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$ha?) sleeping in a bathtub wearing one boot.
I wake up in the morning feeling like P-Diddy
Grab my glasses I'm out the door, I'm gonna hit this city
Ke$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.
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