Walk on the Wild Side

I still use AOL as my primary email provider. I'm not trying to be retro cool. It's the same address I've had for over thirty years and it's good enough for me. I have a Gmail account for professional purposes, but seldom use it. There's not a lot of interest in a writer almost 70 years old. When I access my email on my Chromebook, I go to the AOL homepage and the first thing I usually do is check out the rotating slide show that highlights the important news of the day. Recently, the big celebrity story was about Cardi B deciding not to have her butt implants removed. She took Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back" to the next level. 

Cardi B is one of the top performers in the music industry and has been so for almost a decade. You may be familiar with her from her duet "W.A.P." (Wet Ass Pussy) with Megan Thee Stallion. I prefer double entendres such as Blondie's "The Tide is High". Same meaning. Same message. Just a different way of saying it. Last week, the AOL homepage carousel featured a story about a dustup in the music industry between Moby and Kinks founders Ray and Dave Davies. In a recent interview, it appears that Moby takes umbrage with the lyrics to "Lola" and calls it transphobic and unevolved. It was 1970. Why the animosity? Dave Davies took to the music media to rebut in places such as Rolling Stone magazine. Now it's front page news. So much for current events.

"Lola" was controversial in 1970 and temporarily banned from the airwaves by the BBC in Great Britain, not for the trans references, but because of commercial product placement. The lyrics, "Well I'm not dumb but I can't understand why she walked like a woman and talked like a man", were deemed okay. Mentioning Coca-Cola was too much for the censors and it was taken off the air. Only after the Kinks changed Coca-Cola to cherry cola was the song able to reclaim air time. "Lola" was an international success, with a peak position of #9 on the U.S. singles charts soon after release. Although some British radio stations banned "Lola" for its lyrics, it remains one of the top songs in Rock and Roll history. I wonder how Moby holds up?

In 1973, Lou Reed had an AM radio hit with "Walk on the Wild Side". Off his second solo LP Transformer, it was a top 20 single of the year. Produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, it was groundbreaking and risqué, according to Wikipedia. I wouldn't know. It was just a catchy tune to me. The first stanza goes something like this: "Holly came from Miami, F.L.A., Hitchhiked her way across the USA. Plucked her eyebrows on the way, Shaved her leg and then he was a she." The song's name was derived from the 1962 movie Walk on the Wild Side, which itself was an adaptation of a Nelson Algren novel. Jane Fonda was one of the actors in her second starring role playing Kitty Twist. 

Renée Richards is the first transgender person I was aware of. Renée made headlines in the 1970s from being the first trans athlete competing on the professional women's tennis circuit after sex reassignment surgery. Before the transition from male to female, Richards was an incredible multisport athlete - in high school, in college, and in the Navy. I was in high school and didn't really know what to make of it all when Richards made the nightly news from taking her case to the New York State Supreme Court. Richards wanted to play tennis, professionally as a woman, and won. As a result, Richards played in both singles and doubles competition at the U.S. Open. She went on to a brief but successful professional tennis career. 

This past week, the International Olympic Committee banned transgender women athletes from women's events. “Eligibility for any female category event at the Olympic Games or any other IOC event, including individual and team sports, is now limited to biological females,” is the official statement from the IOC. The sex of the athlete will be determined by a mandatory gene test. I agree with this ruling. Once in a while, you get an outlier such as Olympic swimming phenom Katie Ledecky that can compete with men on a limited basis, but it's few and far between. It's not a level playing field. I don't like to side with the Trump agenda, but I do with this issue. In my opinion, trans people can serve in the military, can be a good parent, but can't play women's sports. It's not fair to women, who were born women. It's a stacked deck and just not fair.

I downloaded the MP3 file of "Lola" from iTunes. It's in mono sound. That's the way we used to listen to music on the AM radio. It has some sagacious lyrics: "Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, except for Lola.". Maybe Moby should give it another listen.