There Ain’t No Sex Cult Like an S-Club Sex Cult

The lyrical content of S-Club’s well-regarded canticle (There Ain’t No Party) Like an S-Club Party has long held fascination for scholars.

Analysts more mentally agile and erudite than myself have attempted formal analysis of its stanzas and I cannot presume to add much to the storied conversation.  However, drugs I humbly propose—Barthesian aversion to biographical reading of text notwithstanding—that the Dangerous Love Cult aspect of the lyric has been somewhat neglected.

Perhaps we have overlooked this analysis for critical principle; which is to say, not only to uphold the laudable emphasis on the reader rather than the author but for the sake of inciting a Culture Wars morality have we rejected a highly sexualised unpacking of this text.

As I have mentioned. and as Hannah—no longer crying for the “more” of her initial outpouring which surely speaks to a Lacanian view of infantile sexuality finding its place within symbolic order—would concur, no reading of this writerly text can claim to be complete.

As such, it is just a fragment of analysis I offer at this initial stage; less of an unpacking, if you will, than it is a sideways glance at the ‘box’ (and the Phallic Mother inference need not be openly extruded here for any genuine fan of the S-Club).

I may add more to this reading of S-Club in time. But, for the present, this Material Psychology reading of the libidinal economies of a group of young, polyamorous men and women who together live in a  Cult of infinite pleasure and gymnastic repression will do.

S-Club: An Analysis:

Tina’s doing her dance
Tina is stripping for the pleasure of onlookers
Jon’s looking for romance
John has lowered his pants
Paul’s getting down on the floor
Paul is performing acts of onanism face-down on the rug
While Hannah’s screaming out for more (ooh hoo!)
No extrapolation of text needed
Wanna see Bradley swing
We would like to see Bradley more sexually liberated than he is currently
Wanna see Rachel do her thing
We would like Rachel to join Paul on the carpet
Then we got Jo, she’s got the flow
Jo is currently menstruating and will today abstain from the sex-cult
Get ready everybody ‘cos here we go
Ain’t no party like an S-Club Party

In summary, I see S-Club here as playful inhabitants of a concupiscent Jonestown; a Peoples Agricultural Temple of the gonads in which it is not Kool Aid that we drink to lead us to a momentary destruction of the super-ego. But dixie cups of semen; the liquid product of Symbolic Order itself.

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