What more of a cultural snapshot can there be than the Top 40? And somebody’s gotta figure out the meaning of Miley Cyrus, Robin Thicke, and Katy Perry. So it’s my job at the beginning of each month to review the top 40, make a few observations, and pick a best and worst song for each month. This month I had a lot of catching up to do on some songs I didn’t know, so there’s some longer analysis before the best and worst than there will be in coming months. 

Part 1: The Top 40: Romance, love, sex, more romance and a few social statements

Trend #1: I want you, You left me, I don’t know how to feel about you

No matter what the era or the musical style, pop music is mostly about romantic relationships. There’s something spiritual there. Selecting and having a life with a partner can be a very spiritual process. And erotic too — just check The Bible’s “Song of Solomon.” 

But relationship songs usually sum up two parts of the relationship: the beginning and the end. Most are about the the courtship at the beginning of the relationship or the fallout from a relationship ending. We don’t get many songs about stable love from consistent marriages. Maybe it’s because most songs are by young people who are mostly immersed in either finding a romantic partner or managing breakups when relationships end.

There’s so much emphasis on romance that pastors and youth group leaders might want to deeply explore that topic. Finding a partner still seems to be the strongest desire of young people — if the pop charts and their music videos are any clue.

And there’s many variations on the emotions of romance in the Top 40. 

There’s ambivalence and obsession in Zedd‘s song “Clarity” where the singer is in some kind of internal warfare: “If our love is tragedy, why are you my remedy?/If our love’s insanity, why are you my clarity?.” In Pink‘s song “Just Give Me A Reason” she’s in a crisis situation with her partner where she wants to go on because they’re “bent not broken.”  Then there’s the more overly sexual ones. Nicki Minaj has a X-rated rap in the middle of Chris Brown‘s “Love More.” Justin Beiber himself has a mid-song rap in Maejor Ali’s nasty song “Lolly.” Avoid both these songs. 

The most riveting song in this category is Lana Del Rey‘s “Summertime Sadness.” This song by the gloom goddess is a melancholy adieu to summer that coincides with saying goodbye toa lover. The music video turns this into the story of a lesbian love affair that ends in suicide. The song is haunting with its sense that something is about to end. Is it the season? The relationship? Life itself? It’s the most atmospheric and complex song in the Top 40.

But there’s happiness too.“I Need Your Love” by Ellie Goulding and Calvin Harris is about being lifted up by a love into a state that’s a spiritual-like transformation. The healthiest and most joyous depiction of romance is Paramore‘s “Still Into You.” The singer is elated that the buzz from the relationship hasn’t fizzled “after all this time.”  Devotion and consistency of emotion is what’s valued. Nice.

Trend #2: Don’t wait for the dudes, sexualize yourself first

In this genre, the woman isn’t the subordinate background sex object in the music video. She’s clearly in charge. She’s assertive —  but always through her sexuality. So it’s a total mixed message. A woman can be in charge, but only if it’s through being sexual. So some female artists lock themselves into their own prisons by doing themselves what society wants them to do: be sexual. This kind of false feminism has been the pattern over and over again with stars like Brittney Spears, Rhianna, and Beyonce.

Some music videos in the Top 40 show this phenomenon continues.

Miley Cyrus‘ “Wrecking Ball” is a typical “you hurt me and I”m angry” post-breakup song. But Cyrus falls into the same self-imposed sex object trap. In the music video she swings nude on a wrecking ball, licks a sledgehammer (yes, you read correctly), and lies like a sexualized doll in a pile of rubble.  Her music video for “We Can’t Stop” is even worse with its orgy overtones and images that look inspired by pornographic movies. These two videos reinforce the idea that for young female stars to “grow up’ from a teen to a young adult the must sexualize themselves. It’s a disturbing cultural rite of passage.

Cyrus’ Hannah Montana pop girl power songs were much more subversive and spiritually wise in comparison. The cropped dyed hair and the snarling and sexualized dancing that Cyrus does in these two videos is just an illusion of rebellion. She’s just put herself into a sexualized box far more restraining than anything from her Hannah Montana days. And above all its’ a business move that works. Don’t think that the outrage she ignited with all that twerking on MTV’s VMA show wasn’t calculated. As this Wall Street Journal article points out, the negative publicity Cyrus generated makes good business sense: it increases brand awareness. And America seems fascinated with the brand of a good girl gone bad.

Katy Perry brands herself as a kooky and funny girl-next-door. But in the music video for the song “Roar” — which contains lyrics about self-empowerment — she too can’t go long without falling into this trap of being independent and assertive only by sexualizing herself. As the island adventure video goes on, she wears fewer and fewer clothes until she’s in a revealing cavegirl outfit. The message? You can only be the girl next door for so long before you have to be the sexpot too.

Another example of this is in Lady Gaga‘s “Applause,” where the music video begins with some artsy dance and theater imagery. But it isn’t long before Gaga and other women are writhing in skimpy clothing. She too is the leader and center of attention, but uses that position to sexualize herself.

Trend #3: Good ol’ boys sowin’ their oats

About a half dozen country songs from male singers are in this month’s Top 40 (no female country singers on the charts). But most are interchangable pickup songs. “I know you don’t know me, but I can’t leave here lonely,” sings Billy Currington in “Hey Girl” while he’s working hard to snag a woman in a bar. These country dudes want some action. “It starts with a smile and ends with an all-night kiss” sings Thomas Rhett‘s song “It Goes Like This.” In Luke Bryan‘s “That’ My Kinda Night” he ticks off an ideal evening: she likes to fool around by the corn stalks, she goes fishing for catfish, and then it’s time “to get me another beer.” His ideal date night ends with wanting to “lay you down and love you right.” The women in all of the music videos to these songs look like models, not down home girls. At this point, there’s as much sexism in most country music videos as rap videos.

Only Jason Aldean‘s music video for “Night Train” skips this cliche and instead uses the epic musician on the road imagery with lots of slow motion concert shots. But the song is by far the best of the country songs in the Top 40. It has a Springsteen-style sense of urgency to get to a transcendent place. In this case it’s a spot where the singer wants to get away from everything to listen to the night train — which seems to be a kind of mystical experience. Aldean’s song is about romance, Currington, Bryan and Rhett are about superficial pickups and sexism.

The most disturbing country song in the Top 40 is Tyler Farr’s “Redneck Crazy,” which is bascially an angry stalker song. In the Top 40 only Robin Thicke‘s “Blurred Lines” with its “you know you want it” chorus has such an edge of violence to it. In this song she “broke the wrong heart” and drove him “redneck crazy.” He wonders how long she’s “been getting some on the side.”  So he will show up at her house to throw beer cans, shine headlines into a window — and in the music video there’s a gizmo that sends a lot of toilet paper reeling into the air so her lawn is trashed. Farr sings that he didn’t come looking for a fight “but he’s ready for anything.” Violence is never far beneath the surface here. Why can’t these dudes just let their two-timin’ women go?

Trend #4: Can I make a social statement?

Although romance in all its forms — from pickups to celebration of enduring love — is the dominant theme, a few songs in the Top 40 go outside of romance to make a social statement.

The most obvious is the song “Same Love” by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis which calls for gay marriage and criticizes rappers for their homophobic lyrics. But this is the only song in the Top 40 that directly mentions God and religion. It criticizes “right-wing conservatives” and religious intolerance of gays:

“God loves all his children” is somehow forgotten/But we paraphrase a book written thirty-five hundred years ago”

This line summarizes an argument often made that some Christians pick and choose specific sections of the Bible and ignore others. He’s probably means that some Christians make references to homosexuality (notably, Jesus said nothing about gays), but ignore other sections that call for everything from stoning to death disrepectful children to not marrying after divorce.

The singer seems not to have given up on the idea of God, but sounds like a Unitarian Universalist: “whatever God you believe in, we come from the same one,” he says. The song ends with repetitions of “love is patient” and “love is kind” from the famous passage from Corinthians I. The song is more of a reminder to Christians in what the singer believes religion is all about rather than a condemnation of religion.

The song“Royals” by Lorde likely resonates for a generation that is tired of being told things are better than they are. It demystifies the excess and the feeling that all is well. The singer’s anger seems directed at images of excess in music videos:

But every song’s like gold teeth, grey goose, trippin’ in the bathroom.
Blood stains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room,
We don’t care, we’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams.
But everybody’s like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your time piece.
Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash
We don’t care, we aren’t caught up in your love affair.

Her life is different. And she doesn’t aspire to live like she’s in a rap video. It makes a dichotomy between the way she lives and what she sees on television. But it seems to be a broader statement that we’re being fooled by the media.

J.Cole’s “Crooked Smile” is a powerful statement on racism and society’s expectations of beauty. But the music video goes in another direction. Based on a real life drug raid  on a Detroit home which ended in the accidental death of a seven-year-girl, it  shows a menacing army of undercover police raiding a family home. It ends with a request to “rethink the drug war.” I’m not sure what the music video is trying to say. Is it saying that drug dealers make good family men and should be accepted? Or is it a condemnation of police tactics? Or does it just depict a tragedy that we must try to avoid in the future?

Part 2: Best Music Video of the Month : “Cups” by Anna Kendrick

Not a novelty: Depression-era song sounds right for our times

Yes, the music video is at time a little gimmicky. And yes, she copped the song and that cup concept from a viral video by a duo called Lulu and the Umbrellas. And true, she just expanded this song from a scene in the movie “Pitch Perfect.” But this remake of the county standard “You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone” (originally recorded by The Carter Family and covered by other Appalachian bands) is the most uplifting song and music video in the Top 40.

The music video begins with Kendrick in the kitchen of a diner making cookies – one of her duties in what looks like a dead end job. She uses a plastic cup to create the shapes of cookies in the dough. Then she glances at some postcards of Scotland, Venice Beach and other places before she puts the cookies in an oven and sets a timer. She brushes off her hands and stars tapping out a rhythm on her work station with the plastic cup.

While the cookies are baking she picks up a plate of pancakes and walks through the swinging kitchen door into the diner. As she drops off the plate, buses some tables, and wipes them off, she sees everyone else in the diner also tapping out rhythms with their cups. She comes back into the kitchen and the oven timer signals the cookies are done. She looks back into the diner and we realize what happened was all her imagination while the cookies were baking. She looks up at the cook and then walks out the back door. She’s gone.

So what’s behind all this most unlikeliest of songs to be in the Top 40?

It’s compelling to hear Depression-era poetry in the lyrics of this song. And it’s a near miracle that the music video broadened the song into something more universal that didn’t have anything to do with a romantic relationship. It’s a longing to rise out of the routine and drudgery for something better. She seems to wish in her fantasy that everyone would join her. But that’s not the case. She has to walk out alone.

Her decision to leave is an epiphany that something better is out there. Her glances at the postcards suggest she wants to see other places – a kind of pilgrimage awaits her. I believe that sometimes our decisions to leave for something better are spiritually-based moments of insight.

The song also reflects that kind of insight. She’s self-confident and angry enough to know that he’s going to miss a good thing. And she would like him to join. But either she doesn’t want him to — or he won’t go. We don’t know why she’s leaving. Has he done something wrong? Does she want something more? Or is she restless and needs a pilgrimage to find herself? She doesn’t seem to have a goal in mind because she insists on “taking the long way ’round.”

Whatever the case, the combination of dissatisfaction and wanderlust is something that connects to the current day. Like the Depression, the paralyzed economy and job market is forcing many people to make decisions to do something else, to try something different, and to realize there are limitations. The spiritual qualities of wanting something better and the beginning of a pilgrimage to find it make this song a bittersweet but hopeful song. This music video also is the anecdote to the dreadful music video for Avicii’s song “Wake Me Up” with has a message of escape, but a disturbing and slick one. Basically it’s this:  I look like  a supermodel, these Depression-era geeks stare at me, and I need to leave just to jump up and down to some mediocre dance music — after I use all that product placement swag for designer clothes and smartphones.

Here’s the music video for Anna Kendrick’s song “Cups,” a remake of a 1930s Appalachian country song. The music video is well-known for all those cup moves, but it’s a wonderful update of the song and the music video’s theme of moving onto a better life is compelling:

Part 3: Worst Music Video of the Month: “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke

Thicke puts on white boy pimp persona to give us sexism, racism, and classism in one package

Sexism in music videos goes back decades. Back to the beginning of MTV in the early 1980w. Before MTV, music videos usually featured bands miming their own songs by playing their own instruments. With little other imagery.

 

But that all changed in 1982 with Duran Duran‘s “Girls On Film” music video (which like Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” featured an unrated version too explicit for television). It featured the first assortment of women as sexualized objects performing a series of fetishisized actions. They included cowgirls, a woman in a nurse’s uniform performing a massage, women having pillow fights, and lots of girl on girl action. After this music video’s controversial success, objectification of women was embedded into the emerging music video genre. 

It’s become so normalized that metal bands, rappers, and county musicians continue to use it routinely. Nothing’s changed since the 1980s except that it’s become accelerated. Now it takes faster edits, more explicit sexism, and more than just one sex object per music video. Many music videos feature many flavors of women in each video. In some cases like Brooks & Dunn’s music video “Put A Girl In It” there is a near football field of available women. 

We’re used to this. But Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” music video takes the exploitation of women in music videos to a disturbing new level.

Here, Thicke lives out the fantasy of being the slick white boy pimp. Against a plain backdrop, he’s in charge of a male fantasy of subservient nude and semi-nude women. But there’s a strange detachment. He’s too aloof and remote to dance, to move much, or to be engaged in much of anything. For most of the music video everything comes to him — from feet put up to his face to women rubbing up against  him. Two rappers (T.I. — who should know better than to be here — and Pharell Williams) dance through the scene while three women: an African-American, a redhead, and a pale blonde perform a lot of sexualized schoolgirl tactics. This is an example of the new white boy fantasy: to be the cool dude hangin’ out with rappers and women of different flavors who are fetish objects.

The music video uses the standard sexist strategy of having the men fully dressed in designer clothes while the women are in various stages of undress — ranging from completely nude to being wrapped in a strange kind of plastic. Of course that gives the men power. Although there are three women and three men, no one seems interested in pairing off with other person as a partner. It’s basically an orgy.

The women are fantasy objects. There are strange allusions to bestiality with animals. Why is the goat there? And what is she doing with that stuffed dog? The women are often in submissive positions. There’s also a disturbing schoolgirl kind of poses. Lots of fingers in mouth like a child, riding on bicycles – and what’s the deal with the toy car running down a model’s back?

What’s also disturbing are the lyrics which make this the rapiest song since “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” The lyrics about being a “good girl” but “you know you want it.” This line “you know you want it” appeals to the male fantasy that every girl deep down inside wants him.

I don’t even know where to begin with how this all goes wrong spiritually. There’s no interest in real relationships, it’s all just women being fantasies come to life for the wannabe white boy pimp.

But it doesn’t just end with the sexism. There’s product placement for a liquor brand and shameless self-promotion with large hashtag addresses for Thicke’s twitter site. This makes this a glorification of sexism, racism, classism, consumerism, and narcissistic self-promotion. Horrendous.

You’ve probably already been bombarded by Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” music video. So you don’t need to see it again. But check out these two parodies of it. The first is by a comedy team and the second is a feminist reworking of the music video . Warning: to make their point about Thicke’s extreme sexism, there is some very explicit language in these music videos: