On 7/15/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Sun, 15 Jul 2007 16:41:22 +0300, "Jussi-Ville Heiskanen" cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
Not so much a case in point, but a touchstone. Do *you* think we are better or worse than Britannica for having "List of songs about masturbation". Stand up and be counted...
No, a case in point. There is no encyclopaedic topic "songs about masturbation" because there is nothing about masturbation which has any logical connection with songs, and vice-versa (although I suppose one could stretch a point and say that, for example, Whitney Houston's "I will always love you" gives more pleasure to the performer than anybody watching). The connection is an arbitrary one, and pretty much every entry in the list was also unsupported by references, because in the end what constitutes being *about* something, rather than simply mentioning it in the lyrics somewhere? I am all for setting up a sister project, triviapedia or whatever, for collecting such examples of word association gone mad, but there's no question in my mind that a neutral, verifiable encyclopaedia is not the place for them.
Your general point is better than the example you have chosen to illustrate it. Perhaps the list form is not the most encyclopaedic way to approach masturbatory imagery in music lyrics, but the subject itself is well studied, and inherently encyclopaedic in the wide (non-Britannica) sense.
Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself" is the subject of not one but quite a few academic papers, reflecting on it as the iconic watershed on the evolving attitudes toward sexuality of Pop Music particularly.
It would also be almost as hard to dismiss the masturbation theme in Blues Music as a whole, as it would be to dismiss the metaphor of inebriation and wine in Islamic poetry.
-- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]