The easiest way to gauge the pop cultural status of literally anything – from Donald Trump’s hair and just how fit New Jack on Love Island really was to the mighty Ed Balls – is to give it a quick search on Twitter. By using this digital, cat gif-heavy answer to Debrett’s, it seems that in the 10 years since its release, Kings of Leon’s Sex on Fire has lost its status as an indie disco floorfiller and has instead become a shortcut for highly NSFW sex bots.
Search the song by name and, in among the occasional “this tune still bangs!” proclamations from enthusiastic 27-year-olds lamenting the loss of their teenage years, are a huge number of mucky links to cam girls who almost certainly don’t really exist. And while there is a certain Bukowski-esque poetry in free association tweets such as “kings of lean [sp] sex on fire lyrics girls having sex in the weather porn sex commandos”, grubby is the fate of the one of the most unintentionally hilarious songs of the 2000s. Now excuse me while I wipe my search history.
It is easy to forget that at one point, on the crest of what NME dubbed the New Rock Revolution (RIP), Kings of Leon were actually a really, really good band. Their first two albums were hairy, lairy triumphs. They were the Allman Brothers meets the Strokes; Led Zeppelin gone country. A quartet of truckstop angels, three lusciously bearded, slim-hipped Tennessee siblings and their cousin, who reminded people what rock’n’roll was all about: looking great. Oh and sure, sounding all right, too.
By the time their fourth album rolled around, however, things had got weird. Maybe they had realised how delicious a shit-ton of money tasted. Maybe they wanted to be taken seriously as artists. Maybe they, like, really got into Muse. Either way, Sex on Fire was a true sonic jump of the shark. The lyrics – though the band later said they were a joke – were a grim attempt at channelling unfettered passion into a stadium singalong. But what was written as a sexy tribute to shagging ended up sounding like the repercussions of a particularly gnarly STI.
During an interview with Noisey in 2016, even Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell, in an unprecedented and unnatural moment of self-awareness, called the song “the apex, death and afterlife of landfill indie all in one go”. Which is saying something coming from the man who wrote Don’t Go Back to Dalston.
Kings of Leon have been playing a run of festival sets and shows this summer, encoring with, you guessed it, Sex on Fire. Hopefully they’ve been dedicating it to all the bots who are keeping the song’s name alive via the medium of online grot. It would only be fair.
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