ivy-League advisors, like Douglas Dillon, and then would conduct a perfectly normal discussion of some current issue--while LBJ sat on the toilet. LBJ enjoyed watching his advisor squirm and would bark something like "What's the matter with you, boy?" if the aide's discomfort became too obvious...
...smooth-talking partisans of "men's liberation" joyously chanting "Oppressors, arise and recognize your own oppression!," fresh from their discovery that men as well as women suffer from rigid sexual stereotyping. No use trying to pin the blame on some anonymous entity called "the system" which makes both sexes squirm unhappily--not even if the system turns to be none other than that ogre capitalism. After all, Marxist theory may say one thing, but in practice socialist countries still uphold the nuclear family and discriminate against women. Every man--socialist or capitalist--is a sexist oppressor, a supporter of patriarchy...
...SOME SHOWINGS of Nashville bands of people squirm in their seats, flamboyantly discontented--sharp out-takes of impatient breath, exclamations of disgust, even boos at the end of the show. It had to come to this: it should have been obvious from the beginning that the colossal build up for Nashville would alienate people, and not just because certain aficionados consider it the height of sophistication and the mark of a properly iconoclastic sensibility to reject on principle whatever happens to be snared by the cover of Newsweek or Time...