I'm not going to jinx my Scribd essay by adding a link. The YouTube video and tribe blog went nowhere, but I'm telling you Notes of a Rebel Angel goes somewhere! Google the title, my name, and Scribd for a sense of what movies would be like if sacred sex was generally understood. I'm here today with a follow-up to the second section.
That was a brief overview of pop music when it's invoked notions of alchemy and healing love making. I identified "Lover's Rock" by the Clash as the only song in the rock pantheon to take on with no uncertain terms the topic of men forsaking ejaculation in emulation of Eastern bliss.
In the essay I deduce that the late Joe Strummer wrote the song - because writing partner Mick Jones has little of interest to say in retrospect. Now I am sure of it, thanks to the accompanying booklet to the 25th Anniversary Legacy Edition of London Calling. That reprints the Clash's promo fanzine Armagideon Times, which included a few words or a cartoon about each track on the album. Some of the songs must have been co-written, but here it falls along the lines of one man per song - Joe, Mick, or Paul Simonon. For "LOVERS ROCK" (no apostrophe) Joe offers a doodle of a guy and gal in profile puckered up in a smooch and the following note: This song is a book we tried to condense into two verses - The book is called "The Tao of Love & Sex" by "......". It's a thin book and a good one to get if you are a boy trying to be a man.
The author whose name they couldn't remember is Jolan Chang. He was a Canadian-Chinese scholar, among the first to provide a kind of Western umbrella over Tantra, Taoism, etc. Strummer and Chang happened to die in the same year - 2002 - Chang at 84, Strummer at 50. Yes, it's a thin book, but one of the very first I ever found and read about this stuff. (Forget those long-standing, royally stiff Kama Sutra art plates!) I discovered Mantak Chia at the same time, who, at 65, keeps right on publishing a great amount of detail over the course of many related volumes.
As for any other songs nearing the explicit nature of "Lover's Rock" or my own "Superblue"...the game is a little different now, the aformentioned rock pantheon co-existing with the rest of the past and the laterally expansive plurality of today. It's still a lot easier to find New Age soundtracks designed for extended embraces than any pop visionaries hawking their own herbs, sex 'n' rock&roll take on Five Element Theory.
