Let's start with saying what needs to be said: Pitbull's song, 'Sexy Beaches' is terrible. Some of you know that I have no lost love for Rhianna's 'Birthday Cake.' 'Sexy Beaches' is worse. 'Sexy Beaches' is on a par, artistically, with a song by Paris Hilton. It sounds like washed-up Flo Rida. It sounds worse than the made-up hit single 'Drip Drop' from Empire.
It is terrible. Don't say I didn't warn you (it's so bad, I can't even get Blogspot to post it from YouTube).
But here's where it gets all Florida (there is a more detailed summary here).
1) This song was commissioned by Visit Florida, the state-sponsored tourist organization that tries to entice people to visit the Sunshine State. In what can only be viewed as a bureaucratic move, the good people at Visit Florida felt that having Pitbull sing a Florida song might entice millennials to visit. I would love to read the minutes from that meeting. My imagined version of those minutes:
Bureaucrat #1: Do you know what millennials love? Pitbull.
Bureaucrat #2: Who?
Bureaucrat #3: We're rescuing pitbulls?
2) In case you were not already aware of it, the state of Florida has some interesting laws. Some of them pertain to openness in all government dealings, also known as the Sunshine Law. This is where Pitbull courted controversy: apparently he viewed his deal with Visit Florida as a 'trade secret' and refuses to disclose the paperwork surrounding this song. Except that the contract has now been disclosed. Someone may be prosecuted. It may be Pitbull. This story got very confusing the more sources I read.
3) As a result, lawmakers may eliminate all of the money that previously went to Visit Florida from the state budget. All $74 million dollars of it. A Florida legislator is on the record with the following statement:
“This Pitbull ad called 'Sexy Beaches' has women walking around in
thongs and their chests hanging out,” [Richard] Corcoran said. “There’s just no
one in the Florida Legislature buying the argument that this was
necessary to get millennials to come to Florida.”
I have a lot of questions:
1) Will Visit Florida cease to exist? By extension, will people no longer visit Florida?
2) How are you going to have a Pitbull song without mention of 'Mr. Worldwide' (perhaps not appropriate for such a Florida-centric song) or at least a yell of 'Dale'? This song is the Pitbull equivalent of phoning it in.
3) Is this simultaneously one of the most banal and costly advertising jingles in history? I'm basing this on the assumption that Visit Florida loses its $74 million per year. So this song cost an agency $74 million, in addition to being a terrible song. Plus they paid Pitbull one million. That's $75 million for 'Sexy Beaches.' I suspect that if you put the lifetime salaries of Handel, Bach, Haydn and Mozart together and adjust for inflation, you might get one quarter of 'Sexy Beaches', tops.
4) Did no one, no one, say the words 'Sexy Beaches' out loud before signing this contract? Because the contract (yep, that links to the actual contract) stipulates that the song would be called 'Sexy Beaches' and was being released by the state tourist agency.
And lastly, one surprise twist: this is not even the worst tourist video ever made of Florida. Or even the worst tourist song. Behold!
And just in case you don't have 18 minutes to spare, the song.
Now, I know, I have talked about jet skis on this blog before, but a music video recently surfaced that is making me revisit this topic. Thanks, Internet, for making this clip readily accessible:
Previously, when I was talking about jet skis, it was in reference to what I claimed was a parody video mocking hip hop's expectations from Empire. The video in question was being made in support of Hakeem's veritable masterwork, 'Drip Drop,' and while I wasn't able to find any good clips from when they were shooting it with a green screen on a jet ski, you need to just take my word for it that this happened. There is more insight into the overall aesthetics of the 'Drip Drop' video later in the episode:
Earlier in the episode, Hakeem states that he wants to create a video that shows he is the heir apparent of Empire Records and that he feels like this message will be sent via a video filled with scantily-clad women and jet skis. I view this entire song as parody, particularly because it is so vapid (and so close to a generic Rihanna collaboration) yet so catchy. What makes it even more of parody is the fact that Hakeem thinks this image is what he needs to succeed in the family business. Meanwhile, up at Ghetto Ass Studios (which is an actual location in Empire), Hakeem's brother Jamal is recording a song from his heart, a song with meaning, a song that conveys his struggle as he attempts to distance himself from his disapproving father. Notably, it does not feature a green-screen jet ski video.
So if we can agree that Hakeem's video is demonstrating the profound shallowness of his character (and by extension, the generic hip hop song that he has just created), then what exactly are we to make of Meredith Vieira, who has taken almost all of the same tropes, only brought them to a day time talk show and therefore made them weird? First, let's identify what these tropes are:
1) Scantily clad women: a seemingly unending stream of them appears in Hakeem's video shoot. Meredith was apparently not ready to 'go there' (I feel like this was an actual note in some production meeting). So instead, she wore a t-shirt that projected the notion of a scantily-clad woman.
2) A green screen: on Hakeem's set, some random cameramen note that they expected to be in Miami filming Hakeem on a jet ski. Instead, they are stuck in New York, filming a jet ski in front of a green screen. If anything, this moment adds to the irony of Hakeem's assurance that this video will show him to be, in his own words, 'king' (also, you don't want to be king of an empire. You want to be emperor of an empire). Meredith notes that such videos should take place on the beach, but then goes to the green screen instead. This seems particularly ironic for a song entitled 'Going Down For Real' since they are getting down for fake.
3) Bling: Flo Rida and Hakeem share very similar watches. However, Flo Rida missed out on the gold chain. Instead, Meredith got the gold chain.
4) Intimations of a Strip Club: neither video is set in a strip club, although there are intimations of such. Hakeem is carefully evaluating the ladies and their various assets, which places him into the role of a consumer, much as he would be in a strip club. Furthermore, the raining gold in the backdrop turns the set into an enclosed area with low light. While Meredith is not in any way in a club, she is making it rain. While on a jet ski. With a t-shirt that projects the notion of a scantily-clad woman. I am not sure what to make of this. Also, I am not sure why you would want to make it rain on a jet ski. I don't think you're going to impress strippers with that kind of precipitation.
5) Dranks: both Hakeem and Meredith have champagne. Hakeem treats it in a more understated fashion, whereas Meredith is guzzling it down like it's the last bottle on earth. Have some decorum, Meredith.
6) A Bunch of Women Touching On the Artist: there are a number of these near the end of 'Drip Drop' touching on Hakeem. What Meredith is doing around 0:50 makes me slightly uncomfortable.
I'm not even going to talk about the fact that the two songs are not that far off in terms of style and content. You can just make of that what you will. If Flo Rida had done 'Drip Drop,' though, I have total faith that he would have been promoting it on Meredith's show. 'Going Down For Real' was featured prominently in Furious 7 during a scene steeped with overstated opulence in Abu Dhabi, although I would make a larger argument that the FF franchise basically takes hip hop tropes and pushes them to excessive extremes, much as it does with, well, everything. This is what happens when your movies co-star Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson and Vin Diesel.
In case you were curious, Wikipedia claims that the instrument used in the sample was not, in fact, an oboe.
This whole Meredith incident could be viewed as nothing more than a scene gone wrong or a tone-deaf segment (or really freaking funny because what just happened there, depending on your point of view), but I feel like Meredith's frenetic actions in it suggest that she is taking advantage of what is, for her, an 'exoticized' moment. She is placing herself in a world that is very distant to her, yet from her exhortations to 'Shake it' (and encouraging others to yell/shake the same?), she is momentarily attempting to join it.
That Meredith 'exoticized' Flo Rida's music is a bigger problem when considering who her audience is. I wasn't able to find any specific statistics about the demographic that watches her show, but from recent rumors that it is going to be canceled, some clues emerge: the network is looking for someone who draws a 'younger' and 'more multicultural' audience, which implies to me that Meredith's is primarily 25+ and white. Hip hop in general, then, is being conveyed to an audience that is not familiar with its conventions--unlike the viewers of Empire, who were more likely to know a parody when they saw it. What is the image that emerges here? This is a style that seemingly lacks deeper meaning, that can be reduced to its most overarching stereotypes; in other words, that can be summed up by a bikini t-shirt, bling, champagne and a jet ski. Even the actual video for 'Going Down For Real' is arguably more sophisticated as it features a women's basketball team facing off (I'll leave that as 'arguably,' since there is plenty of booty shaking too).
We're at a cultural moment when hip hop is being transformed into a larger means of dialogue across a broader audience. The runaway success of Empire as a prime-time soap reinvigorated by a fictional hip hop world was one sign, and I would argue that the wide-spread integration of hip hop culture into the Fast and Furious franchise is another. There is also the upcoming studio (!) film Straight Outta Compton, which (LET'S ALL HOPE) will portray the social conditions that led to NWA's album (ALLOW ME TO DREAM). In contrast--and contemporaneously--the Meredith segment represents hip hop as little more than its most basic and distancing tropes to an audience likely unfamiliar with the genre. I, for one, truly wish that Meredith had never donned that bikini t-shirt.
Kira's most recent post on Florida Georgia Line sought to delineate some of the factors that earn a group near-universal disdain, taking as her examples such disdainful groups as Nickelback and Creed. Several of the factors that Kira identified as crucial to earning this level of disdainfulness fall under the category of authenticity, or lack thereof. The idea that artists should be 'authentic' is tied larger concepts in Western culture about the imperative of originality for the genius--in other words, we value those who come up with innovative, new ideas, and we tend to see these genii as working independently, often in opposition to what is popular. In this paradigm, genius artists also tend to skew male, which is not necessarily within the theory, but was at one point linked to gender: since men could not create life without the help of women, their creative tendencies were channeled elsewhere. Hideously archaic? Yes, but this paradigm continues to govern how we talk about 'good' and 'bad' music today. The genius paradigm helps explain why the sell-out is so reviled and why the canon of art music so heavily favors men--even when discussing contemporary art music.
I bring these notions up because I want to talk today about two artists who break this paradigm, but are still subject to its strictures. One is frequently viewed as a sell-out with limited artistic value, yet her career has reshaped the world of pop music. The other is an anomaly within pop music, since she fits the concept of genius in some respects, but adheres to few of the expectations that we have of pop artists. I am talking, of course, about Britney Spears and Sia respectively. Both of these artists simultaneously meet and thwart our expectations of what a 'genius' can do, while demonstrating how complex our understanding of pop music can (and should) be.
Britney Spears
Go ahead, hate on Britney. She doesn't write her own songs. She doesn't sing her own songs in concert. She relies on auto-tune for her albums. She can't act (okay, this one may be fair). She is nothing more than a Disney star transformed into sexy, sultry pop star--so basic. And yet, I defy you to name another pop star working today who has had as many iconic moments as Brit Brit. I plan to pepper this post with random ones.
What Britney can do--and can do better than almost anyone else in the biz--is perform. And that is what she does best. She can do so in lives shows, as seen above, and she is famous for having done so at award shows:
I saw a documentary once where it was revealed that actually, Brit Brit is afraid of snakes.
I saw this when it aired. And I remember where I was. It was Notable.
She is also justly famous for iconic video moments. Many, many video moments:
Of all the songs above, perhaps 'Circus' best sums up what Britney does best. All eyes do fall on her in the center of the ring and we keep watching for what she will do. The lyrics 'Don't just stand there watching me, follow me,' with their slight syncopation, make clear that not only are we 'gazing' at her, but that she relishes the attention. Her songs are heavily produced to be successful, but I think the 'it' factor that has kept Britney relevant is precisely her:
I don't care how many 'handlers' Britney needed around her to make these moments happen. The end result is that she was the one who delivered (to make a football analogy here, this is like saying that Tom Brady is a 'system quarterback,' which is all well and good, but he is still Tom Freaking Brady, and he still has more Superbowl rings than any other active QB and LEAVE TOM BRADY ALONE). She is a consummate performer. Note that I did not say 'singer,' because I don't think that she is necessarily a consummate singer; of pop stars working today, there are better examples on a technical level, such as Lady Gaga and Beyoncé. However, detracting from her artistry for not creating her own material has always struck me as odd. There is no question in my mind that the 'creative genius' paradigm is afoot whenever that happens. To say that Britney is an inferior artist because she doesn't perform her own material is bizarre. It's like saying that Meryl Streep is somehow a bad actress because she reads other people's words.
Repeatedly bringing such striking performances to life, that is a skill. And it is one at which Britney reigns supreme.
A reminder to choose what you make iconic carefully.
Sia
Readers of SGS, I have a confession to make: in late 2012, I pretty much stopped listening to pop music. Shocking, I know. My primary mode of consumption was the radio, but I started noticing more and more that what was on was just....well.....bad. Everything sounded either like Rihanna's 'Birthday Cake' (NOT GOOD) or like Lil Wayne rambling over some slow jam. Mostly, it was a morass of sameness, badness, and channel-change-inducing ennui. Instead, I went to podcasts, and I pretty much never went back. Yes, I felt very old when this happened.
However, there were a few exceptions (I will admit to Drake's 'The Motto' being one of them. Don't hate. Canadian solidarity, man). And a few others that I didn't absolutely hate:
These songs are not completely terrible, unlike Rihanna's 'Birthday Cake'
Connoisseurs of pop music have already noticed the common denominator here. All three songs are, in some way, the work of Sia: she wrote the lyrics to 'Diamonds; and she both performed the vocals for and wrote the lyrics to 'Wild Ones' and 'Titanium.' Those who are not connoisseurs may be asking who exactly Sia is. That is a great question. It is extremely notable that she does not feature in either video for which she provides vocals, which is highly unusual for a 'pop' artist. In the video, many people lip synch along with the chorus in 'Wild Ones,' making it unclear who the actual singer might be, but quite clear that it is none of the people lip synching (also, can I take a moment here and point out how unintentionally funny 'Girl With Arms Up In Bandeau' is?). Perhaps she should be better viewed as one of those background singers, like Dido to Eminem in 'Stan' or Ke$sha to Flo Rida in 'Right Round.' But that view misrepresents Sia's contribution: she is not only a singer, she is also a songwriter and has contributed to a number of hits (in fact, Sia's version of 'Titanium' was originally meant for Katy Perry). Furthermore, it is a bit hard to say that she is the 'background' singer in 'Titanium,' even though the primary song credit goes to David Guetta, who is a DJ.
Sia now has her first credited major hit with 'Chandelier.' Even in this video, though, she is wholly absent. Instead, dancer Maddie Ziegler dances in a frenetic manner, likely representing the inner torment felt by the singer while she is 'swinging from the chandelier' and barely hanging on while partying:
If you haven't seen the SNL parody yet, take a moment and do that. Also, there is something to be said here about performance, especially at the end when the fact that this is a performance becomes clear when Ziegler bows, but I'll leave that for you to ponder.
Sia conforms in many ways to the genius paradigm (and I will argue that because I think that 'Chandelier' is a genius way of representing the tension that often exists between those who party it up and their motivations...it's a broader metaphor). She creates her own art. She performs her own art. Yet she is not, in my view, a pop star. One of the most preeminent requirements in pop--as Britney teaches us--is creating notable performances. Maddie Zielger does this in the 'Chandelier' video, but Sia remains absent. In fact, when she performed on Dancing with the Stars, Sia was 'hidden' in favor of the dancers:
What the cases of Sia and Britney demonstrate is that an understanding of pop music through the lens of the genius paradigm is inherently flawed (arguably, evaluating any type of work through the genius paradigm is flawed). There are too many other factors that contribute to a notable and noteworthy pop experience, perhaps most importantly performance. To subject these stars to the same critical tropes makes no sense. Instead, we should recognize that pop depends on a wider scope of people for its success. We are accustomed to the idea that the performer should be equated with the artist, but I am suggesting that Sia and Britney demonstrate to us that these roles can be divided. Both make great art, but in very different ways.
