C. S. Lewis and "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy"

In An Experiment in Criticism, the literary scholar C. S. Lewis makes the provocative claim that "we can find a book bad only by reading it as if it might, after all, be very good." The same is true in music. For over a year now, I have been haunted by the implications of Lewis’s claim if applied to Rod Stewart’s "Do Ya Think I’m Sexy." To exorcise this personal demon, I have decided to fully consider Stewart’s "poem" as a consciously constructed literary work of artistic value. You can see the lyrics here:

Let us look first at the chorus: "If you want my body,/And you think I’m sexy." We might be tempted to see these two statements merely as repetitive, as if it were Rod Stewart’s desperate cry, "If you’ve got some lyrics, and you’d like to give them, come on, genius, let me know." Yet as recent studies of Hebrew parallelism have shown (see for example Kugel’s The Idea of Biblical Poetry), poetic parallelism is rarely a mere repetitive structure: the second statement in some way completes or extends the scope of the first statement. There is indication that Stewart intended such a link by his use of the conjunction "and": In Stewart’s opinion, it does not suffice for the woman to want his body; she must also think it is sexy.

What, then, is the subtle difference between these two statements? "Want my body" most likely refers to the physicality of desire. Yet by demanding that she "think" he is sexy, Stewart makes an unambiguous affirmation of the cognitive, evaluative element in human relationships. Women have sexual desires for the body and have cognitive faculties that enable them to discern sexiness. In distinguishing wanting the "body" to thinking of it as "sexy," Stewart further moves from the subjectivity of personal desire to the objectivity of universal approbation; the woman does not see him simply as meeting her own personal needs but also as a fulfillment of universally held aesthetic norms, of being categorizable as "sexy." As a romantic poet, Stewart was faced with the choice whether to elevate bodily love or cognitive love, to elevate subjective personal preference or an objective standard for sexiness; his answer, as later echoed by noted poet Czeslaw Milos in different words and about a different subject, is, "Not at all! Why either-or?" Stewart boldly asserts it is "both-and," and offers his two-pronged conditional statement that unconditionally stabs into the very heart of the mind-body dialectic and the subjective-objective dilemma at the same time.

It is intriguing that, narcissistic as we might think the song is, it is not about Rod Stewart’s sexiness: rather, Stewart is the third person omniscient narrator, observing a relationship in its very opening stages at a dance club. He sings what his struggling characters cannot speak aloud. The song claims that it is poetry and music–aesthetics alone–that can express our anxieties about self-sexiness, express the poetic subtext that lies beneath the surface of ordinary speech. The only truth is that we dare not speak the truth, we dare question but never answer: as Stewart expresses it, he is "avoiding all her questions," and "he’s acting shy looking for an answer."

Stewart makes the subtle point that men and women are similar yet also, almost imperceptibly, different, facing similar fears under different circumstances and in different degrees: "her heart is gently pounding" at the club, while "his heart’s beating like a drum" back at his apartment. Two hearts, one beating gently, the other violently. "Beating like a drum" also contains a subtle in-joke, a passing allusion to the fact that Rod Stewart’s drummer contributed lyrics to the song; this resembles John Donne’s own poetic technique in "Hymn to God the Father," in which he included the allusive pun on his name, "Thou hast done [Donne]; I fear no more." We must also note the rigorous phonetic demands Stewart places on his music: mere one-syllable rhyme is for the little leaguers, as Stewart reaches out for something more, the daring multi-syllable rhyme of "apartment" and "heart meant." As the two lovers will soon become one, so two syllables must become one rhyme.

Stewart reminds us of the paradox of human relationship that when we draw closer to another person, we often must move away from another. There is no gain without loss. In a poignant moment, the woman realizes she must trust this man to "give me a dime so I can phone my mother," must choose between her mother and her man, to leave in order to cleave. "Aloneness" can express either the greatest alienation or the greatest intimacy: while in the first verse aloneness represents estrangement ("she sits alone"), it is transformed into a celebratory affirmation of human closeness ("Relax, baby, now we are alone"). Love is the only nectar needed in this bower of bliss: "he says, ‘I’m sorry but I’m out of milk and coffee’/’Never mind, sugar, we can watch the early movie.’" Coffee with milk and sugar has been replaced by him as the only "sugar" she needs. In watching "the early movie," they are no longer merely participants in Stewart’s story but become observers of another story, this "early movie" that, through the form of the poem, becomes inextricably linked to their own story. Stewart seems to say that, dramatic and mythic as their story is, it is merely one version of an endlessly repeating, endlessly connected story that began before us and will continue when we are gone, a television set that we can perhaps tune out, but we cannot turn off, except in the literal sense. Even if Rod Stewart’s song has ended, his legacy remains.