Prominent liberal blogger and frequent OTI podcast guest Amanda Marcotte had an interesting piece up the other day at Pandagon about Beyoncé’s new single “Run The World (Girls).” As she explains, the song, rather than actually celebrating female strength, suggests that women run things behind the scenes “by being very persuasive with [their] vaginas.” It’s an appallingly sexist and demonstrably false idea, of course, but a very ancient and persistent one, and one which, as Marcotte suggests, has been used to argue against granting women actual power. Take a look, it’s well worth reading. And then take a look/listen at the song.
One could perhaps defend the song through a close reading of the lyrics, since Beyoncé does specifically give shout outs to “college grads,” women who are “on [their] grind” (i.e. working hard), and women who are “smart enough to make these millions, strong enough to bear the children, and then get back to business.” But this defense doesn’t hold water, because the lyrics also say that “My persuasion/ can build a nation/ Endless power/ The love, we can devour/ you’ll do anything for me.” The word “devour” in particular raises a red flag, as this is exactly the kind of language that flat-out misogynists tend to use in their version of the “girls run the world” argument. I would not say that Beyoncé is heading down that road, exactly… but I would say that she’s ended up in pretty much the same territory as James Brown’s “It’s a man’s, man’s, man’s man’s world,” which is not exactly a powerful feminist text.
Then again. James Brown never gave a shout out to all the college grads. Since both sets of lyrics do exist, would it be possible to read the song as supporting both of these models, as embracing actual female strength in addition to the merely “feminine” “strength” that translates into a capitalization on masculine weakness?
Not really. And this, actually, is why I’m interested in this song, or at least why I’m interested enough to write about it. Why choose this set of lyrics, rather than the line about college, as the “real” meaning of the song? As my contributions to this series have already demonstrated, I think, I’ve never been very comfortable with the idea that the meaning of pop music lies in its lyrics. Here we have a case where the lyrics are ambiguous, and perhaps flatly contradictory. Which means that the meaning, such as it is, lies elsewhere.
The second element inflecting the song’s meaning has to do with the culture into which the song has been released. When we listen to a song, we don’t just hear the song. We also hear all the other songs around it: songs it sounds like, songs it reminds us of, other songs by the same artists, other songs that are notably different from this song, etc. etc. We also hear, or at least understand, the specific role that this kind of music, and this particular artist, plays in our society. It would not quite be true to say that without this context, the song would be meaningless… if the earth gets 2012ed, and for some reason all that survives is this video, alien archaeologists who found it two million years later would still get something out of it. But the aspects of the song that do depend on context are at least as powerful — if not as durable! — as the “intrinsic” properties of the song itself. And one of these has to do with the understanding of gender roles that the song’s putative audience is going to bring to the table. Thus: if we all really believed that girls ran the world, no one would make a shout-along anthem about how girls run the world. It’s intended as a counterfactual. It has to be. There are a few different flavors this could take, though:
1) The informational: Although y’all don’t realize it, women actually are running the world. (The video here would need to show people like, I dunno, Golda Meir, Benazir Bhutto, Hillary Clinton, a crowd of Egyptian women facing down police in Tahrir square, and so on. Do note that it doesn’t.)
2) The aspirational: women can and should run the world, even though we know they don’t, so get out there and man defend the barricades! Fight the power! Assorted slogans! (I mock only out of habit, here. This is an important sentiment, and has inspired some fantastic music over the years.)
3) The gnostic: Like number one, this is about informing the audience of a truth they are not aware of. But rather than pointing out that “hey, despite what received wisdom might suggest, women play a very important role in the governance of society,” it’s making the claim that “run the world” has a SECRET meaning which is not the same as the meaning you are probably thinking of. Just like the meek don’t get to actually inherit the earth. In this case, running the world involves snaring the actual world leaders (all male, of course) in a web of dark and baleful vaginomancy.
Like I said, it wouldn’t be impossible to hear this song as informational or aspirational. But it would be difficult. It’s not confrontational enough for the second, and it doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty enough for the first. Being a college graduate doesn’t make you a world-runner. Buying expensive clothes on credit doesn’t either. (And yes, that is one of the groups of women she salutes: “all my girls up in the club rocking the latest/ who buy it for themselves and get more money later.”) Even making “these millions” doesn’t really qualify: millions are nice to have, I’m sure, but they don’t put you in Soros or Koch territory. Plus it kind of sabotages Beyoncé’s bid for solidarity with women who aren’t multi-platinum recording artists. Girls run the world because they are all millionaires? Please.
As a result, there’s a pretty strong tendency to hear the song’s message of “female empowerment” gnostically: girls run the world, yes, but not in a way that has anything to do with, like, running the world. Even without the rest of the lyrics, the chant “Who run the world? Girls!” has, to my ear, an implied tag of “…but not really.” I assume right off the bat that the song must be making a more complicated point, because the alternative is that it’s desperately naive. To a certain degree I am twisting the meaning of the song by hearing it this way. But my point is that this kind of twisting is something that we all do all the time anyway. It’s entirely possible that in ten years (or even two months) the song will be taken up as a feminist rallying cry by people who ignore the very parts of the song that I’m focusing on… at which point the meaning of the song will change. And that would be fine. Even great. But I’m pretty sure we’re not there yet. Look, I know that there are many women engaged in the prosaic day-to-day business of running the world (to the extent that the world is, in fact, run). I’m sure all of my friends know it too. I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who doesn’t know it. And yet my idea of the common-sense understanding of gender — not my own idea of gender, but the fantastical one that I project into the minds of Real ‘Muricans, or whatever — suggests that the song could not have been meant in that way. And this in turn shapes my experience of the song. It would be quite a different matter if the song were about a different group: consider a song called — yikes! — “Run the World (Jews).” That would go over differently, is all that I’m saying. And the difference lies not so much in how we perceive these groups, but rather in our sense of how these groups are generally perceived by others.
Does this mean it would be impossible to write a song that is informationally or aspirationally about women running the world? Not at all — but you’d have to make an effort to prevent its being misunderstood. And this song doesn’t.
Then there’s the music. Boy, this beat is crazy.
The most interesting and enjoyable thing about “Run the World” is how off-kilter it sounds. It’s a very, very uneasy blend of Beyoncé’s typical R&B style with a much more raw and off-putting sound sampled from the dancehall inflected avant-house of Major Lazer’s “Pon de Floor.” (Embedding is disabled, unfortunately, so click here to start it playing, and then come back and read.) You could see the aggressive, avant-garde stuff as representing actual female strength, if you wanted to, and the more R&B tinged elements as representing “femininity.” Notably, the prechorus — that’s the “my persuasion/ can build a nation” part, the most lyrically problematic section — cuts out the militaristic drum beat and the squealing monosynths in favor of deluxe R&B production, sweetened backing vocals, and the faintly exotic (and classically “weak” and “decorative”) iv-I chord progression, all of which depicts a seducer-destroyer feminine of the Delilah/Salome model about as strongly as it’s possible to do in purely musical terms. Just like the repetition in the poetic form highlights those lyrics, they’re the ones that are most strongly marked as “different” in the music, which again tends to give them a privileged status.
But let’s take a step back for a minute and consider “Pon de Floor,” because even on its own this music is hella problematic. You watched the video, right? Do you – uh. Do you notice anything a little, uh, questionable about the song? Hang on, let me put it in perspective. Here’s a picture of the musicians behind Major Lazer,
and here’s a picture of the director of the video.
Do you see the problem now?
This isn’t really a white/black thing. I’m sure there are at least a couple of white guys who look pretty much like Diplo and Switch that are totally ensconced in the Jamaican music scene. But these are not those guys. Diplo is an American, Switch is British, and both of them have made their careers out of appropriating and remixing music from other (poorer) countries. This in itself is not a terrible thing: I believe that these musicians do have a real affection for, and a real understanding of, the music that they’re drawing from, and it would be a sad world if we couldn’t be inspired by the art of other cultures. But I am less convinced that most of their fans responded to this song by trying to learn more about actual dancehall music. By the same token, I don’t think that Eric Wareheim is really trying to insult Jamaica here, as the combination of infantile sexuality and self-consciously godawful green-screen effects is pretty much his stock in trade. But I’m pretty sure that for most of the people who watched this video, the takeaway is that Jamaican music and dancing — and by extension, Jamaican people — are primitive and overly sexualized. And really, really weird. (And some of this comes through in Beyoncé’s use of the sample too — not the primitive sex part, which is more a function of the video, but definitely the weirdness and ethnic otherness. Check out her pronunciation of “boy,” if you have any doubts.)
And this misses a lot of nuance. Check out the video for Tony Matterhorn’s “Dutty Wine.”
This is similar in a lot of ways. Again, you could walk away thinking that it’s all about sublimated sex, what with the men judging the dance contest and all. But it would be very hard for the typical American listener/viewer to walk away from this thinking that it’s just weird and sexual, the way that they do from Major Lazer. You know in this case that there are things going on that you don’t quite understand. And although the dancing is obviously sexual, it also clearly has a lot to do with competition, and even more than that it seems to be about skill, control, and physical mastery. Now, the dutty wine is a relatively restrained dance compared to “daggering,” which is the stuff on display in the “Pon de Floor” video. But here’s the thing: even daggering is never really all about sex. Go onto youtube and search for it if you like. One thing you’ll notice is that Wareheim isn’t really exaggerating it all that much: moves like jumping off of a high perch and landing on your partner’s pelvis are actually done. This looks sexual. But it also looks freaking hard to do, once you realize that it’s not a wire stunt or anything. The dichotomy is elegantly captured by wikipedia’s description of the dance, which as of this writing defines it as “an artistic form of dance originating from the Caribbean which incorporates wrestling and other forms of frantic movement,” but also claims — and I’m just guessing that this might have been written by another editor — that “the penis is used in a dagger like fashion to repeatedly stab at the vagina in violent and plundering manner.” Even in Jamaica, people tend to forget the artistic element: daggering has been the subject of a moral panic which claims, among other things, that it’s all demeaning to women, and that men have been injuring their penises by trying to perform daggering-type moves during actual sexual intercourse. And it needs to be said that even within Jamaica, this is NOT how people typically dance. It’s a very limited subculture within the broader music scene, associated with the roughest (and, I’m guessing, poorest) elements of society… that is, with people for whom upsetting social norms, even if it’s by miming violent sex on the dancefloor, is probably an empowering gesture. As for the demeaning to women aspect — certainly that’s the case for some of it. Certainly that’s the idea you’d get from what’s on display in the Major Lazer video. But check out this performance by dancehall queen Mad Michelle.
The sexual element is still there. But there are many, many points where skill, strength, and control take center stage. That jumping business at the beginning? It’s an astonishing display of physicality, but where’s the sex appeal there? And then listen to Lady Saw’s “Chat to Mi Back”
This one is a little more ambiguous. The dancing on display is more straightforwardly sexual, and the lyrics include a line where the singer boasts about how much her man loves/wants her. But most of the song is about conflict between women, and the dancing is meant to be an extension of the argument. Basically, Lady Saw claims that when she hears women talking trash, she just spins around and shakes her ass at them, demonstrating demonstrating through her skill (and physical fitness/sexiness, I guess) that her opponents criticism is groundless. Okay, so I just read that sentence back to myself and I sound like the world’s most pedantic white guy, but I don’t really know how else to explain it: that is what’s going on. Dance, then, is politics carried out by other means. The sex doesn’t go away — in any case where you have women dancing for an even partially male audience, objectification is going to be an issue — but it’s not the only thing. And again, the balance can shift over time. The dignified and sedate art of classical ballet used to be about as respectable as pole dancing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBmMU_iwe6U
This brings us back to Beyoncé. Because I think that it’s in the video, and the dance, that the clearest expression of this song’s meaning can be found. There are three basic sections here, not counting the ripped-from-The-Postman introduction. The first, lasting right about up to the first appearance of the pre-chorus at 2:07, has Beyoncé dressed in costumes that are primarily weird, doing dance steps that are primarily aggressive. Check out that shoulder thing she does right at the beginning: where’s the sex appeal there? I mean, it’s not altogether absent. Beyoncé remains Beyoncé — if she wanted to avoid appealing to the male prurient interest, her costuming department would have to try a little harder. But it’s pretty severely attenuated. Beyond that, a lot of the choreography in this section involves what are called “isolations,” where you move one body part while keeping the rest stationary or vise-versa. It’s my understanding from talking to people who really do know how to dance that these are kind of like magic tricks — once you have the knack of it, it’s not really all that hard. But the fact remains that to the uninitiated, these do seem magical: the mastery and control aspect of the dance, never entirely absent, is here the absolute point. Towards the end of this section, things get a little more sexual (as she crawls around on the ground), but never exclusively so.
The second section, which lasts up to about 3:33, is all about sex. Beyoncé’s ditched her Mad Max outfits for a slinky dress, she spends a lot of time on all fours, and even more shaking her pelvis. It’s nothing like as excessive as the belly dance routine from “Baby Boy” (incidentally her last major foray into the world of dancehall, from what I recall), but it’s aimed in that direction.
The final section seems to want to have it both ways. Beyoncé’s dress is if anything slinkier, and that slash across the cleavage probably required a fair amount of double sided tape. The choreography, though, has all these powerful looking stomping motions… she’s dressed sexy, but she’s not necessarily dancing sexy. It could be argued, just maybe, that this is going for the both/and interpretation I suggested for the lyrics…
Until, that is, you consider the men’s reaction. If they started dancing along, like the two male backup dancers in the first segment, that would mean one thing. If they broke ranks and ran screaming for the hills, pursued by Beyoncé’s attack hyenas, that would mean another thing. What they actually do, though, is stare in turgid fascination. And that pretty severely undercuts the notion that the women in Beyoncé’s army are meant to serve as anything other than objects for male fascination. At best, we could say that the song (and the video) suggest that women can do things like go to college, make lots of money and run a post-apocalyptic paramilitary group without losing their inherent hawtness. That is a good message, probably, as far as it goes. I’m all for shifting the standard of female attractiveness away from the June Cleaver model. But it’s understandably upsetting to people who would prefer a song where women could be awesome without being hawt. The ordering of the dance segments here doesn’t allow that. Think what it would have been like if she started dressed sexy and dancing sexy, then changed to the more confrontational choreography, and then traded in the sexy dress for something weird and arty! But that’s not what we get to actually see, and that’s not what the song is really about. Let’s not forget that all of the women in the video, bar none, are totally gorgeous. And although that has less to do with the song itself than the culture in which music videos are made, well, like I said the culture in which art is made contributes heavily to its meaning.