About Those Lyrics

A bad week for the Phi Psi’s at UCLA. Someone purloined the fraternity’s songbook and slipped it to the campus newspaper, which proceeded to print a few of the lyrics. As you might guess, these songs do not deal with campfires and toasted marshmallows.

We’ll get to the specifics of the songs later. Actually, I think they suggest something more important than anything the Phi Psi bashers have yet claimed. But first let’s deal with the general subject of college drinking songs.

See, every generation has its own set of songs intended to be sung by one gender about the other. A special rule governs their use: These songs only get performed when no member of the target gender is present. Thus they shed all vestiges of sexual diplomacy and can be uncommonly revealing.

For reasons that seem obvious, each generation creates these songs in early adulthood. That’s when the emotions and insecurities about the opposite sex run the highest. But they do not remain the same from generation to generation. As we change, and as the world changes around us, the songs change.

Let me offer my own generation as evidence of this theory. In the mid-1960s I found myself, along with my fellow pledges, gathered each Thursday night in the stairwell of our fraternity house. At the given order, we would bend over the rail so the full-fledged members could stand at the top of the stairwell and pour buckets of water on our heads.

This was known as the water ceremony, a weekly staple at the fraternity. As the water cascaded over us, we began to sing. That was the rule. The more water, the louder the singing.

The songs were memorized from the pledge songbook. We had spent hours coaching each other on the verses just as, I am sure, the Phi Psi pledges coached each other.

We regarded them as the dirtiest songs imaginable. At their simplest level, they celebrated what we liked to think was our unstoppable lust. Songs about condoms that could not withstand our manly exertions. About girls tricked into doing what they never intended.

Actually, the songs expressed more than we knew. These were the days before the birth control pill became easily available to young women. And the days before Roe vs. Wade. So our bravado about broken condoms actually represented a kind of whistling in the dark, a protection against terror. Product failure could easily make you an 18-year-old father in those days.

As for young women, a wariness enveloped them. In a short time the pill would free them of their fears. But not yet. So all kinds of deceptions infused their behavior, and ours, and we made songs about those deceptions.

Deciphering the past is easy compared to the present, of course. What is to be made of these new songs? At times they don’t seem to have been written by the same species.

In the Phi Psi songs, sex itself hardly seems to matter. These young men want to sing about pain. They write verses about dipping objects in boiling oil and using them on women. About cheese graters applied to breasts.

One song tells the story of a woman who is choked to death during sex, then buried, then dug up “every now and then” for more sex.

Why does this generation prefer S & M to our generation’s sexual trickery? More anger? More boredom? Perhaps. You could make the argument that all young men of this generation--because of AIDS, because of shrinking job prospects, general decline, etc., etc.--have reasons for anger that we did not.

As I say, maybe. There’s also the business about rock music and the current social license for inflicting pain. In a Guns N’ Roses album the singer addresses his girl thusly: “Tied up, tied down, up against the wall/ Be my rubbermade baby/ An’ we will do it all.”

That album was titled “Appetite for Destruction” and it sold 14 million copies.

In the end, I don’t have a satisfying answer for the new songs. Maybe we should send the lyrics to Axl Rose with a request for the proper explanation. He just may know something that we don’t.