This may be confusing to you since you don't exist yet. One day you will. Once you've learned enough English to work at McDonald's or blog about politics, you'll probably understand a little bit of the music you hear. You might stumble across the song Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke. Hopefully, this travesty of a song will have been banned by then, but it looks like these namby pamby liberals with their freedom of speech aren't going anywhere.
This song has tarnished the good name of American Pop Music and, I'm afraid, has taken us to a place as a nation we can't come back from. You'll say, Dad, explicitly treating women like sexual objects in song is nothing new: Big Joe Turner released Rebecca in 1944. First, Son, I would say Jazz doesn't count. Second, I would say even if it does, there are some subtle distinctions and I'm going to outline them here. In this fake letter I'm posting on the internet.
Robin Thicke recently performed this song while being the direct object of twerking on a recent awards show. And while he had no control over Mylie Cyrus' impromptu shenanigans, he was a married man singing a sex song, which is probably wildly misleading to people considering marriage. Also, Mylie Cyrus looks underage, so that makes it even worse. Granted, when a 23 year old John Lennon wrote and sang, "she was just seventeen if you know what I mean," he had already married Cynthia Powell after knocking her up. Here's the difference. A 36 year old man who looks like a skinny Russell Crowe: inappropriate. A 23 year old high school teacher: inappropriate. A 23 year old musician: what father of a 17 year old girl wouldn't be pleased?
What does the father have to do with it? Well, if you're going to treat a woman as a sexual object, it's important to take her previous owner into account and that's where Robin Thicke falls short. You can only do what you feel if her daddy is poor. If her daddy is rich, however, you should probably take her out for a meal first.
And let's face it. It's not so much the implicit glorification of infidelity, which has always been OK: Elvis sang Long Tall Sally in 1956. The difference you should note is that Mylie Cyrus is neither "built sweet" nor does she "have everything Uncle John needs."
Robin Thicke sings "you're an animal, baby," which strips away her agency and her intelligence. It is never OK to imply that a woman isn't a person. When the Beach Boys sing that they "dig a French bikini on Hawaiian island dolls," they're not talking about girls as though they were mindless bodies only valuable for their aesthetic attributes. It's a well known fact the Beach Boys actually collected dolls. Some animals are wild, but you shouldn't confuse this with The Troggs' Wild Thing, which is neither about women nor sex. It's a pastoral poem affirming the grooviness of the natural world. James Brown's Sex Machine isn't implying that woman was created for only one purpose. If you go back and listen carefully to the lyrics, he's clearly talking about erectile dysfunction. And that's OK.
Also, when Tom Jones sings What's New, Pussycat... come to think of it, Son, I don't want you listening to Tom Jones either.
One of the most disturbing aspects of all this is the public nature of this explicit sexuality. Twerking on a stage to a song about flirting in a club. The Drifters were gentlemen enough to make love under the boardwalk, hidden from the eyes of the people walking above. Tommy James hid what he was doing. He waited until he thought they were alone now before tumbling to the ground wrapped in arms.
The worst part of this song is the use of the B-word to describe a woman. I'm not even going to type it in his fake letter on the internet. Son, if you're ever confused about whether the B-word is appropriate as a lyric, follow this chart.
Performers who can use the B-word
- Mick Jagger
- Johnny Cash
- Miles Davis
- Woody Guthrie
- Elton John
- Robin Thicke
No comments:
Post a Comment