Monthly Archive for May, 2006

From the indescribably awful “When You’re Mad” video: Ne-Yo prepares to sex one of his several mad girlfriends.

Let us now fix our gaze upon the torrid world of cutting-edge Top-40 teen pop music.

I am not precisely a music critic, but several of my acquaintances are, and I once got a piece published in which I expostulated that bombastic classical music should never be played in restaurants where raw oysters are served because it alarms the oysters, causing them to die agitated deaths, which agitation ruins the post-mortem taste.

I have also danced about architecture. So rest assured that I am thoroughly credentialed in this quarter. Not that I’m actually going to do any music criticking.

I refer your attention to the following stanza of clumsy, bonerized drivel excerpted from a hit R&B song in which the narrator enlarges on one of the tiredest and misogynist-est themes in popular music (“you’re beautiful when you’re angry”).

baby don’t think i don’t take you seriously
but i just can’t help the fact
your attitude excites me (so exciting)
and you know ain’t nothing better
than when we get mad together and have angry sex
oh, i blow you out then we forget what we was mad about, oh

[Complete lyrics here. iTunes snippet here. Thirty seconds of awful video here.]

These compelling lines gush forth from the stunningly derivative, popular, semi-literate dreamboat singer Ne-Yo. I have not seen young Ne-Yo perform, but if he isn’t one of those vapid man-boys who repetitively taps his hairless chest with his fingertips to indicate that his heart is bursting with passion for all his special laydees, I’ll eat a Homophobe Meat Fetish Pie at TGI Friday’s and afterward attend a special Terri Schiavo service at a Baptist megachurch. Which would be quite a hardship for me, because they station a guy at the door of those things to ensure that all female supplicants are encrusted, as Jesus ordered, in at least a half an inch of Maybelline products, and then they X-ray your uterus to check its serial number against their database of fallen women (supplied to them by the NSA).

They do this at the megachurches, too.

Before addressing the patriarchal domination fetish inherent in the aforementioned sexy-anger theme, I propose to present all the proof required by any spinster aesthete that (a) grammar is what separates us from the invertebrates and (b) banality in media, e.g. Ne-Yo, is the gateway drug to imbecility, e.g. the anonymous half-wit who writes the following bio:

At the tender age of twenty-two, the lyrical and musical talent that Ne-Yo posses [sic] are far beyond his years. [...] Ne-Yo is taking the music industry by storm, as he graces and challenges popular music with his writing & vocal talents. Much more than today’s male singer, Ne-Yo is a rare artist; expressing creativity thru drawings, paintings, martial arts and song. He is distinguished by youthful energy with in-depth lyrics that touch the soul.

All band bios are physically painful to read, but this writer has packed into the boilerplate such hackneyed, meaningless crap, such gruesomely butchered syntax, and such agonizing unintelligibility with so comprehensive a Stepfordish torpor that I cannot help but wish upon him—if not a disagreeable death—then at least a crummy summer.

But back to the you-so-sexy-when-you-mad-I-just-gotta-fuck-you leitmotiv. Ne-Yo, whose “tenderness” I am inclined to dispute, is parroting a pervy narrative convention which, since the dawn of pervy narrative conventions, has sought to invalidate legitimate female outrage by ridiculing it, minimizing it, and recasting it as a sex behavior.

Ne-Yo’s narrator tells his irate receptacle that he takes her seriously, but we know this is a horndog lie, because does he say, “What’s bothering you, honey? Let me get you a glass of sherry and rub your feet while you tell me all about it.”? No. Instead, he swiftly and dismissively informs her that she’s “the cutest thing” and “so damn sexy” when she’s mad, and that her “attitude” is wholly responsible for the inevitable blue-veined swaybacked throbber with which he has no choice but to “blow [her] out” during the “angry sex.” He also admits to a preference for this scenario. What modern girl could resist the winning combination of infantilization, appeals to her vanity, and rape? He just fucks her pain away, I guess.

Look, I get that these are pop lyrics, and as such cannot be held to any kind of standard whatsoever, but nevertheless the cold clammy hand of patriarchy tries to high-five me whenever I think about little girls internalizing the you-are-nothing-but-pussy dogma promulgated by crap like this Ne-Yo tune.

Likewise, I always want to puke when this scene shows up in the movie I’m watching, which it almost always does, which is why I keep a bucket and some Lysol next to the lime green recliner. With slight variations, the tableau is a staple of romantic comedy and melodrama alike: Dude commits some assholic irresponsible act. Woman gets pissed off. Dude trivializes woman’s legitimate anger by telling her she’s hot when she’s pissed. He grabs her by the wrists. Woman struggles a bit, whines, “let me go, you’re hurting me” (this line appears verbatim in every such script ever written), and immediately submits to forcible advances of dude, whose inclination to rape her she suddenly finds irresistible. If it’s a comedy, they get married. If it’s a drama, dude ditches the dirty ho. But one thing never happens. The woman never maces the asshole, walks out, and moves to Alaska to start her own lesbian whale-watching business.

The entriplified bogus message of the you’re-beautiful-when-you’re-angry theme:

• All female behavior is seductive behavior.
• Fucking is always more important than any piddling intellectual or philosophical point an otherwise properly sexed-up female might raise.
• Females are always turned on by physical force, especially if you tell them they’re pretty.

[Gracias, AAG]

Any comment containing an ellipsis will be held henceforth in the moderation queue pending review of the aesthetic exigency of the construction’s application (in each case, not in general).

Coming soon: what’s to be done with the Anti-Capitalites?

I can’t resist this Onion bit on an anti-abortion pill that “terminat[es] pregnant women while leaving their unborn children unharmed.”

[Thanks, Anna B]

Oprah releases choke-hold on tearful ex-prostitute after brainwashing is complete.

I just can’t stop being grossed out by Oprah.

The other day she did a show called “The Life of a Young Prostitute” or something like that. Lots of “very candid interviews” with ex-whores talking about their appalling lives, and of course Oprah making sure the women titillated her whitebread audience just enough with stories about “guys who like feet” and BDSM. And of course, the requisite “shocking footage.” Then she had some talking head chick “go undercover” at a prostitutey truckstop to film a sting operation. The talking head chick kept calling the women “suspects.”

What about the pornsick fucktards who buy the women, or the lowlife maggots who traffick’em? Why no “sting operation” where the talking head chick photographs johns and plasters their mugs all over national television?

Well, since shocking footage of exploited women (or, as Godly Oprah calls them, women who have “fallen from grace”) is a lot more gripping than almost anything, the talking head chick only devoted about two minutes to chatting with some prick who was doing 8 years for pimping teenage girls. Why, asked the talking head chick, suddenly stricken with a great notion, did the pimp think it was OK to sell women? He guessed he didn’t know, unless, well, maybe it was money. Brilliant stuff!

Back at Oprah HQ, with his stunningly ugly picture as a backdrop, Oprah’s jocular comment was that this fat bald warty white guy sure didn’t look like a pimp to her. Pimps always wear pink suits! Ha! She flapped her 3″ leopard-print Manolos in the air.

But I must tell you about the creepiest part! When the final prostitute, tear-stained and pathetic, finished telling her horrible tale of drugs and oppression, Oprah suddenly developed a lustrous golden halo, grabbed the woman by the head like some wacked-out Jim Jones character, got up in her face, and insisted that God had great plans for her.

“I want you to say it. Say, ‘I am not all used up!’” she ordered. The woman, used to being bitchslapped, asseded to her Svengali’s wishes. But it just wasn’t good enough. Oprah made her say it louder. I can’t HEAR you, crack-ho! Mercifully, I nodded off before Oprah could reward the poor woman’s compliance with a free 6-week hitch at Hazelden, or a new Buick.

I could maybe cut old high-heeled, lyin’-author-lovin’ Oprah some slack, though. Why? Come back in time with me now as we revisit South St. Louis in the year nineteen-eighty-something. I was sitting in my kitchen listening to the relentless, demoralizing thuds of books bombarding my windows. The bombardier was my insane abusive alcoholic boyfriend. I’d really steamed him this time, boy, by criticizing some insane abusive alcoholic thing he’d done, such as smashing in my front door in order to menace me with a butcher knife because I’d gone out for drinks with a friend, thus proving that I was an unfaithful cunt who didn’t appreciate his undying love for me.

The books he had chosen as missiles to express this wonderful undying love—you’ll enjoy this—were the prized self-help library he always carried around to authenticate his claim that, since joining AA, he’d become a great fucking award-winning sensitive peach of a guy. That dude just loved AA, probably because it did all his thinking for him, and the other drunks gave him what he stupidly believed was “unconditional love,” and he could excuse all his asshole behavior by saying, “but I’m in AA,” and after a while he they gave him his own acolyte to boss around. He talked about it incessantly, referring to it as “The Program,” which gave me the creeps. I actually went to a meeting with him once. I never saw so many deluded cult-smacked assholes in my life. I fled screaming. I have since learned that my instincts were correct; AA is a fucking bogus con. But that’s another post.

Meanwhile, back in my kitchen in the 80’s, as the biblioclasm continued unflagging, I happened to hear Oprah’s dulcet tones on the TV in the next room. She was still Fat Oprah back then, not yet the Voice of God, so she was sensibly advising some woman “Dump him, girl!” rather than menacing her with old-tyme religion. Her audience erupted in supportive sisterly applause as Anne Wilson Schaef’s Co-Dependence smashed through my window.

Whereupon a celestial choir began singing “aahh” and a brilliant light shone down and lo I did say unto myself, “Dump him? Brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that?”

So I called the cops, and that was the end of that asshole. Thanks, Oprah! A few years later I heard he’d relapsed after working his way up the AA hierarchy to Asshole-Suck-Up-In-Chief or something.

Anyway, I can maybe credit Oprah with being the right disembodied voice of pop-psychological reason at the right time, perhaps hastening the long-overdue cure of my Stockholm syndrome. Although I wish it had been Jerry Stiller screaming “Serenity Now!”

I’ll be off spinster aunting all day today, so in the meantime, please enjoy this uplifting news from Liberia, where aid workers are trading food for sex from starving little girls. So are UN peacekeeping soldiers, government officials, and teachers. You may revel particularly in this mind-blowing remark from a Save The Children report.

“Sex with underage girls by humanitarian workers continues openly,” the report stated. Employees of non-governmental organisations “are carrying out awareness on sexual exploitation, HIV and Aids,” one camp resident said, “but during the night hours they are the same people running after these 12-year-old girls.”

Of course this shit is nothing new. The price of survival in cultures dominated by male supremacy is always human dignity. It happens wherever there are helpful male authority figures lording it over the traumatized downtrodden. Here in the States, for example, a Georgia judge was recently arrested for trying to get a couple of teenage girls drunk. Raping children is the time-honored right of patriarchy enthusiasts the world over.