“Let’s talk about six, baby!” sang Jürgen Klopp in a television interview after Liverpool FC had won their sixth Champions League final this summer. The 52-year-old manager was adapting Salt-N-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex”, which topped the charts in his native Germany in 1991, a year after Klopp had signed to FSV Mainz 05 as a striker.
Formed in the mid-1980s, Salt-N-Pepa (Cheryl James and Sandra Denton with DJ Deidra “Spinderella” Roper) were the first female rappers to present a mainstream challenge to the misogyny of the American hip-hop scene. “The boy was rude, I didn’t approve/ He tried to make a move I said, ‘Stop it, dude!’”, rhymed the young women on their first song, “The Showstoppa” (1985). The group’s message on hits such as “Push It” was one of female empowerment (tackling domestic violence, bulimia and sexuality along the way), but many of their songs were actually written by Salt’s then-boyfriend Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor. Despite his own admitted sexual dishonesty, it was Azor who wrote “Let’s Talk About Sex”: a pioneering call for more open communication around “a three-letter word some regard as a curse”.
A decade after the first Aids cases were reported in the US, the song’s final verse explicitly addressed the risk of sexually-transmitted diseases. “Like a dumb son-of-a-gun, oops, he forgot the condoms/ ‘Oh well,’ you say, ‘what the hell it’s chill/ I won’t get got, I’m on the pill’/ Until the sores start to puff and sore/ He gave it to you and now it’s yours.” In 1994 the group reworked the lyrics as “Let’s Talk About Aids” at the request of TV presenter Peter Jennings. “I got some news for you so listen, please/ It’s not a black, white, or gay disease.”
But a crusading spirit lies deeper in the track’s DNA than those lines. “Let’s Talk About Sex” is built on a sample of The Staple Singers’ 1972 civil rights anthem “I’ll Take You There”. The family group began recording gospel songs together in 1952, but by the 1960s they had become a powerful political force, performing alongside Martin Luther King. Pop Staples told his kids: “If he can preach it, we can sing it.”
Signed to Stax Records in 1968, the year of King’s assassination, the group developed a funkier sound, throwing “a little sin in with the salvation”, as Barack Obama said in a 2016 tribute to singer Mavis Staples. “I’ll Take You There” was written for deep-voiced, sweet-hearted Mavis to sing by Stax president Al Bell. In the summer of 1971, Bell’s younger brother Louis was murdered. In 2006 Bell told the New York Times that before the funeral he sat on the hood of a junked school bus in his father’s yard and a song came to him: “I know a place/ Ain’t nobody crying/ Ain’t nobody worried/ Ain’t no smilin’ faces/ Lyin’ to the races.”
Bell built his song, in turn, on a groove he had heard on a trip to Jamaica where he had been smitten by the “skip jump” of the reggae beat. He brought a dub mix of a 1969 reggae hit “The Liquidator” by The Harry J Allstars (which was in turn an instrumental version of Tony Scott’s “What Am I To Do?”) into the studio and played it to the famous Muscle Shoals backing band, The Swampers, who reworked it into an addictive R&B groove: at once steely tight and refreshingly breezy. Mavis Staples ad-libbed over the bassline (although Bell never gave her any songwriting credits; nor was there any credit for the writers of “The Liquidator”) and the song flew to the top of the American charts.
Mavis Staples — who played Glastonbury this year aged 80 — always closes shows with the song because of the goodwill the groove continues to generate. Meanwhile, back in the footballing world, “The Liquidator” has been used as a run-out tune by Chelsea, Wycombe Wanderers, Northampton Town, Wolverhampton Wanderers, West Bromwich Albion, Yeovil Town and St Johnstone (the tune’s four-beat motif gives fans a chance to clap along, then chant their team’s name in the gap that follows it).
The chorus of “Let’s Talk About Sex” was recycled in 2016, when American DJ trio Cheat Codes teamed up with Dutch trio Kriss Kross Amsterdam on the single “SEX”. Now sung by a man, the safe sex message was replaced by lyrics that ran: “I wanna eat you like a cannibal.” The video — in which a group of adult men attend a sex education class and make suggestive gestures with fish and bananas — has been viewed 148m times on YouTube.
Salt-N-Pepa tour the UK this August.
What are your memories of ‘Let’s Talk About Sex’ and the songs that inspired it? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Island Def Jam; Universal Music Group International; Trojan Records; Attack
Picture credit: Mick Hutson/Redferns