Music in pornography
Prominently featuring wah-wah pedals, Hammond organs, and "piercing hi-hats", this music is evocative of 1960s and 1970s pornographic films, and has been released as soundtrack albums through at least the 2010s.
These filmmakers "experimented wildly with soundtracks", and while funk was still the primary genre, tracks with heavy percussion (especially those featuring bongo drums) were preferred here because they best survived the bathtub-developing processes of at-home producers.
The 1968 Italian film Sweden: Heaven and Hell premiered Piero Umiliani's pop song "Mah Nà Mah Nà"; from West Germany in 1970, Schulmädchen-Report was backed with an acid rock soundtrack; 1971's Vampyros Lesbos was a West German–Spanish feature with sitars and psychedelic jazz; and the Italian–French Last Tango in Paris (1972) has "soaring horns and weepy strings from Gato Barbieri".
Deep Throat was attempting to find a wider audience for hardcore porn, and so designed its soundtrack around popular genres of music like bubblegum pop, show tunes, and light rock.
Other notable Golden Age film soundtracks include Bernard Purdie's music for Lialeh, and Alden Shuman's for The Devil in Miss Jones.
[2] In 2012, the Phoenix New Times called out several porn soundtracks that continued to stand on their own merits, including, Deep Throat, Debbie Does Dallas (available at the Wikimedia Commons), The Devil in Miss Jones, Lialeh, and Emmanuelle.
One concession was to use public-domain classical music for films; Marilyn and the Senator uses Modest Mussorgsky's "The Great Gate of Kiev" to bombastically punctuate a cum shot, and The Opening of Misty Beethoven climaxes to the William Tell Overture at one point.
These videos tended to instead feature only ambient audio instead of a non-diegetic soundtrack: "barking dogs, washing machines, door bells, ringtones, chat notifications, outside traffic, radio talk shows, hip hop mixtapes, other porn from the TV or computer."
When the AVN Awards added a "Best Original Song" category in 2009, some big-budget pornos still used popular pre-existing music for their scores (duly licensed).
