And Then There's This...

Butt Seriously: A Meditation on “That Thing”

Being a cautious and timid man with absolutely no tolerance for risk, I was foraging through Amazon the other day in search of padding with which to cushion my fragile hindquarters when it occurred to me that vast swaths of our culture is devoted to venerating that region of the body commonly referred to as “that thing.”

”That thing” (which in polite society is better euphemized than named) has been an irresistible image of desire throughout the history of art, music and literature and remains so today. Consider if you will the so-called “Venus of Willendorf,” estimated to be more than 20,000 years old, which clearly prefigures Kim Kardashian's singular charm. Accounting in great part for “that thing's” rampant popularity is its mobility. Indeed, “that thing” achieves its maximum presence and power when — at the shouted urging of onlookers — its possessor accedes to shaking it.

Robert Herrick was among the first to celebrate such shaking, albeit of the involuntary type.  In 1648, he published his poem “On Julia's Clothes,” in which he swoons:

Whenas in silks my Julia goes

Then, then, methinks how sweetly flows

The liquefaction of her clothes!

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see

That brave vibration each way free,

— O how that glittering taketh me!

“That brave vibration” taketh a lot of uth, Robert, and keepeth uth around for encores. Is Julia's silken spellbinding any different — other than in fabric — from that of the woman ogled by Conway Twitty in “Tight Fittin' Jeans” or by Mel McDaniel in “Baby's Got Her Blue Jeans On”?  We think not.

The song “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” made its debut in 1922 and in so doing informed us that  the envied sister “shimmies like a jelly on a plate.” Now that's some shaking. 

In his 1937 “Essay on Jiggling,” George A. McNamara attempted to anatomize the motion that so arrests lustful eyes, even when “that thing” is in its natural state of locomotion and not being deliberately shaken.

“A jiggle occurs,” he wrote, “when some portion of the body, having been left behind when the major portion was in motion and wishing to catch up, gives a sprightly bounce. In its anxiety not to be left alone, it overleaps its proper position and finding itself without support from the main body it quickly retires too far, whereupon a secondary jiggle ensues.”

The lure of group jiggling is amply noted in the Four Lads' 1956 pop hit, “Standing on the Corner” (“watching all the girls go by”). Merle Travis was one of the first country singers to focus on the physical traits that lie some distance below the beloved's luminous eyes and cherry lips. He brags in his 1947 No. 1 single that his “gal” is “So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed.” Those of us who were born shortly after The Flood will recall that Travis' title was originally the slogan for Lucky Strike cigarettes.

Pop and country singers have conjured up enough shaking to register on the Richter scale.  “Shake it, baby, shake it,” Jerry Lee Lewis howls in “Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On” (1957).  Ray Charles takes up the cry in “What'd I Say” (1959) — declaiming, “See the girl with the diamond ring/She knows how to shake that thing.”

In her less-than-classic “Superskirt” (1974), Connie Cato wails, “There she goes, out into the night/a-waggin' her body, a-gettin' everybody's mind up tight.” (Naturally, it was men who wrote the lyrics.). The Oak Ridge Boys got into the act in 1982 with “I Wish You Could Have Turned My Head (And Left My Heart Alone),” wherein they lament, “You walk by and you shake that thing/and you know I'm not that strong.” In his 2011 hit, Luke Bryan imperiously commands, “Country Girl (Shake It for Me).”

Mel Tillis proposed a particularly vigorous form of shaking “that thing” in “I Got the Hoss” (1977) declaring, “I got the hoss and she's got the saddle/Together we're gonna ride, ride, ride.” Ed Bruce contemplates “that thing” at rest in his 1980 paean to “Girls, Women and Ladies" when he observes, “They're all sittin' on the world we're tryin' to win.” 

And so it goes. And in rap lyrics it goes much farther.

If there is a lesson to be learned here, it is this: Stay away from Amazon. There's no telling where it might lead you.

Please send your comments or questions to stormcoast@mindspring.com with “And Then There's This” in the subject line. And thanks for reading.