Nectarine? Soup Tureen? Sex Machine?

If I asked you to identify the two most surprising words from James Brown’s Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine, one of your choices would be machine. Mr Brown knows that he’s invited an intriguing image into his song. He doesn’t want it to grow in his listeners’ minds before he has a chance to shape it to his will. He works hard and fast to make sure that sex machine becomes a powerful ally, not a powerful distraction. He avoids winking or giving a quick pelvic thrust as he sings sex machine. He keeps his audience with him by keeping the word sex neutral. He treats it no differently from get, on or up. Like a fax machine. Watch him and ask yourself: if he’d emphasised sex or sex machine, would he have intensified the power of the song? Or would he have stepped over the invisible but definite line into sleaziness? James Brown’s neutral treatment of sex machine sets it free to float as a suggestion. He’s using it to suggest enthusiasm and energy, not a repetitive, mindless mechanical action. Your brain never provides you with an engineering diagram of a sex machine. Or this kind of Charlie Chaplin scenario. James keeps sex machine intriguingly and powerfully abstract. By dropping it into the line and letting it be. Any extra attention would have tipped sex machine over into something sleazy. Everything about his song is infused with sex, except the word itself. Why? There’s nothing sexy about the word sex. The shape of the word stops it sounding warm, earthy or romantic. It’s short, sharp and clinical. Cold scientific Latin through and through. Add a y, to make sexy, and the central vowel dips. The word develops a curvy shape. That curve and the friendly y sound at the end humanises and softens it. When James Brown wants to use a warmer word, in the middle of the song, he switches to love machine or loving machine. Sexy machine would have sounded very odd. But starting the song with get on up, like a Love Machine would have been too distractingly human. It would have slowed down the momentum of the song. Love sticks to the tongue more than sex does. Try saying each word. One is sharper and cleaner, isn’t it? Sex alone serves James Brown as a useful single syllable word with a clear consonant ending. Sex machine rhymes usefully with stay on the scene. There aren’t many other words that would fit and make sense: nectarine? soup tureen? No, because you need the s/sh/x consonant echoes of stay on the scene and sex machine. The layers of slightly different consonant sounds, all built around the s, keep the song tightly bound together. I can’t think of any other one-syllable word other than sax or sex with the right sounds at each end to pair with machine. Slush machine? (the l slows your tongue down) Scotch machine?(the hard k sound at the beginning kills it) Sauce machine? (too sloppy sounding). Anyway, they’re all distracting and surreal or meaningless. Sex fits perfectly, in so many ways. And Mr Brown will have known just how much fun that small word would provide. It’s thanks to DH Lawrence that the word sex was available to describe anything other than the ‘state of being either male or female.‘  He was the first to use the word in a more active way. Just forty-one years before James Brown and Bobby Byrd wrote their song. DH Lawrence thought it such an ugly little word. But he knew sex had power. The power to entice. He used it in a matter-of-fact way and let the word weave its own image in the minds of his readers. James Brown knew that too much nudge, nudge, wink, wink emphasis on sex machine as he sang would have got him censored. The words fit the groove of his song and added to its memorability. He lit the blue touch-paper and retired. Here’s a music trivia question: at about 2.10 in to the video, you hear James Brown sing a tribute to Wes Montgomery. Why? If English isn’t your first language: don’t over-emphasise the sex part of sex-machine. Yes, sex is a powerful word, but it doesn’t need your help to attract attention. The opposite, in fact. James Brown treats sex neutrally. So should you. Sing the word sex simply. Sing sex-machine as you would sing fax machine or nectarine. No extra energy or emphasis. The word is there to rhyme with stay on the scene. That’s all. All the rest is in the mind of your audience. And that’s the most powerful place for it to be. By the way, the same goes for the Tom Jones song Sex Bomb, or the Kings of Leon Sex on Fire. Sing the word sex neutrally. Sex doesn’t need your help to attract attention to itself. Don’t do this. It will make you look like an awkward teenager or a sleazy old man. Don’t rush sex. It’s a short word, and it’s a balanced word – the s and the x have an equal value. Think of the vowel sound in the middle like this. Level. The sound of sex is important. It should be clean and clear. Check that you’ve got its vowel sound right here. Make sure that you are pronouncing the x as a clean ks sound. Don’t sing sess. The right consonants are important to give sex a clear end. Treat sex like any other word – like socks or tax. Its power is in the mind of your audience. It doesn’t need your help. © Sing Better English, 2014