Before the Mall

 Before we leave behind "experience" and return to "innocence" again, I just wanted to leave this as evidence. This was one of the top pop songs in the country the summer I was nine years old. 

"Released nine months before the album of the same title, the song became one of the greatest musical successes of 1974, as well as of Roberta Flack's recording career. Flack's version scored a week at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, making it Flack's third #1 single, making her the first female vocalist since 1940 to top the chart in three consecutive years. "Feel Like Makin' Love" also had five weeks at #1 on the Hot Soul Singles chart. and two weeks at #1 on the Adult Contemporary charts of both Canada and the U.S. Flack co-produced the record under the pseudonym Rubina Flake, with Eugene McDaniels. It went on to receive three Grammy nominations for Flack: Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance." (source)
Ironically one of the raunchiest pop songs of the 1970s (written by the same songwriter as one of John Denver's greatest hits) was indeed couched in double entendres that sailed right past me back then. It was only years later that it hit me what the song was really about. No wonder it was so popular! But even the way their bodies are moving as the bands sing this proves to me how much more real sexual-body energy existed in our culture back then  (video). The openness of our pornographic culture has drained that away. 

As a boy, I thought it was a sappy song. The point is that I knew the lyrics and could sing along. How many mature adult realities did I sing into my childhood head back then, that became the templates of how life would be lived when I was older. 

Popular music before the 1970s had plenty of sexual innuendo, but almost universally it was hidden by double entendres. By the 1970s, those pretenses were no longer culturally necessary.  By the 1970s, it was passé to conceal the sexual meaning of lyrics. It was considered prudery. And yes, I am a prude.

I remember hearing the lurid Robert Flack song above when I was walking in the Mall in Ames when I was nine. But, oh, we haven't gotten to the Mall yet! In 1968 the Mall in Ames didn't yet exist. That fact alone became a big part of my life experience, for which I am extremely grateful. I got to see life in a small town before the mall came. A totally different kind of innocence. Most of my good friends I made in high school got to see that world too, although in a different town--Fort Collins, and this common viewpoint bound us together ideologically in a deep way that still resonates today.