My brain resolved it as two words, ESP and SPIRIT I assumed my classmate was proclaiming her allegiance to the paranormal realm, which seemed to make a certain amount of sense.
Her sweatshirt featured the brand name printed in oversized letters: ESP on the front, with the -SPRIT wrapping around under her armpit and across her back.
At that moment, ESPRIT was on the cusp of becoming an eighties fashion juggernaut, and this was my first exposure to it. My classmate wore a sleeveless pastel ESPRIT sweatshirt to volleyball practice that day, which has somehow burned itself into my memory. Someday I’ll give you all an essay on Smut I Read Before I Turned Twelve, but today is not that day.) They did not I was an egalitarian devourer of smut. (I’d like to be able to point to Lady Chatterley’s Lover as proof my tastes in dirty books skewed toward the highbrow in my formative years. Those virile chaps in Frankie Goes to Hollywood could have been cumming or coming it hardly matters. I was too meek to contradict my classmate, and even in fifth grade I knew this was probably a weird hill to die on, so I nodded and agreed with her. I had my quiet doubts about this Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I’d read earlier that year, featured many passages about orgasming, all of which used a more traditional spelling: c-o-m-e. I remember sitting on a bench in the gym with a classmate during volleyball practice, deep in conversation about “Relax.” My friend argued that the word “come,” as in “when you wanna come,” was actually spelled “cum” when used to refer to ejaculation. “Relax” is a spewing, spurting geyser of a song.Īs a fifth grader in 1985, I knew the “motivation” explanation didn’t hold water. No one at any point in history from the song’s release to the present has ever been fuzzy about the meaning of “Relax” motivational speeches, after all, rarely invoke the phrase “suck to it.” Lyrically, “Relax” is not subtle (“ shoot it in the right direction”) sonically, the track contains enough grunting and gushing to broadcast its intentions to those who don’t understand spoken English. In the liner notes to their 1984 debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome, Frankie Goes to Hollywood bassist Mark O’Toole writes of the band’s hit “Relax,” “hen it first came out we used to pretend it was about motivation, and really it was about shagging.”
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