zz top - degüello

Growing up, my parents maintained an impressive collection of adult-themed music that was almost always within my reach.  My mom's favorite artist was Prince, and my dad's favorite was Donna Summer.  I took me a decade to hear more than a handful of tracks on , and probably longer to realize "Bad Girls" was about prostitutes.  I had no idea what kind of music I was listening to at the time, with a few exceptions: "Let's Talk About Sex" by Salt 'n' Pepa, and "My Head's In Mississippi" by ZZ Top.

"Let's Talk About Sex" was the unfortunate case of my parents letting me listen to the song beyond the point of simple novelty of a child saying unchildish things, into the period where I retained memories, and eventually found out what the word "sex" was.  "My Head's In Mississippi" was more ZZ Top's fault than my parents'.

In hindsight, ZZ Top was always a hilariously sexual band.  Even before Eliminator and their string of terrible MTV releases, when they were a legitimate blues-rock band, their songs were laced with innuendo and crude metaphors.  But they always seemed to be just sly enough about it to evade my eight year-old consciousness.

For years, I thought a line in "Tush" went "Damn those taxes / Honey would," transforming the song into some kind of abstract political commentary that I just assumed was above my head.  I had no idea what "La Grange" was about, but it sure as hell wasn't a whorehouse.  And I was nowhere near comprehending the complex subtleties of "Pearl Necklace."  But even I understood what "Mississippi" was about: "Last night I saw a naked cowgirl / She was floating across the ceiling."

What I never realized was the same dark, confusing sexual energy that coursed through that song was in just about every other ZZ Top song I loved.

"I Thank You" is literally thanking a woman for sex.  "She Loves My Automobile" is nothing but clumsy comparisons between car parts and female anatomy.  "Hi Fi Mama" even turns playing a record into a phallic "needle in the groove" metaphor.  And so on, with damn near every song on Degüello.  And I had no idea.

The band maintains that this all comes from the lost art of rock 'n roll innuendo.  In reality, it's just a clumsy gimmick unnecessarily piled on top of some of the finest blatant blues worship this side of Led Zeppelin.

What impresses me is that even after revealing ZZ Top's cheap sexual act, the music really doesn't suffer at all.  Pretty much everything after Eliminator is still complete trash, but I don't think any less of Degüello or Tres Hombres.  On the contrary, I'm rather impressed that I'm still unpacking these lewd details so many years later.  It doesn't exactly make them sophisticated musicians, but it somehow makes them more ZZ Top than ever before.