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.

Death and the Father: ‘Chop Suey’

The figure of the Father is a staple of Heavy Metal lyrics, not least because these often tend to engage with Christianity, a religion centred on the figure of the Father. Three songs in which the father as Father makes notable appearances are Chop Suey, Chop Suey, by System of a Down, and Enter Sandman and The Thorn Within by Metallica. All three songs use samples of Christian prayer or scripture within their text, emphasising the connection between father figure and God. I will begin with a reading of ‘Chop Suey’.

Chop Suey

Chop Suey is made up of three sections: verse, chorus and bridge. The verse consists of a list of statements in the second person:

Wake up

Grab a brush and put on a little makeup.

Hide the scars to fade away the shake-up.

Why’d you leave the keys upon the table?

Here you go, create another fable.

The first three lines are instructions which can be read as commands to conform to a set of social standards, especially as lines two and three concern appearance. The flow of instructions is broken by the question ‘Why’d you leave the keys upon the table?’ the trivial nature of which highlights the aggression of this passage. The accusation that the addressee is creating ‘another fable’ hints at a general habit of dishonesty.

In the second iteration of the verse, the phrase ‘you wanted to’ repeated after lines 2-5, which could be interpreted as a suggestion that the primary victim of this dishonesty is the self. ‘You wanted to’ could refer to a desire to perform each of the actions listed above, or it could be read as a general desire to conform, which results in the necessity of such traumatic acts as hiding scars and creating fables. This is an interesting reflection on free will, especially read in the quasi-religious context of the rest of the lyrics.

The chorus is a first-person soliloquy about suicide:

I don’t think you trust in my self-righteous suicide

I cried when angels deserve to die

In my self-righteous suicide

I cry when angels deserve to die

The introduction of the first-person problematises the first stanza, as it does not clarify whether there are one or two subjects involved in this discussion. Specifically, it is unclear whether the ‘you’ in the chorus is the same subject as the ‘you’ in the verse. One can read it as an altercation between self and double, or as a confrontation between insider and Other.

In the bridge, the figure of the Father is introduced with a dramatic repetition of the word, which can be read as a cry of despair or an invocation. This Father can be interpreted as God or the speaker’s father, depending on whether you want to be religious of Freudian. The invocation leads into a prayer of despair:

Father into your hands

I commit my spirit,

Father into your hands

Why have you forsaken me?

In your eyes forsaken me?

In your thoughts forsaken me?

In your heart forsaken me?

The above supports the idea of the father as God, as it is a mixture of two of Jesus’ statements on the cross:

'Father, into your hands I commit my spirit' (Luke23:46)

'My God, My God, why have you forsaken me' (Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34).

The structure of the verse with its repetitions of ‘forsaken me’ is reminiscent of the prayer ‘God be in my head’:

God be in my head and in my understanding
God be in my eyes and in my looking
God be in my mouth and in my speaking
God be in my heart and in my thinking
God be at my end and at my departing

The prayer ends with death; similarly, Chop Suey’s text progresses from a dialectic pattern of question and answer to the final command:

Trust in my
self-righteous suicide

This indicates the speaker’s embracing of death, which could be read as an attempt to seize control of the body from the Father through the murder of the self. Perhaps the suggestion is that it is not possible to separate the self from the figure of the Father without bringing about its complete destruction.

Self and Double in Audioslave and Charalambides

the double was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’, as [Otto] Rank says; and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body. […] Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death. (Freud, The Uncanny, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, p. 940)

The double as discussed by Freud and Otto Rank is a concept that often engages artists, from the most diverse backgrounds. I was struck by the uncanny appearance of the double in Audioslave’s ‘Exploder’ and Kyriakos Charalambides’ ‘(Hi)Story with a horse in it’. In both texts, the artist encounters his double, and ultimately destroys him.

Audioslave’s ‘Exploder’ deals with themes of mental illness: the first stanza describes a man who has been committed to a mental institution, the second a girl who copies her father and commits suicide and a boy who hears voices and kills his mother. Each stanza is followed by the chorus, which almost ritualistically repeats that ‘If you’re free you’ll never see the walls’. This fits in with the theme of questioning control over one’s actions: the girl in the second stanza commits suicide despite having expressed the intention not to (‘she said she’d never do the same, then did just what he’d done’), while the boy who kills his mother is presumably acting on the instructions of the mysterious voices in his head (‘no one knows what they said, now his mother’s dead’). In the third stanza, the speaker looks upon himself, quite literally: he encounters his double:

I saw a man who had a face that looked a lot like me
I saw him in the mirror and I fought him in the streets
Then when he turned away I shot him in the head
Then I came to realize I had killed myself

In this instance, the speaker’s belated recognition of himself intensifies the uncanny sense of the encounter. In Charalambides’ poem, there is a similar delay in recognition, although this is because the speaker is initially unable to see his double. He is told by others that he can be seen riding his horse through the skies of Lefkosia, but it takes time for him to encounter himself:

Όμως μια μέρα σαν κι αυτή – παράξενο! – είδα
τούτο που λέγανε. Και μη νομίσεις
πως σου μιλώ για πήγασους και τα τοιαύτα.
Άλογο ήτανε, γερό και στιβαρό
χωρίς φτερά και μ’ ένα χαλινάρι
χοντρό σαν το χαλάζι – εγώ π’ ουδέποτε
σ’ άλογο ανέβηκα, και να καλπάζω.

But a day like that – strange! – I saw
what they were talking about. And don’t think
that I’m telling you about pegassi and suchlike.
A horse it was, strong and solid
without wings and with reigns
as thick as hail – and I who never
on a horse had ridden, up there and galloping.

In this case, the sense of the uncanny is evoked both by the existence of the double, and by his seeming disdain of the laws of Physics. He is riding through the sky on a real, solid, heavy horse. Like in ‘Exploder’, the speaker must assert himself over his double through an act of violence. He pierces the sack of air holding the horseman aloft, and drags him to the ground, finally killing him:

Όμως τον πρόλαβα μπροστά στο βασιλιά
και μια και δυο τον ξετελειώνω – να μη λένε
ότι με βλέπουνε καβάλα στ’ άλογό μου
επάνω από τον ουρανό της Λευκωσίας.

But I caught up with him before the king
and chop chop, I finish him off – so they don’t say
that they see me astride my horse
up in the sky of Leukosia.

The main difference between these two murders of the double is that in ‘Exploder’ the speaker only discovers that he has killed his double after the event, where as in ‘horse’ the speaker deliberately murders his double to protect the integrity of the identity of the self. However, the violent outcome in these two instances may point towards the desire of the artist to control the image of the self. While ‘Exploder’ creates an uncanny setting through the questioning of the accuracy of perception entailed in the delayed recognition of the double, the same degree of uncanny is evoked in Charalambides’ poem through the dreamlike structure of the narrative. The sequence of events is presented as causal, but this association is elusive to the wakeful mind.

In conclusion, it could be argued that the figure of the double poses a particular threat to the artist, and must be eradicated at all costs. Also, American rock music and Cypriot-Greek intellectual poetry have things in common.

So what's this all about, then?

I was recently writing a PhD thesis, and I had all these ideas that were tangentially related but didn't quite fit in with the central theme. Like the Freudian overtones of many rock songs. Also, I just like to overanalyse things. So I decided to put all this stuff here. Feel free to set me straight if you think I am misreading something...