Sex and the Church

The song from Buddha of Suburbia raises the question. And Lord alone knows that the church (in its broadest sense) traditionally has an uneasy relationship with this, one the most important of biological process.

So what is Bowie’s take on this?

If we look at the proportion of words relating to sex and religion across all 266 songs from the 26 studio albums we get a moderately sized positive correlation of .38. In other words, the more references to the religion there are in a song, the more references to sex.

Although the size of correlation is only moderate, because of the large numbers of songs involved, this is highly statistically significant [Footnote 1]. Sounds impressive.

However, bear in mind that this analysis arose out of the song, Sex and the Church, a song that repeats the phrase “sex and the church” (or a variant of this) many times. Unsurprisingly, Sex and the Church has the highest number of sex words of all Bowie’s songs with 21.2% of the words relating to sex – the song with the second highest number of sex words is Soul Love from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars but is a long way behind with 8.9% (this might come as a surprise but the category of sex words includes references to love … there are a lot of references to love, love of love and love not being loving in Soul Love). All other 264 songs are between 0% and 8.9%.

A similar story emerges for religion words. Again Sex and the Church has the highest number of religion words with 17.7% of words relating to religion and, in second place, The Wedding Song from Black Tie, White Noise is a long way behind with 10.2%. The religion words for The Wedding Song, however, have a very different feel. As might be expected from the title, the religion words here refer to angels, heaven and saints.

But all this is a bit misleading. The figure below is the scatterplot charting the proportion of sex words against religion words for all 266 songs. Each point represents one song. As you can see, the vast majority of these points (songs) are grouped into the bottom left hand corner and there is no discernable pattern (i.e. there does not appear to be a relationship). So where does this significant correlation come from?

If you look way up to the top right hand corner you will see one song out on its own. That’s “Sex and the Church.” It looks like that one song is creating a correlation where none exists. It’s what is known as an outlier. That is, it is so very different from all other songs that it doesn’t really fit with the other 265 and it can therefore skew the results. When we exclude this one song and repeat the correlation we get a very different result: the correlation between sexuality and religion words drops to just .008 and is about as non-significant as you can get [Footnote 2].

The second graph shows the correlation when the outlier, “Sex and the Church”, is removed. To highlight the difference I’ve added regression lines to the two graphs. These are lines that we can use to calculate scores on one variable (frequency of use of religion words) if we know the score on the other variable (frequency of use of sex words). From the first graph you can see that the line has a gradient and so we can use this to work out scores on religion words from scores on sex words (if there are 5 sexual words [on the x-axis] the regression would predict that there will be about 2 religion words). But in the second graph, when the song “Sex and the Church” is removed, the line is essentially horizontal and we cannot calculate scores on religion from scores on sex.

Hmmm … on the face of it, a bit disappointing. Interest in the link between religion and sex was piqued by the song “Sex and the Church” but it looks like this one song created a false impression of an association.

On the other hand, the category of sex words also includes the word love. Okay so sex and love are not the same thing, albeit they’re related; in my defence, I didn’t invent the LIWC.

But hold on, isn’t God love? That’s what religious people would have us believe. And if God is love then use of words relating to religion would be expected to be correlated with the use of a category of words that includes the word love … wouldn’t it?

So what is Bowie doing with these word categories? Why isn’t there a correlation? Surely we would expect that there should be one. Wouldn’t we? Maybe it’s worth a further look after all.


Correlations in individual albums
So far we have looked at the correlation between sex and religion across all 265 songs (excluding “Sex and the Church”). But if we look at the correlation within each album separately we find that there is a positive correlation in some albums and a negative correlation in others. In other words, in some albums, the more sexual words there are, the more religion words there are as well. In other albums, the more sexual words there are, the fewer religion words there are.

If we combine all the songs from those albums where the correlation between sexual and religion words is positive separately from all the songs from those albums where the correlation between sexual and religion words is negative we begin to see why the overall correlation is close to zero.

Essentially, those albums where there is a negative correlation are cancelling out those albums where there is a positive correlation.

Interestingly, the albums with positive correlations tend to be those in the earlier part of Bowie’s career, particularly albums 3 through 8, namely The Man Who Sold the World through to Diamond Dogs inclusive. Bowie’s later albums such as 1.Outside, …hours, Heathen and Reality, tend to have negative correlations between sex and religion. However, what I think is even more interesting is where the switch from positive correlation to negative correlation occurs.

After a string of albums with a positive correlation from The Man Who Sold the World to Diamond Dogs, Bowie suddenly switches to a negative correlation in Young Americans and this carries on to Station to Station. According to Tremlett’s biography [Footnote 3], although Bowie had always been interested in and studied various religions, this was the point at which Bowie began wearing a small crucifix, apparently settling on Christianity. Angie Bowie’s Backstage Passes also discusses David’s religiousness around this period but more from the perspective of drug-induced paranoia – I’m remembering that story about the Devil-shaped stain at the bottom of Bowie’s swimming pool after an exorcism, a stain that apparently kept coming back in spite of being repeatedly painted over.

Okay, so that might explain the timing of the switch in the link between sex and religion, but what exactly changed in the lyrics of sex and religion words as Bowie moved from Diamond Dogs to Young Americans?

Here are some of the relevant phrases from songs from the albums between The Man Who Sold the World and Diamond Dogs. I've highlighted religion words in green and sexual/love words in red to make them more obvious:

• Gods, prayers and the Devil’s love (Width of a Circle)
• oh Lord, my God, I’ll give my love in vain, many young virgins (She Shook Me Cold)
• sacred realm, divine symmetry, kiss the viper’s fang (Quicksand)
• gentleness clears the soul, love cleans the mind (Fill Your Heart)
• soul love (Soul Love)
• church of man love (Moonage Daydream)
• Making love with his ego, Like a leper messiah, With God-given ass [or “arse” if you speak English English as opposed to American English] (Ziggy Stardust)
• Paris or maybe hell, who will love Aladdin Sane? (Aladdin Sane)
• Feel the love of her caress, She'll lay belief on you (Lady Grinning Soul)
• The way you treated me is sure a sin, It’s you that I love (Rosalyn)
• I feel hot and cold down in my soul, I can't explain I think it's love (I Can’t Explain)
• you love bands and we look divine (Rebel Rebel)
• Heaven’s on the pillow, its silence competes with hell, but I love you in your fuck-me pumps (We Are the Dead)

Here are some of the relevant phrases from songs from the albums Young Americans and Station to Station:

• Heaven knows, she’d have taken anything (Young Americans)
• Your soul is calling (Fascination)
• He’s so divine, his soul shines, His ever loving face smiles on the whole human race; He’s got his eye on your soul, his hand on your heart, Somebody up there likes me (Somebody Up There Likes Me)
• Don't let me hear you say life is taking you nowhere, angel , Once I'm begging you save her little soul, I believe oh lord I believe all the way (Golden Years)
• Lord I kneel and offer you, my word on a wing, Does my prayer fit in with your scheme of things? (Word On a Wing)

It does look as if in earlier albums, where there is a positive correlation between sex and religion words, Bowie is using imagery of souls and divinity in relation to love or else uses God/Lord as an expletive in songs about sex.

The switch to a negative correlation in Young Americans and Station to Station obviously means that, when God is mentioned, love/sex generally isn’t (you can see that because where there are green words, there are few or no red words). References to God in these lyrics include songs that are actually about God or else uses religious words as metaphors for love such as in “Golden Years” where “angel” is a term of affection and “belief” seems to be a belief in that person (ironically about Angie … apparently Bowie still had thoughts about rescuing their deteriorating relationship and expressed them in this song he wrote, hoping to get Elvis to record it). In other words, rather than using religious imagery in relation to love, religious words are used as a metaphor for love.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it.

Maybe I’m basing this idea on too few examples.

Or maybe I’ve just hit on a germ of an idea.

I’ll probably come back to this from time to time so by all means email with any other ideas or qualifications.

In the meantime, here are the lists of sexual and religious words … fill your boots.

Footnotes:

Footnote 1: p < .001

Footnote 2: p = .90

Footnote 3: Tremlett, G. (1997). David Bowie: Living on the Brink. London, UK: Arrow.