The Blossoming Flower Award for Sexual Awakening

Kings of Leon :: “Sex on Fire”
from Only By the Night
(Interscope; 2008)

She’s All That with Freddie Prinze Jr. was a modern comedic take on the story of Pygmalion. (What’s Freddie doing these days? He must be, like, two years away from being a Family Guy punchline.) Pygmalion tells the story about a rough and ready flower girl who is taken under the wing of a professor and turned into a society belle, learning about womanhood and love along the way. Famously played on screen by the porcelain waif Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady the film’s only failing lay in the difficulty of hiding the protagonists’ beauty with an accent and a battered hat. Several decades later She’s All That managed to achieve the impossible by disguising Rachael Leigh Cook in DUNGAREES, GLASSES and a FRINGE. Genius. Who knew how hot she was behind that disguring eye jewellry, baggy clothes and long hair? (And what’s she doing these days? She must be, like, two weeks away from being a Family Guy punchline.)

And so it is with Caleb Followill. Sometime last year he cut his hair and all the girls swooned cos you could see his face, and his ears were no longer poking out of the side of his hair like an afghan hound’s tongue. No longer the rosy-cheeked preacher’s son, Caleb was a man. And what an effect it had on the video to “Sex On Fire”: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HHhhcKxflMY

Yes, it was still a band preformance like every KoL video before it but now it’s interspersed with the Caleb gun-show, and he’s all sweaty and writhing on the bed like a Pussycat Doll. His kin have a right to be worried. Chastising his lust with cold water and holding him on to the bed like an intervention in case his rampant hard-on decides to take over and, you know, do “it.” However, whatever Caleb has seems to be infectious. Soon we get the barechested shower scenes, everyone’s making their “O” face, and, at the song’s climax, a bizarre montage where Caleb blows smoke out of his mouth, someone wipes something off his face and he, ever the lady, decides not to swallow. If that wasn’t enough, you see his cock at 19 seconds.

But, wait a minute, they’re family for Christ’s sake. Eugh!