Porn meets pop: Cher has a lot to answer for

Shot on the deck of the gigantic USS Missouri battleship, the video to Cher's 1989 hit If I Could Turn Back Time featured her surrounded by hundreds of panting sailors and sitting astride a gigantic cannon. Music may have died when Buddy Holly’s plane crashed in Clear Lake in 1959 but If I Could Turn Back Time marked the moment the subtle use of sexual innuendo in pop music was butchered in its prime.

What made the video even more hysterical was what the 43-year-old singer was wearing. Or rather what she wasn't. MTV briefly banned the promo because of a close-up of the butterfly she has tattooed across her buttocks. Back then tattoos on buttocks were a rarity, but Cher's see-through outfit left little to the imagination and in an unprecedented role reversal provided a nightmare scenario for teenagers across the globe: what if my Mum goes out dressed like that?

Twenty years on and once again female singers are pushing the murky boundaries of how little you can wear before you're actually naked. The difference is that today, unlike Cher, their videos aren't banned and their live performances don't cause moral outrage - it's just how pop music is.

Last week, nude photos of the R&B singer Rihanna were leaked on the internet by an ex-partner. You would imagine such an event would pique the curiosity of the online population but barely a ripple was registered by Google's almighty search engines. The reason why is clear - we've seen enough already.

Despite its adult nature Rihanna's latest album Rated R doesn't come with a Parental Advisory sticker (possibly because the music industry has given up on the notion of anyone under 18 ever buying a CD again) but it should have one for the CD booklet photos of the basque-wearing star in a variety of pornographic poses.

Unlike Cher 20 years ago, Rihanna is not alone: Lady Gaga, Fergie, Britney, Beyonce, Shakira, Pink, Katy Perry and, of course, Madonna have all chosen to blur the boundaries of pop and porn in recent videos. They're far from alone. Basques and fishnet stockings have become the pop uniform. Somewhere being a pop star and being a glamour model became the same thing - possibly on the same day that it was decided you could only look sexy if you also looked trashy. It's all a little too desperate.

A similar thing has been happening among male pop singers over the past decade: from Peter Andre to Usher, having a body rather than a voice is the number one concern. Meanwhile a boy band cannot really be classified as a boy band unless they flash their six packs once every five minutes - a contractual obligation the current hotties JLS are more than happy to fulfill.

What makes this undressing of pop so curious is that we live in an era of peculiar mixed messages - the wholesome fantasy of High School Musical, the growing market for mature artists like Susan Boyle and the daily dishing out of moral admonishments in the online comments of the Daily Mail at one end of the spectrum, and at the other Lady Gaga simulating masturbation while straddling a motorcycle and being admired by seven men in leather posing pouches.

Nowhere was this pop culture dichotomy better illustrated than on The X Factor. Early in the series Cheryl Cole scolded the tacky girl group Kandy Rain - four girls who all met when they worked as pole dancers, lest we forget - that they wouldn't be taken seriously if they continued to wear suggestive outfits. Now call me old-fashioned but if anyone's entitled to wear a suggestive outfit then it's a pole dancer.

Then, with Kandy Rain but a distant memory, several weeks later Cole - the most sexy woman in the world according to FHM - performed her debut solo single on the show wearing knickers and a slit skirt that was all slits and virtually no skirt.

Ah, if only we could turn back time to a simpler age when pop stars were pop stars and porn stars were porn stars and we only had to look at girls' bottoms or boys' six packs if we chose to do so. ·