Dating Confessions by You "Callin' me baby when I'm trying to get over you doesn't help. I just don't have the heart to ask you to stop because my heart skips a little each time you say it to me."
DISPATCHES
posted 4/30/2009
20) Jimi Hendrix
When we finally got up the courage to leave our much older boyfriend in high school, the radio was playing the sweet, wild, electric Jimi Hendrix. It was the first time we'd ever heard him and we knew a new era had begun. Hendrix's power crosses over into alchemy when he touches his guitar. The sounds are so joyful it's almost certain they didn't come from this earth. Voodoo child is right. — M.L.
promotion
19) Simon Le Bon
Duran Duran's leading man had the looks of a matinee idol, and he damn well knew it. This probably explains why he frequently dressed like an extra from an Errol Flynn swashbuckler. Although his kerchiefs have gone out of style (MGMT's attempts at resurrecting a hipster hijab notwithstanding), Le Bon's voice is immortal thanks to its fresh-Formica cool. Let the other rock stars screw models. Le Bon married one. — C.L.
18) Elvis Presley
Elvis' sex appeal seems so hokey and self-evident nowadays that it's easy to lose sight of how terrifying he was in his heyday. The man's FBI profile, for example, declares him to be a "definite danger to the security of the United States." We're sure that honor has been bestowed on singers whose artistic ideologies extend beyond who is or is not a hound dog, but with little more than a backbeat, some pelvic thrusts, and a leather jacket, Elvis Presley — once a shy truck driver from Memphis — blew Western Civilization the fuck open. In short, Presley's image upended American society so efficiently that it's still used as a reference point for raw sexuality some fifty years later. So, yeah. Elvis is sexy. — Joe Bernardi
17) John Lennon
Every John Lennon has his appeal. From the bitter, fiery anti-war activist clinging in the buff to his pretentious bride on the cover of Rolling Stone, to the wavy-haired star-child singing about Strawberry Fields, Lennon was always sexy. How could he not be? He's fucking John Lennon. It's our opinion, though, that Lennon's maximum sexiness was captured on film in 1964. The smirking twenty-four-year-old cracking wise in a train car at the beginning of A Hard Day's Night makes us titter and go weak at the knees. When he sings shortly thereafter, we understand why all those chicks were screaming forty-five years ago. — J.C.
16) Paul Westerberg
Listening to Paul Westerberg's more sensitive songs ("Answering Machine," "Sixteen Blue," "Skyway," etc.) you might figure him for a proto-emo sap. But what makes that material work so well is the other half of his persona; what makes "Sixteen Blue" tug so effectively on the heartstrings is that, on the Replacements' classic Let It Be, it immediately follows "Gary's Got a Boner." Westerberg is a cranky, contrary, sarcastic prick by all accounts; he was a surly bastard as a nineteen-year-old singing janitor, and he's a surly bastard now. It only makes his sincerity more affecting. If he's a jerk to everyone else, it'll only makes it more potent when he fixes you with those big peepers and sings "Don't Get Married." At that point, how can you not ditch your stiff of a fiancé and take this shaggy-maned loner into your arms/bed? — P.S. [See also former Hooksexup editor Ada Calhoun's classic Westerberg paean here. — ed.]
