Dual Pickup

While researching unpleasant bands for a minor joke in yesterday's entry, I was struck by the neat complementarity of Ke$ha's unconscionable "Blah Blah Blah" and 3OH!3's despicable "Don't Trust Me".  Taken together, the songs can be seen to circumscribe both sides of a near-anonymous heterosexual relationship characterized by mutual disrespect and loathing.

"Don't Trust Me" (which I consistently mistype as "Don't Trust Men"; oh feminism!) takes the form of an account of the damage on the meat popsicle the narrator is about to intubate, imbued with equal parts nausea and pity. "Blah Blah Blah" consists of a set of instructions addressed to the listener/fuckee.  The central exhortation of each song, the demand each character makes of their partner, is to shut up.

For 3OH!3's narrator, listening to the bruised head-case he is focused on spit-roasting would bring to the surface distressing thoughts that circulate beneath the surface of this song--of whether taking advantage of a fucked-up girl after taking pains to dehumanize her makes him an untrustworthy, terrible person.  Ke$ha's narrator seems, well, simpler: she doesn't want to hear from her interlocutor because she is aware any respect he displays for her is feigned, part of a ploy to trick her into doing what she's intent on doing anyway [him]. 

Because these atrocious songs and the horrible sentiments they express are quite popular, my natural next move should be to bemoan the breakdown of social mores they represent, and perhaps to long for a simpler time before the invention of casual sex or young people.  But this would ignore context, both social and musical.  I'm going to just assert that relations between the sexes are better than they were in the past and leave it there; if necessary I'll defend it in some forum that isn't a blog post about disposable alterna-pop. Musically, these songs exist in a rather long tradition of opposition to love songs expressing admiration--think of "I Just Want To Make Love To You" in 1954 or "You're All I've Got Tonight" in 1978.  Moreover, they aren't popular because of how acceptable it currently is to treat a sexual partner like they were Clippy the Microsoft Office Paperclip, but rather because in an atmosphere of increased respect and communication, being an asshole becomes subversive. 

Personally, I find it heartening that neither of these acts is allowed to go on tv alone anymore: each has to feat. other artists in their videos to lend credibility to the notion that another person could stand to be around them for three minutes.