Who's being rude in MAGIC's 'Rude'?

In 'Rude', MAGIC have a hissy fit about someone refusing to give permission for someone, I assume their hairy lead singer, to marry his daughter. We shall refer to this individual as 'Maggie'. Maggie failed to get my sympathy for two reasons: first of all, the way he describes asking for this woman's hand in marriage makes him come across as an entitled asshole, and secondly, the woman this conversation is about is completely, 100% objectified. She's not even named, ffs. Let us look at these things one at a time

Why is this entitlement? Maggie seems upset because he put some effort into achieving something, and was not rewarded. This makes him a bad loser. Furthermore, if you compare the effort he put in to what he's asking for, it really seems as if he thinks the world owes him something. How much effort did he actually make? He woke up in the morning, put some clothes on, and then drove to someone's house to ask for something. In a car. He did not, I feel I must point out, drag his bare belly over hot coals to get there. Also, most normal people get up in the morning and put clothes on. You don't get any special prizes for that. Anyway, when he asked his question, the person said no, so Maggie had a tantrum.

Now, even if we weren't talking about a woman's life here, it would seem that Maggie didn't really put in enough effort to be legitimately upset by the outcome. Imagine he wanted a job, so he put on his suit, knocked on the nearest executive's door, and started gushing about how he really wanted a job. That probably wouldn't go too well. If you really want someone to agree to something, you have to lay the groundwork: call them and make an appointment, show that it really would be the best thing for everyone to give you what you are asking for, engage in a discussion instead of just saying 'can I have?' Besides, it should be 'may I have'.

This infelicitous use of the English language brings us to the objectification of the woman. The question asked is:

Can I have your daughter for the rest of my life?
Say yes, say yes, 'cause I need to know.

(The second line is utterly entitled - why ask someone a question when you're going to whine at them about what they should answer? No is still a definite answer, you turnip. But I digress.) The question he asks is not 'may I have your daughter's hand in marriage'; he asks 'can I have your daughter', as if she were an item of furniture, or a prized hat. So far, so objectifying. But that wasn't enough. He goes on to infantilise her in the chorus:

Marry that girl, marry her anyway
Marry that girl, no matter what you say
Marry that girl, and we'll be a family

He doesn't mention her name, or say anything about her that would create the image of an individual - he calls her 'that girl'. This is infantilising: presumably if she is legally able to marry him, she is an adult human, best described as a 'woman'. It is also just stupid - if he's so hell-bent on marrying her, shouldn't he be repeating her name in a lovelorn frenzy or something?

Furthermore, the very structure of the sentence literally objectifies the woman: he, the subject, is going to Verb that Object, and confound anyone who dares express their own agency in opposition! Now, that's rude. She should smack him on the head and go find someone who is willing to acknowledge her humanity, then have a conversation with her father herself informing him that is who she would like to marry. While I am opposed to the tradition of asking a woman's father for her hand in marriage (unless the woman is going to ask the man's mother for his hand in marriage - then things would at least be balanced), I think in this case the Dad may be onto something. Don't marry him. He's an idiot.

Chris Cornell, from Yesterday to Tomorrow

Chris Cornell entered my personal universe in the 1990s as the lead singer of Soundgarden, a slim and gorgeous dark-haired man with piercing blue eyes, a haunted expression and a voice with the depth and turbulence of an unmapped ocean. The music he produced was complex but emotionally direct, the very embodiment of popular culture as timeless art, universal in its ability to affect, to communicate, to engage the listener and draw them into a world of unanswered questions in which they were, if still alienated, no longer alone. In short, he was like a living male lead from a novel aimed at teenage girls: a cross between errant tomcat and fallen angel. Then, horror of horrors, he tried to enter the mainstream and became the embodiment of everyone's embarrassing uncle who thinks he is cooler than he actually is. But how did it happen? Let us have a look at his three solo albums, and wildly speculate with the gratuitous use of Freudian psychoanalysis.

Cornell has been in a few bands, all of which have been lauded for being ground-breaking in one way or another - Soundgarden, the original grunge-masters, Temple of the Dog, and Audioslave, a supergroup with a social conscience if not always a sky-high average IQ (I watched the DVD they released about their tour of Cuba - one of them wanted to ride a mountain bike down a slope that ended on a major freeway - #DarwinAward). Cornell's contributions to these bands were substantial, both in terms of musical virtuosity (he has an impressive vocal range and technical control miles above the average for a grunge/rock/punk/metal singer), but also as composer and lyricist of the bulk of the material. There is no doubt his best work was produced in a band-setting; Soundgarden's Superunknown is a legendary album, and not just because some of the title's letters were printed backwards. Audioslave may occasionally sound a bit turgid, but they also produced some great things. For example, listen to the transition between verse, chorus and bridge in 'Doesn't Remind Me'. It has electric guitars and is interesting, what more could you want from life? So given Cornell's central role in the creative process of these bands, you'd think his solo albums would be phenomenal. Instead, they display a markedly downhill trajectory. Let's take a closer look.


Cornell's first solo album, Euphoria Morning, was released in 1999 after the massive success of Soundgarden in the mid 1990s. It is an album with an individual voice, even if it does occasionally sound like the voice of one of those YA heroes with overly sharp cheekbones and possibly wings. Some songs are masterful. 'Preaching the End of the World' captures several unique elements of nineties culture: you imagine the speaker connected to a chat-room via dialup modem (remember the sound those things made?), speaking to a stranger and trying to convince them and themselves of their sanity ('I've got a photograph, I'll send it off today;/ you will see that I am perfectly sane'), the oxymoron of living in a world where all problems have been solved with the exception of human misery:

Hello, I know there's someone out there

who can understand, and who's feeling
the same way as me.
I'm twenty-four and I've got everything to live for
but I know now
that it wasn't meant to be

Because all has been lost
and all has been won
and there's nothing left for us to save
But now I know that I don't want to be alone today
so if you're finding that you're feeling just the same

Call me now, it's alright
it's just the end of the world
you'll need a friend in the world
'cause you can't hide
So call and I'll get right back
if your intentions are pure
seeking a friend for the end of the world.

The lyrical content of this song is powerful, and engaged with the issues of the time when it was written. The speaker is expressing a sort of isolation created not just by the imagined impending doom of the world, but by his inability to imagine the future in the terms that his parents did. This is expressed more clearly in the second half of the song, when he details the future that he and his proposed new friend will never have:

Not for a lifetime or forever and a day,
cause we know now that just won't be the case
...
There'll be no commitment and
No confessions and
No little secrets to keep
No little children
or houses with roses
Just the end of the world and me

What he is describing is the negation of the traditional patriarchal narrative of adulthood - in this instance, he and his friend are denied the possibility of a beautiful heteronormative future because of the impending end of the world. Yet this end need not be a literal armageddon; perhaps what is gone is the entrenched set of social values that determined what people should want, and how they should interact with each other. This can be read as a love song for a new generation - instead of offering the future, he offers one fleeting moment of shared understanding as everything explodes and they watch from the same vantage point:

Cause all has been and gone
And all has been done
And there's nothing left for us to save
We could be together as they blow it all away
And we can share in every moment as it breaks

Though I think 'Preaching the End of the World' is by far the best song on Euphoria Morning, the album as a whole is not far behind - it explores meaty themes like alienation, mental illness and human relationships, all within an engaging yet simple soundscape that foregrounds Cornell's exceptional voice. It's not The Superunknown, but the two exist in the same universe.

After Euphoria Morning, Audioslave happened. I love their three albums very much, but won't go into too much detail here - suffice it to say that they produced some awesome rock music somewhat to the mainstream side of the works of Soundgarden. In 2007 Cornell revisited his solo career, with Carry On. This album is really something of a mixed bag - on the one hand, there are some really, really good songs on there. Cornell's Bond theme, 'You Know My Name', is both great and Bondworthy, while his dark, acoustic cover of 'Billie Jean' creates resonances with Jackson's original that just make the world stand still. And then he goes off on a bit of a cheese-fest about falling in love with 'Scar Upon the Sky', and 'Finally Forever'. Even so, neither is too terrible - a man is entitled to his emotions, and it's ok to release love songs about your wife. In fact, it's kind of cute. Which makes what he went on to do next all the more baffling:

Scream (2009) is a total abomination. Apparently, someone told Cornell he needed to co completely mainstream and produce some pop music, and despite good choices in his collaborators the result is Euphoria Morning, which tended to focus on Cornell's not-unphotogenic face, or the videos released with Audioslave and Soundgarden songs which tended to feature the band doing their thing interspersed with images of variable weirdness (barbie dolls on a bbq, anyone?), 'Part Of Me' places Cornell in a bar full off good looking people, scantily clad good looking people, who are doing something that may be dancing but is mostly writhing. This is not his natural environment. Presumably because of Cornell's limited writhing abilities, he remains seated for the duration of the video, initially at a table, and looking like a normal person, and then straddling a chair while people line dance behind him and partially expose their breasts. This is just weird. It does not make him look cool, it makes him look like everyone's embarrassing uncle who doesn't realise that ageing has happened to him, too, and he is no longer 'down with the kids'. Apart from anything else, the whole thing is so unnecessary. The difference between this video and the more indie-rock productions in Cornell's past is that it is stuffed to the rafters with overt sexual references - the muscular men, the bosomy women, the tight clothing, the writhing, and writhing and writhing. But just watch the video for 'Preaching the End of the World': it is incredibly sexy. And Cornell is wearing a black t-shirt and sporting questionable facial topiary. The man is handsome, why would you try to turn him into Pitbull? I mean seriously, what for?
simply horrifying. Take, as a case study, 'Part Of Me', the first single, produced by Timbaland. Let us begin with the video: unlike the slightly quirky videos that went with

This analysis brings us to the issue of the song itself: it is Sexist. Misogynist. Chauvinist. We're talking Thickie Robin Thicke proportions. For your delectation, here are some of the lyrics:

Little girl, I love when she talks to me
Got to smile when she walks that walk with me

I want the girl but I want a lot
Might cross my mind, but that's where it stops

Oh, that bitch ain't a part of me
No, that bitch ain't a part of me
[repeat far more times than strictly necessary]

I love the girl, I'm loving the dress she wears
She's got a hold, got a hold of my neck, oh yeah
I wanna cry, the way that she moves
I want the girl but not what she's going through

Oh, that bitch ain't a part of me
No, that bitch ain't a part of me
[repeat ad nauseum]

She was so friendly, I had one too many
But now that they tell she was rubbing up against me
But I swear, never meant a thing, she was just a fling
There's no other woman who does it like you

That bitch ain't a part of me

No, that bitch ain't a part of me
[repeat until untimely death from Cultural Withdrawal Syndrome]

As you can see, most of the song consists of the repetition of the line 'That Bitch aint a part of me'. That's got to be up there with Thicke's 'Blurred Lines' for needlessly dismissive attacks on women's humanity. I mean really, Christopher, is that any way to speak to a person? Here is a sample of my reaction from when the song came out: 'What does it even mean? Is it a protest against the biblical view of women as descended from Adam’s rib? And what’s going on in the song? It seems like an incoherent attempt to blame a woman for a man’s cheating on another woman, because ‘she was so friendly’, and he had ‘one too many’; but earlier on, he said ‘I want the girl, but not what she’s going through’. So he wants the woman as objectified as a body, but is put off by her having a personality/life, so is going back to some other woman, and... I give up.' Needless to say, I had come to expect more of Cornell before this; and I have yet to understand why he made this album. Compare this to the quirky take on human relationships in 'Preaching the End' - the addressee is not even gendered, it could be anyone. That makes it liberating, an imaginatively rich experience to listen to the lyrics, which are left open to anyone regardless of gender or sexuality. 'Part of Me', on the other hand, alienates anyone identifying as female who does not wish to see herself as a 'bitch'. And it makes most men cringe. And it just isn't any good. 

As if it wasn't bad enough, misogyny is not the only problem with this album. It also indulges in poorly executed cultural appropriation - calling women 'bitches', and saying 'aint' are linguistic quirks associated with hip hop, and Black American culture. Thus someone like Jay Z can get away with telling us 'I got 99 problems but a bitch aint one' without being forever branded misogynist (not that I'm saying hip hop as a genre does not indulge in a bit of misogyny here, there and everywhere - but that's a tirade for another day). Cornell, on the other hand, cannot get away with using 'bitch' to mean 'woman'. Nor can he get away with addressing a woman as 'girl', or using the contraction 'aint'. It makes him look like an ageing duck out of water trying to ride a unicycle: it aint pretty.

I was thinking about this, and wondering if it reveals something about Cornell's experience of life through the music business. After all, the grunge and alternative rock scene he was part of for so many years in Soundgarden and Audioslave is overwhelmingly male and white. So maybe he just doesn't know any better. Nevertheless, that is no excuse. Get your shit together, Chris. Go on the internet, or something.

Hanson on Love: From Boys to Men

When I was young and innocent(er), I loved Hanson. Not so much in an ickily romantic kind of way (though if asked I'd have claimed to have a crush on Taylor, because at the time it was something like a social obligation for girls older than Zach but younger than Isaac to have a crush on Taylor); after all, the first few times I saw the video for Mmmbop I assumed the younger two were girls. (This is ironic, because at the time I had short hair, and everyone thought I was a boy. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.) What attracted me to Hanson then was their irrepressible sense of fun as is evident from the video for Mmmbop: they rollerblade (and fall over), catch a taxi and don't wear seat belts, ride a bus (a thrilling experience when first done without adult supervision that, alas, gets old fast), and at one point Zach emerges from a bin. Just because.

Recently, I stumbled across a couple of songs from their latest album, Anthem, and realised that I still love Hanson. But I also noticed that they occasionally reproduce misogynist conservative stereotypes in their lyrics. So I decided to have a look at the representation of women and love in Hanson songs, from Middle of Nowhere to the present day, strictly in the interests of dispassionate research and not at all because I wanted to go back and listen to it all again.

Middle of Nowhere (1997):

For an album mostly written by three boys who had not fully completed the journey through puberty, there is a great deal of focus on love, romance and girls. Overall, these songs are reminiscent of children parroting things they have heard about love and relationships. 'Where's the Love' exemplifies this bafflement in the first line: 'Something's been going on, and I don't know what it is'. The depth of their confusion is made apparent in the bridge:

We're separating, consciousness is fading
Are you thinking that it's me you're fooling?
Where's the right in, all of our fighting?
Look at, look at, look at what we're doing

This makes no sense - on the second run 'separating' is replaced with 'segregating', which makes marginally less sense, if anything. 

Interestingly, there are two songs that address particular girls: Madeline and Lucy. Both are fantastically lacking in substance. 'Lucy' tells the story of leaving a girl called Lucy, with no other context or detail, and essentially repeats the name as a mantra. In fact, the lyrics are so sparse it is almost poetic, even if it was written by an eleven-year-old. He leaves Lucy, she cries, he misses her; in the second verse it all happens again. Then the song ends. In 'Madeline', on the other hand, the lyrics are a bit more elaborate, in that a broader vocabulary is used; even so, the scope of the song is limited. The speaker is sad, because he didn't realise Madeline was the woman (or girl) of his dreams, and now it's all a mess, and something about roses, and why can't she see they're meant to be together.  It is perhaps a little stalkerish, but all in all a pretty effective distillation of unrequited romantic love, which suggests the author was not yet confused by actual feelings.

In Middle of Nowhere there are also reflections on non-romantic love. 'I Will Come To You' has almost pantomimic Christian overtones in both lyrics and video (the band wander around crowded streets surrounded bodily by halos of golden light - I'm still not sure why); these are incongruously mixed with what may be a breakup narrative (occupational hazard of writing by teenagers, perhaps). Then there is 'With You In Your Dreams', which they wrote about the death of their grandmother.

This Time Around (2000):

The tweenage years: 'If Only' is a convincingly realised expression of teenage love. By this I mean that it is self-contradictory, nonsensical, and contains far more borderline constipated emotion than would seem necessary for the topic in question. For example, a contradiction:

If only I had the guts to feel this way

Presumably if you didn't, you wouldn't, and so you wouldn't be worrying about it. But clearly the speaker is confused; take a look at the first verse, for instance:

Well every single time I see you it's like I feel this way 
It makes me wonder if I am ever gonna feel this way again. 
There's a picture that's hanging in the back of my head 
I see it over and over 
I wanna hold you and love you in my arms and then 
I wanna need you 'cause I need to be with you till the end 
Then I hear myself reply "You've got to hold it in" this time tonight 

This is a portrait of a first love, where the subject is feeling things that are unfamiliar and strange and weird, and doesn't know if they want to feel them, or if they have a choice, and thus self-contradictory nonsense and talking to oneself ensues. Full marks for verisimilitude - it's like the inner monologue of the main character approximately three-quarters of the way through every Young Adult novel ever.

Underneath (2004):

'Penny and Me' perhaps contains the most rounded female character in any of Hanson's songs; the chorus describes a series of activities the speaker and Penny enjoy together, pointing to a shared experience which creates the potential for real communication:

Cause Penny and me like to roll the windows down 
Turn the radio up, push the pedal to the ground 
And Penny and me like to gaze at starry skies 
Close our eyes, pretend to fly 
It's always Penny and me tonight 

Admittedly, the things they enjoy doing together are an homage to the most prevalent of romantic cliches, but nevertheless, Penny emerges from this as a character; we are told about what she likes to do, as well:

Penny likes to get away and drown her pain in lemonade 
Penny dreams of rainy days and nights up late by the fireplace 
And aimless conversations about the better days 

Not sure what the deal is with the lemonade, but the speaker's understanding of her and knowledge of the things she likes to do creates a positive image of a romantic relationship. He may not like to drown his pain in lemonade, however it is one does that, but he's happy to hang out anyway. According to some dodge site on the internet, Hanson have said that Penny is actually a symbol for music, and the song is full of references to music mixed in with oblique references to personal experiences. 'Penny' is named after the Beatles' 'Penny Lane', and there are references to Nick Drake's 'Pink Moon'.

Things go a little way downhill in the next couple of albums; both 'Give A Little' (Shout it Out, 2010) and 'Get the Girl Back' (Anthem, 2013) are variations on the theme of verb-that-noun, in which the subject is the man and the object is the woman.

'Give A Little' is particularly hopeless in this regard. Lyrically, it consists of a list of statements of what 'she' means and wants. It ventriloquises the lowest common denominator of magazine dating tips:

You gotta show her why she can't resist

Make her blush when you put your hand on her hips
She's gonna keep on playing until you stop chasing
So wrap your arms around her body
Tell her all she needs to know

This is revisited in  the second stanza:

You gotta show her, when she can't decide
You gotta hold her, with that look in your eyes
When you move in close, take your time
Leave an empty shoulder, let her move in closer
And wrap your arms around her body
Tell her all she needs to know

The repetition of 'tell her all she needs to know' positions the man in control of all information, the woman being given what he determines that she 'needs to know', and thus eroding her agency - this is reinforced by the opening of the second stanza, 'you gotta show her, when she can't decide': the man must help the feeble-brained female by telling her what to do, because obviously she can't decide for herself, right? The message is that unless the man shows the woman who is boss, she will wander off and sleep with other people. This is not really representative of the way human relationships work.

This is reiterated in 'Thinking 'Bout Somethin' ' (Shout it Out, 2010), which features a man emotionally distancing himself from a faithless woman. This is sort of disappointing, because the chorus hook 'I've been thinking 'bout somethin' other than you' could be a refreshing reference to the fact that there is more to life than romance. Unfortunately, this idea is put to rest when the song ends with the line 'I've been getting the love that moves me while you've been getting around' - the joke's on you, faithless woman, the Man doesn't even miss you...

Nevertheless, both songs have a sort of tongue-in-cheek cheerfulness, created by the combination of lively rhythms, catchy guitar riffs and canny use of brass; combined with the almost frenetic cheerfulness of the video clips (featuring much silly dancing and the wearing of old ladies' golf visors), it is actually quite hard to think of these as texts deliberately undermining the subjectivity of women. The songs and videos retain the spirit of fun apparent in the 'Mmmbop' video, with a richer, matured sound, if, sadly, lacking much depth of reflection on gender politics and the human condition.

'Get the Girl Back' raises suspicions with its title: who is this nameless girl, and why must she be got? And do you mean seduce her once again, or get revenge because she dared do something you didn't like? Having said that, the song is not as bad as it seems at first. The chorus hook is 'you've got to get the girl back on your side'; getting someone on your side does not imply they are a possession in the same way the 'get the girl back' does out of context - however, it still refers to 'the girl', as though the female gender is an empty signifier, and not an infinitely variable collection of individuals (is it a specific girl that must be 'got back on one's side', or just any girl as a representative of the female gender? Who knows? Should we care?).

Yet the omnipresent 'she' in Hanson's lyrics is not necessarily always a manifestation of unthinking erasure of female individuality - rather it may display a little-discussed aspect of male/female relations: the male experience of the female gaze. For example, the 'you' in 'River' (3 Car Garage, 1998).

Lately we've been talkin' 'bout who we are
Seems we don't know anymore
And all this time that we've been thinkin'
At night I've been dreamin' about youAnd I know you don't believe me when I say
I'll love you 'till the end - forever and a day

And I guess we'll never know
Exactly where this river's gonna flow
And I guess we'll never understand
Until we reach that promised land
So I guess we'll
I guess we'll never know

The chorus is a reflection on the unpredictability of life; however, it also functions as a reflection on the impossibility of truly complete understanding between individuals, and the relationship between this impossibility of understanding and the difficulty of articulating individual identity. So all in all, there are some interesting reflections on love, relationships and women in the works of Hanson. They just need to steer clear of that whole empty-signifier 'girl' thing. I mean, I understand the impulse to write about an anonymous and generalised love-symbol, particularly if you have a wife who may take it personally if you air the details of your sex life in your lyrics, but there is some middle ground. For How To Do It, see Jeff Buckley's 'Lover, you should have come over' and 'Last Goodbye'. Perhaps the secret is to omit gender if you're going to omit names...

One of the things that becomes apparent through looking at the progression of Hanson's albums is how much their music, and particularly the quality of their voices, has matured over time. All you need to look at to see just how formidable they are as musicians is their cover of 'Ain't no Sunshine'. Anthem is a good pop album, but who knows, if their lyrical ability catches up with their musicianship, they may yet produce an adult album legitimately described as 'great'. I'm less optimistic about Chris Cornell - watch this space for my deconstruction of his career.

The Trouble with Meghan Trainor and All Her Bass

Meghan Trainor's All About That Bass has a nice, catchy melody and equally tenacious bass line, as suggested by the song title; but there, alas, its good qualities end. For like her many popstrel predecessors, Trainor is polluting our airwaves with the same objectifying misogynist rubbish that is endemic in twenty-first century popular culture (seriously, you would have thought we'd have learned by now). The problems with the representation of women are as prominent in the video as in the song, but let us start with the lyrics.

Trainor begins by informing us that she's 'all about that bass, no treble', a problematic idea from the very beginning. In Trainor's dictionary, 'bass' apparently means 'fat', or perhaps more politically correctly 'voluptuous'. One imagines, by extension, that treble means 'thin', so here Trainor is rejecting all thin people out of hand. So it is evident from the beginning that Trainor's song is not a manifesto for the acceptance of physical difference, but another foray into the fat against thin battle, which really we should have laid to rest by now. There is more to a person than their BMI.

Though the above is problematic, it gets worse. In the first verse, Trainor explicitly objectifies women, and places them in a subservient position to men. She says:

Yeah it's pretty clear, I ain't no size two
But I can shake it, shake it like I'm supposed to do
'Cause I got that boom boom that all the boys chase
All the right junk in all the right places

In the first two lines, Trainor objectifies her own body by offering her ability to 'flaunt her curves' as a substitute for being thin. Rather than critiquing the propensity of Western culture to define women by their bodies, this simply demands a different set of criteria by which a woman's value can be judged through her body: 'flaunting curves' as opposed to being skinny. Her claim that she can 'shake it' like she is 'supposed to do' is particularly repulsive, as it suggests she interprets the only possibility of enacting her feminine subjectivity as being the sexualization of her own body through the practice of 'shaking'. She goes on to define her self-proclaimed value as a curvaceous woman in terms of male heterosexual desire, describing her curves as 'that boom boom that all the boys chase'. So she creates a 'fat vs thin' dispute amongst women, and then calls men in as arbitrators. Does anyone else see a problem with this?

In fact, one of the biggest problems I have with this song is that Trainor mixes thoughtless reinforcements of patriarchal heteronormativity as detailed above with critiques of truly questionable practices in popular culture. As a result, a listener could be fooled into thinking that this really is a song about female liberation, which could only confuse the issue. She says:

I see the magazines working that Photoshop
We know that shit ain't real
Come on now, make it stop
If you've got beauty beauty just raise 'em up
'Cause every inch of you is perfect
From the bottom to the top

This is an almost-perfect rejection of the practice prevalent in magazines and other popular media of passing off photoshopped models as 'normal women', creating a mass of body image issues for everyone who cannot exist solely on the digital plane. Yet even here she doesn't quite make it: you're only invited to 'raise 'em up' if 'you've got beauty'. So again, this divides women into the two polar categories of 'beautiful/ugly', 'desirable/undesirable', which demonstrates that rather than erasing these categories, Trainor is simply trying to invert 'thin/fat' so she can have more cookies (an idea reinforced by the various close-ups of cupcakes and other sweets in the video in time to the word 'bass'). This cognitive dissonance between liberation and oppression is the recurring theme of the song's lyrical content. She starts the next sentence saying 'my momma she told me don't worry about your size', which could be interpreted as a rejection of our cultural obsession with women's bodies, but then ruins it by adding 'boys they like a little more booty to hold at night'. The first half of the sentence could separate subjectivity from physical appearance, but the second reduces the female body to an object for the pleasuring of men, as either sex doll or animated hot-water bottle, depending on the age of the listener.

The one occasion where Trainor expresses a sentiment that can be interpreted as empowering to women is at the end of the first verse, where she says:

You know I won't be no stick-figure silicone Barbie doll
So, if that's what you're into
Then go ahead and move along.

In this instance, she is taking possession of her own body as an independent subject with agency, announcing to any would-be suitors that she is not willing to change her body to meet their expectations. While that is all lovely, it is nowhere near enough to address the inherent sexism and sizeism in the rest of the song.

In her second verse, Trainor addresses this idea of a 'thin vs fat' war among women more directly, by attacking thin women:

I'm bringing booty back
Go ahead and tell them skinny bitches that
No, I'm just playing I know you think you're fat

This is particularly ugly. First of all, her 'bringing booty back' suggests Trainor has taken it upon herself to introduce a new arbitrary standard of feminine beauty and impose it on her fellow women, which is frankly irritating. Her subsequent reference to 'skinny bitches' who 'think they're fat' is emphatically tasteless, since body image issues of that variety can be a symptom of anorexia nervosa, an actual disease that kills people. She tries to position herself as a liberator of women from the cultural constrictions of arbitrary beauty standards, by saying she's here to tell these 'skinny bitches' that 'every inch of [them] is perfect from the bottom to the top', but undoes this completely by repeating the line about her mother saying boys like 'a little more booty'. This firmly positions 'skinny bitches' on the reject pile in Trainor's brave new world, simply replacing the hierarchy of skinny over fat with its inverse. Is this helpful? I'll give you a clue: No.

This brings us to the glorious cultural artefact that is the video for 'All About That Bass'. This features Trainor, a curvaceous, voluptuous, emphatically-not-skinny blonde singing her song with a variety of backing dancers. It begins and ends with a close-up of Trainor's face on a pink background, wearing a pink tulle bow and pale blue girly shirt. It is evident that the video intends to challenge the prevalence of skinny women on television, as it features curvy female dancers, but also a rather overweight male dancer. A notable moment is when Trainor mentions photoshop and a 'before and after' image is shown of a skinny model made to look fat.

While this could be interpreted as a mockery of the practice of changing people's appearance with photoshop, in the context of Trainor's lyrics, it falls into the narrative of the 'fat wars', dividing women amongst themselves based on their desirability to men. It undermines Trainor's rejection of Photoshop, suggesting she would accept its use for the proliferation of images of fat women.

As a whole, the video is an exploration of stereotypical femininity, featuring much pink and other pastel colours, as well as two little girls playing with barbie dolls, whose movements are reenacted by Trainor and a male actor.

The presence of the little girls in the video suggests Trainor wants to free the development of female subjectivity from the yoke of image obsession, an idea reinforced by a scene in which her female dancers ride around the pink set on girls' bicycles. The little girls themselves abandon their dolls, and dance with much passion and enthusiasm, suggesting the liberation of female expression. Nevertheless, like the lyrics it accompanies, the video fails to truly represent the idea of female liberation.

In addition to the 'fat wars' narrative, there are also some racial issues with the representation of women in the video. While it is encouraging that Trainor's dancers represent a range of skin tones, which are all being presented as beautiful, there is a scene near the beginning in which a skinny white model stands and watches in disgust while a black dancer twerks at her. Of course, this scene is meant to mock the white woman for being all skinny and judgemental, but it also objectifies the black woman, and does so to a greater extent than the other women in the video. While Trainor claims she can 'shake it', she demonstrates this with a demure shake of her body, back facing the camera, which causes her flared skirt to sway in a girlish fashion.

The black dancer in the tweaking scene, on the other hand, is dressed in skin-tight pastel leggings (which are also, incidentally, really horrible) and she shakes her bottom far more emphatically; one might even say eloquently. Trainor does not emulate these dance moves elsewhere in the video, nor do any of her white dancers. Perhaps this could have been dismissed as trivial, but it is cringeily reminiscent of Lily Allen's Hard Out Here, in which Allen protests the objectification of women while wearing long leggings and sleeves herself, with black women in leotards and bikinis gyrating around her.

Overall, though it presents itself as a text that liberates women, 'All About That Bass' reinforces patriarchal sexist stereotypes, and proliferates objectified images of women. While it is likely not her intention, Trainor ends up being one of those women who perpetuates the repression of women. Like Margaret Thatcher. And this happens because Trainor has missed the point entirely. It is not about reasserting the rights of fat people against the tyranny of the skinny. The objectification of women hurts ALL women, and ALL prescriptive beauty standards are objectifying, regardless who they apply to. So, Meghan, you can take your bass and shove it.

Pitbull ruins everything: Why TikTok is better than Timber

Pitbull is a weird occurrence in popular culture. He is short. He lacks conventional attractiveness. He has no hair. He doesn’t really sing. He wears suits with his shirt tucked in and gives the impression that he may well be wearing a vest underneath that his mother ironed for him. He dances like someone's creepy uncle. zeitgeist on the head with a hammer and thus insinuate himself into the charts. As a general rule, I don’t have a problem with him (though maybe I’m just saying that because I watched that Charlie Brooker episode where Limmy thinks Pitbull kills everyone who says anything bad about his music). I do, however, take issue with Timber: as a song, as a video, and as a revelation of human nature. It’s just bad. What makes it worse for me is that it features Kesha, who issued a great challenge to female stereotypes in TikTok, and is presented as just another singing bum-and-boobs combo in Timber.

To contextualize my dislike of Timber, here is what I liked about TikTok:

TikTok is a crazy anthem for the  girl who likes to get tipsy, which starts and ends with Kesha (or should it be Ke$ha?) sleeping in a bathtub wearing one boot.

She is the pov character in the video’s narrative, and she presents herself as a subject-not-object from the outset:

I wake up in the morning feeling like P-Diddy

Grab my glasses I'm out the door, I'm gonna hit this city

Ke$ha = subject. City = object. It is not clear what it has done to deserve being hit, but she is unapologetic about her intentions. Similarly, while brushing her teeth with a bottle of whisky is a potentially questionable lifestyle choice, she is not apologetic about that either. One gets the impression that she is neither trying to be a ‘good woman’ nor a ‘bad girl’. She enjoys parties and drinking, and that shouldn’t be a big deal. Her juxtaposition with the ultra-clean American family unit in the video opening makes it clear that she is breaking free of stereotypes, even while she plays with them. 

Male interest is undoubtedly a part of this marathon party lifestyle, but it is discussed on the women-as-subjects' terms. For example:

and now the boys are lining up because they think we got swagger

but we kick them to the kerb unless they look like Mick Jagger

This implies that the women within the universe of this pop song have agency: they can choose to reject male interest, and are not solely defined by it. However, what is perhaps more significant is that the boys in question are attracted to the girls' 'swagger', a behavioural trait or attitude (or something), rather than because of the way the girls look. She's not saying 'the boys are lining up because they think we got bums’. This is important. (Also, nobody twerks at any point. This raises the intellectual level and artistic quality of the proceedings considerably.) Furthermore, the criterion she chooses for men’s attractiveness is that ‘they look like Mick Jagger’, which is unusual, so one suspects completely arbitrary. It works because it rhymes, and because it’s funny, but is also making an important statement: attraction is individual. Maybe Ke$ha really does like men who look like they’ve been soaking in a salty bathtub for several decades. This is reinforced by the male lead in the video, a skinny pale guy with a very fake-looking handlebar moustache. 

Finally, the way Ke$ha is styled in this video is also refreshing: while she is showing plenty of skin, she wears comfortable clothes normal women would wear - shorts, weird t-shirts, ripped jeans, boots. She's wearing eye makeup and nail varnish and so forth, but none of those things are her defining feature. Which brings us to the way she is presented in Timber:

In the first scene, she is wearing a bikini with some bizarre bridal train attached.

She also has foot-long black nail extensions. These are red in another atrocious outfit elsewhere in the video. She does dirty dancing while singing something utterly nonsensical about things 'going down' and 'yelling timber', concluding that 'this be the night you won't remember / I'll be the one you won't forget'. Ominous. And weird. Anyway, all the women in this video are overtly sexualized - from Ke$ha in the bikini wedding dress to the mock country dancers in the club who are wearing shorts that expose their but cheeks and doing something in lines that is not line-dancing, to the weird Mama Mia woman in the doily dress who dances with Pitbull on the beach, the message is that women should be mostly naked, and made of fake. I object.

The video may have just about been bearable, however, were it not for Pitbull's lyrics. They are cringe-inducingly belittling of women, unmusical and not very clever. He tells us:

The bigger they are, the harder they fall

These big-iddy boys are dig-gidy dogs

I have 'em like Miley Cyrus, clothes off

Twerking in their bras and thongs, timber

Face down, booty up, timber

That's the way we like to–what?–timber

I'm slicker than an oil spill

She say she won't, but I bet she will, timber

Traslation: I am a bigger man than the men who are taller than me (which is all of them) because I have women shaking their bare bottoms in my face which is the way the world should be, and no really means yes.

After shouting incoherently for some time, I am back and ready to comment on this dispassionately like a real adult (no, really). First of all, the reference to Miley Cyrus is disgusting. While she has been skipping around blithely announcing to anyone who will listen that she is a sexual being, a man in his thirties referring to her as a sexual object is just gross. Secondly, the ascendancy of 'booty' over face is a distressing development for women everywhere. I like to think I can communicate with people through speech and eye contact rather than ass-wiggling. But popular culture disagrees with me. The reference to oil spills is pertinent in that Pitbull is as environmentally destructive and gross, I believe it was a different nuance of the word 'slick' he was going for. Finally, 'she say she won't, but I bet she will' is a socially damaging idea to be pouring into the ears of innocent teenagers who spend their lives watching music videos (I should know about that, I was one). And it is dangerous for boys and girls alike. Just to make some basic things clear: women are allowed to refuse sex. So are men. Sex is consensual, anything else is rape. You would think these things would be obvious by now, but the man in the pastel suit makes me wonder.

Overall, it would appear that Pitbull and Robin Thicke went to the same weekend course on how to deal with women, and it did not stand them in good stead for the reality which is that women are just people, no means no, and nobody should be defined by their bum.

Nudity, femininity and the animal kingdom: Would Robin Thicke objectify a woman?

As I have mentioned previously, Miley Cyrus was not the first to take her clothes off in a music video, nor will she be the last. Another video which has drawn attention recently due to its inclusion of bare-breasted women is Robin Thicke's 'Blurred Lines', otherwise known as 'gender equality: you are doing it wrong'. In this little gem, women dance around the besuited Mr Thicke and his partners in cultural crime, Pharrell Williams and T.I., also fully clothed at all times.

 However, what is potentially more problematic than the severe imbalance in clothing distribution is the whole narrative of domestication, and narrative of women as animals. He sings:

Ok now he was close, tried to domesticate you
but you're an animal, baby it's in your nature

Just let me liberate you
You don't need no papersThat man is not your maker

On its own, this could be read as an affirmation of the merry topless women's independence: they don't need boyfriends, because they are free agents. But this is undermined by Mr Thicke's offer to 'liberate' them, and also by the rather tawdry little rap sequence later on: 

One thing I ask of you
Let me be the one you back that ass to
[...]
Yeah, I had a bitch, but she ain't bad as you
So hit me up when you pass through
I'll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two
[...]
Nothing like your last guy, he too square for you
He don't smack that ass and pull your hair like that

*Shudder* I'm not going to bother analyzing that part. Add to that the line 'you the hottest bitch in this place', and there's really no saving it. It's not made much better by the sentence 'Robin Thicke has a big Dick' spelled out in helium balloons. That just makes me think 'FREUD!' very loudly, and assume that Mr Thicke's penis must be average-to-small in size. I then get frustrated by the fact that I have been manipulated into thinking about the size of someone's penis, when that is clearly a waste of my cognitive ability and I could be doing better things with my time. 

There has been some debate over whether this video truly objectifies women, as the creators have argued that they are mocking explicit pop videos by including references to all that is taboo, including nudity, drug use and bestiality. Furthermore, one of the topless women has stated that she did not feel objectified, and she wanted to undermine the nudity taboo. All very admirable. However, rather like Ms Cyrus, the model in question has missed the point about objectification: it does not require the object's consent. While the fact that she is able to speak publicly about her performance and provide a reading of her own nudity which counters the general assumption that she is being objectified does go some way towards recontextualizing the video, she is nevertheless naked and surrounded by clothed men singing about her as an object of desire.

However, this whole thing could be read as not so much an attempt to shamelessly objectify women with merry abandon, as a poor, confused man's cry for help. This would be summed up in the image of a naked ass with a stop sign on it towards the end of the video:

Mr Thicke sings 'I hate these blurred lines/ I know you want it', suggesting that although he is convinced that the woman in question would like to have sexual relations with him, he feels inhibited from making any concrete moves in that direction by social conventions. So Mr Thicke is admirably resisting the mixed messages sent by the objectification of women in a society which claims to support gender equality, and keeping his allegedly large penis in his very tight trousers. Perhaps he is a little bit socially awkward, and found it hard to talk to topless women at parties when he was a teenager, because really they are quite scary. The smallness of the stop sign presumably suggests that the fact that nudity does not constitute a sexual invitation is difficult to grasp, and one could be forgiven for trying to have sex with someone who just happened to be naked, but didn't actually consent. Or does it?

While there is no question that the lyrics are sexually suggestive, Mr Thicke's part does not at any point suggest that crossing these 'blurred lines' is acceptable; he repeatedly issues the invitation 'come on, get at me', and expresses his frustration at his inability to assess whether this woman is interested in him or not. He mentions 'the way you grab me', but isn't doing any grabbing himself. Perhaps what is more irritating, and potentially sinister as well, is his insistence on the fact that the addressee is a 'good girl'. In fact, it is her status as 'good girl' that is playing havoc with his semantics, because if she were a 'bad girl' it would be obvious that she wanted potentially physically harmful sex, there would be no 'blurred lines' to contend with, and everyone would live happily ever after, apart from the occasional STD. Either way, it's clearly the woman's fault. Right?

The (anti?)feminist discourse of Miley Cyrus's bare bottom

Recently, Ms Cyrus has been the Talk of the Town: first, there was that infamous MTV VMA performance, in which she stripped down to her underwear and mimed pleasuring herself with a foam finger, then there was the video clip in which she appeared writhing around on a wrecking ball wearing nothing but a pair of safety boots. When asked about the latter, she claimed to have been influenced by Sinead O'Connor's 'Nothing Compares To You' video, leading to Ms O'Connor writing a series of open letters, attempting in vain to show Ms Cyrus how she had entirely missed the point, and warning her of potentially dire consequences of her objectification. Curiosity compelled me to watch both the VMA performance and the wrecking ball video, and there raised several questions for me:

1) In the context of common practice in Pop music, are Ms Cyrus's performances that unusual?

2) When is nudity objectification and when is it art?

3) Does the objectification of Ms C's body spell the death of feminism?

Before I answer these questions, here is a brief summary of my impressions of the two offending articles, for those unwilling to tarnish their retinas and/or souls by watching the originals:

Exhibit A: The Twerking Incident
This is MC's MTV VMA Performance: the act opens with her flouncing out of the innards of a giant teddy bear, wearing a leotard with some sort of demented mouse on the front, her tongue hanging out like she's caught some sort of rare sheep disease; as though she were innocently on her way to a pre-teen modern

dance class when she suddenly became the first victim of a zombie apocalypse. She proceeds with a dance routine that would not have been entirely alien to the aforementioned pre-teen modern dance class, with the exception of the occasional crotch thrust, and bending over and shaking her bum, a move apparently called 'twerking'. The song in the background pronounces that 'It's our party, we'll do what we want'.
Following this, she rips off her leotard to reveal something resembling a beige 1950s bikini,

proceeds to mime pleasuring herself with a foam finger, and repeats the 'twerking' move, this time rubbing her bum against a somewhat lecherous-looking male singer who is wearing a thick striped black and white suit that makes him look like a used-car salesman. The chorus to the song for this scene is 'You're such a good girl. I know you want it.' So far, so tasteless, but hardly unusual for the world of pop.

Exhibit B: The Nudity Incident
This is Miley Cyrus's video for the song 'Wrecking Ball'. It opens with a closeup of MC's face, wearing vast amounts of mascara and red lipstick, with artfully controlled tears rolling down her synthetic-looking cheeks.


This, she claims, was inspired by Sinead O'Connor's 1990 video for 'Nothing Compares 2U'.

While O'Connor's video consists mainly of close-ups of the singer's face with some tears towards the end, Cyrus's goes on to show the singer writhing in her underwear in a partially demolished building. Then she is seen swinging around on a wrecking ball wearing nothing but her boots.

At one point, she also licks a hammer. The song itself is about the dissolution of a relationship, in which Cyrus describes herself as a well-intentioned 'wrecking ball', who only wanted to break down the nameless addressee's defenses. And yet, apparently, it is her who is wrecked. Whatever.

1) In the context of common practice in Pop music, are Ms Cyrus's performances that unusual?

No, they are not. So why are Miley Cyrus's performances more shocking than other semi-naked and sexualized women's pop videos?

To a large extent, what makes MC's 'sexy dancing' disturbing is the fact that she still effectively looks like a child. At the age of 20, she could still easily pass for about fourteen, and so her objectification is more disturbing than that of an older-looking woman, as her claims to be making her own decisions appear less credible. To some extent, this may be her motivation for engaging in shock tactics: having become famous as a child, to a child-audience, she wants to prove that she has grown up by presenting herself as seductive as well as capable of great emotion.

Unfortunately, the effect is cringe-inducing, rather than artistically effective. The extreme stylization of her video makes her emotion appear fake, while the protrusion of her apparently still-budding breasts through a ribbed vest evokes the horror of the image of an objectified child. By comparison, the scenes where she is wearing nothing and swinging around on the wrecking ball are a relief, because at least nothing controversial is actually visible- it reminds me of naked calendars you can buy, made by various amateur sports clubs to raise money, where sporting equipment hides the subject's intimate areas: not very shocking, and a bit twee.

To return to the VMA performance, Cyrus appears to be deliberately deconstructing her previous public persona: the demented mouse leotard is a corruption of Mickey Mouse who represents wholesome childhood, while all the sad-faced dancing teddy-bears and suchlike follow a similar theme. She keeps pointing to her sexuality, literally, by pointing to her vagina. But while I find comedians, such as Sarah Millican, making jokes about vaginas both funny and pleasantly challenging to social convention, Miley's performance reminded me more of a little girl I knew, aged two: during nappy changes, she would point at her bum, and say 'bum!' with an extremely smug look on her face, showing her pride in discovering the location of her bum, and knowing the word by which to identify it. Similarly, Miley seems to have discovered her vagina, but unfortunately has not yet learned the words to articulate her joy in this discovery.

2) When is nudity objectification and when is it art?
If the impressionists could get away with painting naked women in the nineteenth century, why can't Miley swing around naked on a wrecking ball to her heart's content?
Well, in order for something to qualify as an artistic expression, it has to contain some semblance of a meaning, as well as a modicum of originality. Probably. In the case of Ms Cyrus' VMA performance, it is difficult to argue that it could constitute art, as it appears to be a cynical agglomeration of titillating footage with no message other than a promotion of hedonistic partying, which, frankly, is no longer in any way original. 'Wrecking Ball', on the other hand, could have a case for being art: it appeals to a universal human emotion, namely the pain experienced as a result of rejection, much in the same way that 'Nothing Compares 2U' does. That emotion does come across through Ms Cyrus' facial expressions, if not through her body movement. And the scene in which she swings around naked on a wrecking ball could be interpreted as, rather than a poor excuse for gratuitous nudity, an expression of the nihilistic vulnerability of the subject of emotional rejection. Of course, all these readings are undermined by Ms Cyrus' comments on Twitter, which generally suggest that she has the depth of emotion of a creme cracker and the intelligence of the average tree frog, coupled with an unshakable conviction that she is right and everyone else is wrong - but who can blame her? That's what being twenty is all about.

3) Does the objectification of Ms C's body spell the death of feminism?
No - not more so than any other objectified woman in a pop video does. However, it does show that gender equality is still a long way off.
Pop music has never been a particularly feminist-friendly discourse. Take, for example, the Spice Girls: they allegedly supported the idea of 'Girl Power', and represented a range of articulations of femininity. However, according to the Spice Girls' model, girls could either be Sporty, Sexy, Baby, Ginger, Scary or Posh. None of these are particularly helpful in a real-world context, and with the exception of Sporty all involve wearing extremely short dresses.
If one takes a lipstic feminist position, Miley Cyrus' current public persona could represent a re-appropriation of her body and femininity through the open enactment of her sexuality and the flaunting of her nudity. However, due to the creme cracker - tree frog hypothesis detailed above, this reading seems far-fetched. It is exceedingly likely that Ms Cyrus' performances are doing nothing but perpetuate the sinister objectification of women in popular music culture, often to a vulnerable audience who were introduced to her in her insipid but safe incarnation as Hannah Montana. Is the world likely to end as a result? No. With any luck, one day she will put her pants back on and produce some music that doesn't perpetuate all that is bad in the world, both aurally and ideologically. I'm not holding my breath, though.