"Poison"

I'm still not back to actual books yet, despite the title of this blog. To be fair, I'm doing a lot of reading, but it doesn't lend itself to blurby little summaries, so I'm staying way off topic.

So, as a child, if I read about or heard a reference to something I didn't quite understand, I was often wary of asking an adult for clarification. By the time I was nine or ten, I'd definitely figured out that most of the stuff that was going over my head had something to do with sex, and was generally content to wait it out, confident that the joke or word would make sense to me eventually.

For example, the first time I read Judy Blume's Then Again, Maybe I Won't, I had no idea why Tony was carrying around books and raincoats to "hide" something about his body. I don't remember when I twigged to the fact that the Tony's euphemisms were about erections, but I was always aware that the euphemisms were euphemisms.

When it comes to music, however, even the euphemisms often escaped my notice. I was cheerfully oblivious to implications, and often still am. At seven, I was a fan of Madonna's Like A Virgin album, but I was really, really missing the implications in that title. (Oddly, I think that I never worried over what the title meant because I was raised Catholic; when "the Virgin Mary" is a standard turn of phrase in your daily life, you stop paying much attention to that phrases's component parts.)

So, lately, I was thinking about the Bell Biv Devoe song, "Poison," which was a big hit on the radio stations I listened to obsessively back in 1990. I was about 12 or 13 at the time, and while I liked the song, I don't recall thinking it was risque or scandalous or something that would bother my parents.



Listening to it twenty years later was startling. "What did he just say about 'hos'?" "'Never trust a big butt and a smile'?" (Admittedly, that one was startling because it was also part of the title of an academic essay about African American dialogism I read not too long ago, which is an unexpected connection.) "'Me and the crew used to do her'?"

How did I miss these, and yet was mildly scandalized by Young and the Restless's choice to rhyme the name "Judy" with "booty" in "Poison Ivy"?