"Out, damned spot! Out, I say!" Lady Macbeth used to shout on the day she cleaned the sheets. There was no Wisk in the Middle Ages. Today, detergents can take care of even the most difficult wet spots with no wringing of hands, but sex is just as much in evidence as ever. Of course, there are always reactionaries trying to repress it. The ones who try hardest, however, often seem to have the very reactions they scream about most (viz., Springfield, Ohio's, city manager Thomas Bay--the man who in 1982 suspended policewoman Barbara Schantz for posing for Playboy--who this past October had to resign his job after having been picked up for allegedly soliciting a prostitute. And Representative Dan Crane, who had portrayed himself in three successful Congressional campaigns as an ultraconservative Christian family man, was censured by the House for making it with a teenaged page). In 1983, one kind of repression even had a hand in spawning a new forum for libidinous art. Music videos, which everyone should know about by now, began as intra-industry promos for musical groups; some acts, most notably Britain's Duran Duran, first attracted U.S. attention through video rather than records or live performances. MTV picked up those tuneful ads and ran with them--24 hours a day. That's the good news. The bad news is that MTV moguls still make a habit of clipping out the most fun, most revealing--we may as well come right out and say it--most arousing parts of the tapes they beam to Anytown. That practice led to a new cable show on our own Playboy Channel, Hot Rocks, which earns its name each week with videos that are too hot for MTV's wires. We'll show you a few of those cuts here, as well as a lot of other frolic from 1983. Enough preface, though. "One, two--why, then 't is time to do 't," said Macbeth's lady once, disdaining extended foreplay. "You mar all with this starting."
