One of these days, I keep telling myself, I’m going to write a blog post so riveting that it is going to cause people to lose sleep. People are going to stay up late into the night, compulsively hitting the F5 key, just hoping that somehow, some way the force of my insight will penetrate their skull a little more deeply.
Until then, I offer you this:
Rihanna makes me fidgety. I feel something for her that could either be described as intense romantic infatuation or perplexed dread. Or maybe intense romantic dread.
Background: I know almost nothing about Rihanna. I think I have heard 5 of her songs, whichever ones are played on hit radio. I gave her Wikipedia page a 90 second browse, and have seen her photo a few places, but doubt I’d succeed in picking her out of a lineup of hot black chicks.
Background, part II: I wear fleece. I listen to public radio. I play tennis. I am technically an economist. I listen to folk music. If you made me name my favorite musicians, I’d probably say Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and Ray LaMontange, in that order, the trifecta of weird, hairy, funny-sounding dudes who appeal to fleece-wearing, tennis-playing audiences.
Point being that Rihanna is not exactly in what I would consider my strike zone.
But then can you please explain to me why I have been listening to “What’s My Name” and “Only Girl” on repeat? I would be really embarrassed to admit that if I wasn’t already so embarrassed by my upper-middle-class-whitie-ness. Instead, I take this to be a bright sign, like maybe there is a soulful, sensual side of JW hidden beneath a layer of fleece. (Doubtful.)
I’m pretty sure that if I fished for long enough I could find something profound to say about Rihanna, something about how in some songs she immaculately adheres to the DFW Theory of Aesthetics whereby her notes emit a genuine sensuality that feels so damn cherry-ringing true while in other songs she is clearly making a cheap play to the 12 year old mp3-buying segment by superficially offering cheers to the freakin weekend, as if she in her millionaire music-industry status has a freakin weekend that she eagerly anticipates. (I won’t drink to that.)
But now I’m sounding all anti-commercial-y and overanalytical and just lame. Truly, the commercial part doesn’t really bother me. I find it interesting. It’s interesting, for example, that Britney Spears’s musical career has survived since my 8th grade crush. I imagine that has a little to do with her musical talents and a lot to do with the fact that she has established herself as a brand with which the hit music industry can sell music.1,1a
Back to Rihanna. It would be too simple to say that I “like” Rihanna, but “infatuated” seems fair. What creeps me out is that I’m not really sure what I’m infatuated with. #1, as I’ve already established, I know almost nothing about her, including what she looks like. I am infatuated, then, with a voice superimposed over some electronic snare drums.
Do you know how bird researchers collect bird semen? (I promise this is sort of related; give me a minute.) They take a stuffed dead female bird and make her strike a pose in such a way that the males come and do their thing, no questions asked. Voila, bird semen on a dead bird’s backside, ready to be swabbed, petri-dished, and put in some university lab’s freezer.
My infatuation with Rihanna sort of feels like that. Here is the analogous cast of characters:
Dead bird: Rihanna
Researchers: Hit Music Industry
Hopeless horny male bird with a bad case of existential angst: JW
I could explain, but I hope I don’t need to.
This is a very unsettling realization, that my infatuation could be so easily earned by just positioning the female in a certain way.
And what must the folks in the music industry (“the researchers”) be thinking? How much of a downer must that be if your job is to strategically position females in order to maximize metaphorical semen intake? What must you think of the human species – of yourself and your brother and your husband – if you spend your 9-5’s watching males flutter in and drop their pants all because you got Rihanna to enunciate the word “whisper” in a certain way?
I want our (my) dignity back.
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1In college, I interned for a couple of years at a radio market research company, so I got more than a peek into the hit radio sausage factory. You could say I had a cubicle in the sausage factory. I didn’t see anything terribly gruesome2 – it was mostly what you would expect w/r/t playlist creation based on a lowest common denominator effect, where the songs that statistically offend the least number of people win. But it seems likely that there was/is a lot of gruesomeness taking place out of my sight, e.g. between the “labels” and the stations. In other words, I don’t imagine that our careful research to determine which songs offended the least was the only or maybe even one of the primary factors determining playlists.
1aAnd “brand,” I’m pretty sure, matters (to me). For instance, I liked Katy Perry’s song “You Make Me Feel” quite a lot until I learned that it actually wasn’t Katy Perry’s song, and that instead it was some random band called Cobra Starship. Um, what? And I was similarly turned off/on when I learned that Ke$ha co-wrote Britney Spears’s “Till the World Ends.”
2That’s actually not true. I saw some pretty gruesome things, just not related to the music industry, exactly. The most gruesome thing I saw was people who were genuinely huge music fans – people who would jump in front of a train for a ticket to a Radiohead or Supergrass concert – working at this radio market research company because of their music passion, but then having to turn around and tell the radio execs to play more Nickelback. That may sound funny, but it was legitimately hard for me to be around, and to this day I have a fierce distaste for Nickelback, the kind of innards-churning distaste that no inoffensive melody should be able to induce.
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