You're Doing Gender Wrong

I enjoy watching pop videos, I guess.  I'll certainly watch them for hours until I've had my fill.  Sometimes I even like the songs.  But mainly I enjoy watching brief linguistic and visual spectacles on the Semiotics Channel.  Take Mike Posner--if you listen to his lyrics, he just sounds like a classically-trained date rapist.  Classically-trained in date rape, I mean, not music.  But the videos for his odious songs are great!  "Cooler Than Me" has him stealing sunglasses off hipsters and looking into different film universes through them, and in "Please Don't Go" the emotional pain of a breakup causes the world to fragment and artifact around Posner like a badly-streamed video.  And every week produces a new guilded turd of similar caliber. 

Generally these days UK pop videos are fashion shows whose central themes alternate between a kind of Babestation Lite and personal affirmations that you are, in fact, okay to just be yourself, even if maybe you don't look and/or fuck like the video people.  So basically music television has become women's magazines, with all the conflicting messages about women's roles that that implies.  I'm open to the idea that young women may be in need of someone to tell them that becoming the world's most lifelike Realdoll is only one of the many things they can aspire to, of course.  I'm just not sure that message is best delivered by a writhing professional dancer with no skirt or trousers.

One style of video I have come to find especially grating is the specific claim, made over and over again, that women are in fact just as good as men and can achieve anything they want.  This was a brave sentiment in 1961; the fact that it's still in heavy rotation in 2011 would seem to imply that it hasn't really soaked in, despite the very different material conditions of first-world women these days.  These songs--Jessie J's "Do It Like A Dude" is the one in current rotation, but previously we had Alexandra Burke's "Broken Heels", a couple entries in the genre from Beyonce, and basically Pink's entire oeuvre--they appear to stem from a sense of inadequacy at not being male, a kind of "penis envy", if I may coin a phrase.  And the answer in the videoverse is to do what men do, but sexier. 

This approach misses out one of the major conceptual gains of the feminist movement, aside from how it got pretty much everyone to agree that there was some historical point at which women were getting a raw deal (currently debates tend to rage about whether we should be locating this point in the past or the present).  The gain I'm referring to is the capacity to question the gender binary.  Rather than attempting to slavishly duplicate men's lives, only with killer heels and bouncing a baby on the hip, we could use feminist intellectual tools to stand back and ask whether the mass of men have it so good today that women ought to expend their energy on catching up. 

Also of note: I am apparently so straight these days, or Jessie J's hoodie-playsuit and wacky gurning antics are so terrible, that I didn't notice that the backing dancers for her number are largely delicious-looking Afro-Carribbean butches.  J, much like Lady Gaga or myself, identifies as bisexual, so I guess I'm meant to feel some kind of solidarity.  I don't.  Also they keep mentioning that she has a heart condition.  The phrase "save your breath" springs to mind.

It's Just Noise

One thing that makes my eyes bulge in their sockets--though please bear in mind I did not go to school in the hippest part of the US, but rather the hippiest--is seeing college-age kids, who were at the time I attended college about four years younger than me, all wearing t-shirts proclaiming their love of musical artists of the 60s and 70s who are for the most part dead. 

I feel like I understand why a Boulder resident would choose strategically to wear a Bob Marley or Grateful Dead shirt.  I suppose Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin have their own rebellious, binge-drinky appeal, and professing reverence for Jimi Hendrix would certainly help justify one's decision to irritate other Native Americans with a hipster headdress.  It is a bit more opaque to me why someone would want to broadcast their love of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones (who no longer benefit from the cachet of not being the Beatles, as no one seems to remember that they once had a Blur/Oasis-style rivalry [though of course it is deeply insulting to the Rolling Stones to allow them to be compared even momentarily to Oasis]).  It strikes me as sort of like wearing a shirt announcing your enjoyment of inhaling air and exhaling somewhat more carbonated air; it's not like it's avoidable.  I'm sure even the Black Sabbath and Sex Pistols kids (who, again, may feel free to choose a band whose collective ages total under two centuries) love Helter Skelter or Happiness Is A Warm Gun or Savoy Truffle or something. 

Dead artists and the canonized living are safe to like because their meanings have become fixed; they'll never again produce anything which will be subject to critical scrutiny.  And god knows there's a broad enough range that could be expressed by a Beatles shirt to be the stiking-up point of a conversation with a stranger: so which is your favorite Beatle?  What was their best album?  What's your favorite of their songs featuring beating up women?  Would you like to experiment with some drugs with me, in case it makes us creative? 

But this is the music of our parents and grandparents.  They weren't burning up the dance floors with ragtime and the Charleston in the sixties, they were out seeing contemporary bands and screenprinting their names on really thin cotton t-shirts and wondering when the sexual revolution would reach them.  I wish keenly for a popular culture not controlled by Baby Boomers and their sensibilities, but more and more I think that we are not built for populism the way they were, and are doomed to narrowcast all the deeper parts of ourselves while our video of a cat falling off a chair gets seventy million views.

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.

not broken, just a baby

I finally got around to watching the video for Alejandro, Lady GaGa's  recent single (heretoafter referred to as Lady Gaga; I'm not made of capitals), after hearing a number of unenthusiastic reviews ("boring"; "totally derivative of Madonna").  I'm generally pro-Gaga, in the same way as I have been generally pro-Madonna: without being a big fan of her music. 

I'm rooting for Lady Gaga to produce challenging public portrayals of her sexuality, even as sinister Music Biz forces work to make these portrayals more consumable.  So in this regard Alejandro is something of a mixed bag.  While you won't see Ke$ha putting out a video in which she ties 3OH!3 to a bed and fucks their asses (if you read this over a year later, Ke$ha was a pop star who needed help finding men's genitals), there's a great deal of sexual violence in this video and almost all of it is visited upon Gaga's fragile-looking person. 

It's certainly tempting to just count up shots of Gaga being choked or bounced around by the musclemen in this video, compare it to the number of shots of her giving it to them in the ass, and render a score -- Music Videos 18 : Feminism 10 -- but this is terrible film crit practice.  Contextually, many interesting things are going on.  To bring out one example, the majority of the shots of what is delicately termed "rough sex" in porn reviews (rough on whom, exactly?) occur during a scene marked out as a wistful flashback of Gaga's late lamented love affair. 

Even if I really believed that the imagery of rape (not to mention bondage, crossdressing, blasphemy--I'm not scrutinizing these things because they just can't beat rape) that runs through this video was being allowed to pass uncritically as decontextualized aesthetic, it would be trite to attempt to insult director/photographer Steven Klein with something so bereft of the power to wound as accusations of misogyny.  No, I will attempt to insult him with accusations of unoriginality.  Sex and violence are done to death as avant-garde postures.  The power of an image to shock can only decrease as it is disseminated and consumed, and literally all of the images in this video are already available in Klein's back-catalog of photographs.

I'm also interested in being, as far as I can google, the first person to connect the video for Alejandro to the 1989 rape and torture of American nun Dianna Ortiz at the hands of the Guatemalan state military.  My evidence for this claim is slight (and I take Gaga at her word that the song itself is nothing more than a tribute to her love of gay men), but Klein has a history of referencing (and sexing up) culturally important rapes.  First, most obviously, the video depicts the gang rape of a nun by Hispanic soldiers.  The weird bowl-cut bobs worn by all the players (bar the commandant or generalissmo or whatever) resemble Ortiz' hairstyle, and the references to cigarettes in the chorus and facial burning in the final shots might be intended to call to mind the soldiers' burning Ortiz with hundreds of cigarettes.

Lastly, when an American CIA operative working with the Guatemalan military (allegedly!) while they were disappearing, raping, and murdering tens of thousands of political opponents--when this alleged operative found Ortiz, before he berated the soldiers for disappearing an American for whom there would be international outcry, before he took Ortiz from the prison where she was held and drove her to Guatemala City in his jeep, before he tried to make her promise to tell no one and to forgive her torturers because it had all been a case of mistaken identity, before she bolted from the car at a stoplight and made it to the American embassy--it was when Ortiz first heard the soldiers greeting a man with an American accent that she heard them call him by name-- "Hey, Alejandro, come and have some fun!"