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.