Underwear ads again (from today’s Daily Jocks sale), with captions from me. Men’s bodies, mansex allusions, not for everyone.
(#1) Sweat with me, baby
Solid Chet the gym jock
Sweats hard
Lick the salt he’ll
Towel you off
(#2) Lowriders on the storm
Lean Bo the surf jock
Goes low pull him
Lower use your
Teeth those trunks are
Made for cruising
Sweaty Chet and lowball Bo.
Note on body types. Both men are fit and muscular (almost alarmingly so), but in two different body types, alluded to in the captions: Chet is solidly hunky, Bo lean and chiseled.
DJ’s ad copy. For Chet’s shorts:
Marcuse has come out with a new line of shorts. These shorts are sexy, soft and extremely comfortable. Made with fine towel fabric, they are ideal for home, gym, beach or lounging in.
The pitch here is comfortable softness and absorbency. Wicks up that sweat like anything.
For Bo’s swim trunks:
Super low swim trunks for people brave enough to bare some skin and look super sexy! Simple design with embroidered gold Marcuse logo at the back.
Ready to feel and look hot?
This time the pitch is sexy display. This is a Marcuse theme. Here’s the Marcuse Hermoso [Sp. ‘beautiful’, as in hombres hermosos ‘beautiful men’] Swim Brief, also minimal:
(#3)
And the even more minimal Marcuse MA-Xtreme Xtreme, in pink:
(#4)
The copy says this one
stays low on the waistline that helps you to flaunt your sexy body. The design and the drawstring and the sexy pouch are the other features that completes the underwear.
It’s all about lowrise / low-rise / lowrider / lowriding / low-riding swim trunks (and in other contexts, briefs, jeans, and, in fact, women’s panties).
Chet’s caption. “Sweat with me, baby” — an allusion to “Dance with me, baby”, a song lyric that has been set to music many times, and vies with “Do you want to dance?” as an invitation to dance in pop music.
Two landmarks for “Do you want to dance?”: Bobby Freeman’s 1958 song (covered a great many times), which you can listen to here; and a line from Joni Mitchell’s “All I Want” (1971), which you can listen to here:
Do you want – do you want – do you want
To dance with me baby
Do you want to take a chance
On maybe finding some sweet romance with me baby
Well, come on
Strictly on the wording “Dance with me, baby”, there are tons of choices. Among them, Paice Ashton Lord’s 1976 song, which you can listen to here; and more recently a song on a hot video that’s billed as being by Cazwell, but seems to be Kazaky’s “In the Middle” from 2011, with the line “Dance with me, baby” in it; it might be that the video is part Cazwell, part Kazaky. (Cazwell — posted about here several times before this — is openly gay and flamboyant, and Kazaky was openly gender-fluid.) The male dancers in the video are studly and athletic. You can watch it here. One smoldering screen shot:
(#5)
On Kazaky, from Wikipedia:
Kazaky was a Ukrainian-based synthpop dance boyband from Ukraine, made up of Kyryll Fedorenko, Artur Gaspar and Artemiy Lazarev. Assembled in Kiev in 2010 by former original member Zhezhel, a skilled choreographer, the group has released two albums and several singles so far. In 2016 the group announced they were disbanding
On to Bo’s caption, “Lowriders on the Storm”, a phrasal overlap portmanteau, lowriders (referring to low-rise clothing) + Riders on the Storm (the song by The Doors); note the crashing surf in #2.
First, on lowriders. The noun is ambiguous, between a reference to the clothing style and a reference to a vehicle style. On the latter, from Wikipedia:
(#6)
A lowrider (sometimes low rider) is a class or style of customized vehicle. Distinct from a regular lowered vehicle, these customized vehicles are generally individually painted with intricate, colorful designs, ridden on 13-inch wire-spoke wheels with whitewall tires, and fitted with hydraulic systems that allow the vehicle to be raised or lowered at the owner’s command. Given these specific characteristics, while a lowrider is not always a lowered car, a lowered car is always a lowrider. The term is used to describe a class of vehicle, not simply the height from ground to chassis.
It began in Los Angeles California in the mid-to-late 1940s and during the post-war prosperity of the 1950s. Initially, some Mexican-American barrio youths lowered blocks, cut spring coils, z’ed the frames and dropped spindles. The aim of the lowriders is to cruise as slowly as possible, “Low and Slow” being their motto. By redesigning these cars in ways that go against their intended purposes and in painting their cars so that they reflect and hold meanings from Mexican culture, lowriders create cultural and political statements that go against the more prevalent Anglo culture. The design of the cars encouraged a “bi-focal perspective-they are made to be watched but only after adjustments have been made to provide ironic and playful commentary on prevailing standard of automobile design.” However, this resulted in a backlash: The enactment of Section 24008 of the California Vehicle Code in January 1, 1958, which made it illegal to operate any car modified so that any part was lower than the bottoms of its wheel rims.
The term lowrider can also refer to the driver of the car.
For both the clothing and the vehicles, the question is:
How low can you go?
And this is a formulaic expression worth notice in its own right, a catchphrase whose history is by no means clear, though it appears that its use in the song “Born to Hand Jive” in the 1978 movie of Grease was a vehicle for its spread.
Next, “Those trunks were made for cruising” in Bo’s caption. This is a play on the title
“These Boots Are Made for Walking”
as sung by Nancy Sinatra in 1966.
Finally, the second half of “Lowriders on the Storm’; from Wikipedia:
“Riders on the Storm” is a song by American psychedelic rock band The Doors. It was released as the second single from their sixth studio album, L.A. Woman (1971), in June 1971.
… “Riders on the Storm” is a psychedelic rock song that according to band member Robby Krieger was inspired by the song “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky: A Cowboy Legend”.
You can listen to the song here. A significant couplet:
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out alone
Bo is no doubt a dog, but he certainly has a bone, and though he’s alone in the photo in #2, I doubt that his time by the beach will be solitary.
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