Santana - ‘Samba Pa Ti’

‘Samba Pa Ti’ is an instrumental, rather than a song, but for a crucial period in my mid-teens, when I first came across it, it spoke to me as eloquently as anything that contained lyrics: I was convinced that it described sex. More specifically, ‘Samba Pa Ti’ was what I was going to hear when I lost my virginity - if not on the stereo, then in my head. It starts off slow and mysterious and beautiful, and then it gets more urgent, and then - well, then it fades out. (The track lasts four minutes and forty-seven seconds, incidentally; but before I am accused of showing off, I had anticipated that we’d be doing other things - kissing, getting undressed, possibly waiting for a bus home from the cinema - during the slow bit, so I was confident that I could make it through to the fade.)
I hadn’t, at that time, heard anything that would serve as a better soundtrack; indeed, l’m not entirely sure that l’ve heard anything to beat it since. All sorts of pieces of music are constantly being described as ‘sexy’, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’d want them to accompany lovemaking. Most of them, in fact, are sexual substitutes, rather than sexual accompaniments - music for people who aren’t getting any (or won’t be until they get home) rather than people who are. Would it be possible to fuck to the tune of ‘Let’s Get It On’ without laughing? (Not that there’s anything wrong with laughing during sex, but laughter was not, I suspect, the sound that Marvin intended to provoke. If you want to laugh, then why not enhance your amorous pleasure with ’l Have a Pony’, by Steven Wright, or ‘Disco Duck’, by Rick Dees?) And even if you did manage to get through it without a giggling fit, could you manage the same during ‘If I Should Die Tonight’, the third track on the album? Granted, you may have finished by then, but there’s every chance that you won’t have turned the music off, which means that you’ll be lying there with your girlfriend, or boyfriend, or someone you don’t know very well, while Marvin is telling you that the sex you have just had is unlikely to be bettered during the remainder of your lifetimes - indeed, that you may as well shuffle off this mortal coil now, so anticlimactic is any subsequent experience likely to be. This is an intolerable burden to place on any couple, and certainly inhibits the usual post-coital activities (sleep, the hunt for socks or the TV remote, exchanges of false email addresses, etc.).
Prince’s ‘Do Me, Baby’, from the Controversy album, is one of the most sexually explicit, and genuinely erotic, records ever made, but it’s every bit as problematic as ‘Let’s Get It On’. For a start, there’s a bit after the climax (crashing piano chords, moans, sighs, and so on) when he goes all weird, and starts saying he’s ‘soooo cold’, which might well prove to be something of a distraction unless you too have an inappropriately undertogged duvet. And though the next song on the album, ‘Private Joy’, is hardly what you want to hear at an intimate moment, at least it brings the first side of Controversy to a close if you have the album on vinyl; if you have the CD, however, you may find yourself in the unhappy position of trying to give and receive carnal pleasure while Prince sings ‘Ronnie Talk To Russia’ - a sentiment that no longer even contains the virtue, arguable in a sexual context anyway, of urgency. What, one wonders, was he thinking of when he sequenced the tracks? Presumably something along the lines of, ‘Give them five minutes to get their breath back, and then they’ll be wanting to think about impending Armageddon.’
Inevitably, I did not lose my virginity to ‘Samba Pa Ti’. Instead, my unfortunate girlfriend and I were listening to the second side of Rod Stewart’s Smiler, my favourite record at the time; side two, I notice now, features ‘Hard Road’, 'I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face’ and ‘Dixie Toot’. In a perfect world, obviously, that wouldn’t have happened.