The gay underwear anthem

[Mostly about queer sexiness and gay sex, but with comments on poetic form.]

Heard dimly across the room, a song with an insistent chorus that was apparently about bluesy underwear (or, just possibly, boozy underwear). On my iTunes, but it struck no chord of memory for me. I came closer, and it resolved itself into Pansy Division singing “Groovy Underwear” (originally on Deflowered, then in the collection The Essential Pansy Division). Ah, the gay underwear anthem, a theme song for my underwear postings.

Pansy Division is young, gay, and in your face. But mostly sweet. Here’s a YouTube video of “Groovy Underwear”:

Album covers:

And the lyrics, from this source with some amendment:

Tight briefs on your sexy butt
White fabric surrounding your nuts
Bike shorts put it on display
You´re wearing it to the left today
Sweat pants clinging to your crevice
Boxer shorts for easy access

I´m digging your
Groovy underwear, [soft] groovy underwear, [loud] groovy underwear,
Ooh, ooh, groovy underwear,
Groovy underwear, ooh, ooh,
Ooh, it´s so groovy

Jockstrap showing off your cheeks
Movin´ in for a closer peek
Running shorts, thin as paper
Barely dressed, nearly naked
Pulled down around your ankles
I´ll make you spill out like an oil tanker

All because of your
Groovy underwear …

Stretched tight, so hot
I´ve come, I´ve shot
My turn now to get you off
What a collection of skivvies I´ve got
Skimpy little g-string
Hardly a stitch covering that thing
Tucked into that little pouch
Straining hard to get out
Barely hold you once you get throbbing
Let my hands go fishing around in

Look what I found in your
Groovy underwear …

You sure know how to please
Let me give those buns a squeeze
What fine cakes, what fine batter
Any second now i´m gonna splatter

All over your
Groovy underwear …

You’ll see that the song has verses of 2 to 5 rhyming couplets followed by a chorus (ooh ooh). Almost all the rhymes are in fact half-rhymes. Take the first verse: three couplets, one a very close half-rhyme (buttnuts), then a perfect rhyme (displaytoday), and then a bold phonologically distant half-rhyme (creviceaccess). Eventually we get papernaked, anklestanker, and throbbingaround in, but with a return to perfect rhymes in the last verse (pleasesqueeze, battersplatter). So the arc of the rhymes is from conservative to bold and back to conservative, while the words themselves build to one climax, then another (unmetaphorical climaxes: ejaculations).

It won’t make it into collegiate anthologies of modern poetry, but it’s a good accompaniment to the remarkable underwear I post about. Ooh, ooh.

 

2 Responses to “The gay underwear anthem”

  1. Kathryn B Says:

    the cultural context to help people understand you are not “over-sharing” you are gay!

    • arnold zwicky Says:

      (Verb missing somewhere?) Are you suggesting that giving these sorts of details is a specifically gay thing? Hmmm… fags will talk about *anything*? (Or maybe we just talk about things that interest us, and some of them are things that straight folks consider indecorous?)

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