week 28: where them girls at???
I’m writing from the end of a busy week. One of the highlights of the week was a plan that I had already bailed on, and then decided to un-bail on at the last minute. My dear friend Laura had invited me to her friend’s 40th birthday celebration at Drugstore Cowboy in Silver Lake. What I did not know upon entering is that we were stepping into Wednesday Night Karaoke.
Previous moments in which I have encountered karaoke have not been for me. Though I rarely admit this to people, I get overstimulated and quickly annoyed by groups of people who are being too loud for the space that they’re in, and for the most part, I’ve been the sober person around drunk people, who have begged me to scream-sing with them in small spaces. Given these experiences, karaoke has historically had very little appeal to me. When we walked in, there was a lone man, singing on a stage, next to which was the karaoke operator, queuing the songs. Facing him were the two bartenders and the screens he was looking at for the words. When we entered, there was no one else in the bar, and we walked past him as he was fully performing whatever song he had chosen, to absolutely no audience.
I later learned that he was part of our party and that everyone else from the party was temporarily on the back patio. As the night went on, I felt myself deeply resisting participating, and then realized that I was deeply resisting participating in a way that indicated that I actually should participate because it’s important to be out of my comfort zone, and then I committed to trying karaoke for the first time ever. I sang Alanis Morrissette’s “You Oughta Know” before I could talk myself down from it again, and I had fun (and ultimately, I do love and miss singing a lot, so I’m glad I got to do that).
The most appealing part of this evening, beyond the karaoke, was that the karaoke guy would play music videos between people who requested karaoke songs. Eventually, we went up to him and started requesting music videos (I requested the “Party Rock Anthem” music video, our new friend Carter, the stranger sitting next to us who also decided to take advantage of this incredibly go-with-the-flow karaoke operator, requested “Canned Heat” by Jamiroquai [amazing choice; he surprised us with that one, and what a gift]).
This sent me straight back into my music video obsession. As many of you have experienced, if I have access to the TV and we are hanging out, there tends to be a point where I just make everyone watch music videos from Youtube recommendations, making an intentional point to not search for anything. If we decide we want to watch “Oops!... I Did it Again”, but we’re currently watching “Bad Girls”, I go into the recommendations until we find something from the 2000s or Britney Spears, and jump around until we find it.
In trying to get to a Nicki Minaj video I was trying to find on Friday, I stumbled upon a music video I hadn’t remembered: “Where Them Girls At” by David Guetta (featuring Flo Rida and Nicki Minaj). If you don’t immediately remember the conceit, check it out here, and come back once you have.
Not to be like, they don’t make music videos like this anymore, but they don’t make music videos like this anymore. And by this I mean, we are so irony pilled that there is no world where a music video where the concept of, what if a bubble made people dance erratically when it popped, would ever be pitched without being deeply tongue-in-cheek.
Of course, this is a genre. “Where Them Girls At” falls within a lineage. The music video for “Party Rock Anthem” is also of this variety. Plenty of “there’s an epidemic… people are partying too hard” videos have continued to proliferate (the Lonely Island even parodied it!). The concept of a dancing epidemic is centuries-old. Nothing novel about it.
But there’s something so endearing about the “Where Them Girls At” video to me. The exact moment it hit for me was the shot near the three minute mark, of all of the bubbles floating along the skyline, and then the camera pans over to this woman who looks up at it, with the most genuine expression of awe on her face. That moment is what makes this video feel so tonally sincere to me. The moment immediately following it, where the bubble pops on the image of an electric car on a billboard, and then the car starts spinning in these cute little circles? So sincere. It feels like something you’d see in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. (Side note: if for some reason you skipped over “Canned Heat” above, go back to it! The similarity in tone becomes clearer as you watch them together).
I could have sworn that more music videos with this specific concept (dancing epidemic) had come out in the last decade, but there actually haven’t been any major ones (to my knowledge). However, it would be inaccurate for me to suggest that music videos have lost commitment to high-concept ideas altogether. For some extremely contemporary examples, see “Thot Shit” by Megan Thee Stallion (she haunts a conservative lawmaker, who leaves slut-shaming comments on her video while getting off to her), “feather” by Sabrina Carpenter (Sabrina watches three men get run over by a semi truck after they catcall her, witnesses a bloodbath of a fight over her, kills Milo Manheim in an elevator for sexually harassing her, and then dances cheekily in church), and “the boy is mine” by Ariana Grande (Ariana Grande is Cat Woman and also stalks Penn Badgley). But even these videos feel incredibly tongue-in-cheek.
“Nasty” by Tinashe (drones are trying to track her down while she dances, with various shots from the perspective of the drone, locking in on her as a target) comes closest to what feels like a contemporary version of a sincere concept for a video and nothing more. It feels rare to see a video like this. Perhaps the distinction here is that the former three videos are clearly each more self-aware about how these artists view their relationship to womanhood and subverting gendered tropes through their videos, and their self-aware “meta” response to the real world within the fictional world they’re creating is actually what I’m picking up on when I say it does not feel completely fictional and sincere. It’s also possible I’ve just cherry picked three examples that feel that way.
Ultimately, nothing I am saying about sincerity hasn't already been said. Plenty of people have written essay after essay about postmodernity, the rise of irony as the default modus operandi, and the death of sincerity. Here’s my favorite David Foster Wallace quote on this:
Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, “then” what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone… All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.
It seems that the answer must be that we need to go back to sentimentality and sincerity anyway. Unfortunately, this is a new skill for many of us to learn, and a hard moment for us to have to learn it, given that the reality is, we are staring fascism in the face. We can joke about how coconut-pilled we are for Kamala, and have a good laugh about Jack Schlossberg, JFK’s only grandson, getting hired as a political correspondent for Vogue Magazine, and having a sexy Kennedy photoshoot, and then his first major assignment is an assassination attempt. But unfortunately, as much as I am an Irony Lover, and a Cringe Avoider, as much as I care about being self-aware (more importantly, seeming self-aware), irony is not a real answer to our problems. Arrested Development, a show near and dear to my heart, built on superficial relationships between flawed rich people who never learn, that perhaps is rightfully skeptical and cleverly skewers the wealthy, is merely descriptive. It does not offer a solution.
Surely there’s still a place for creative work that describes, satirizes, and shines a light on the worst of what’s happening around us. But if we all live in a world where, regardless of where we are on the political spectrum, we can clearly see SCOTUS overreach, Joe Biden’s rapid mental deterioration, a fascist (usage of this particular word depending on where you are on the political spectrum) power grab from the right, and after this weekend, what feels like the possibly inevitable re-election of Donald Trump, DFW would probably argue we are long past the point of needing irony for people to believe it. We all see it. So now what?
Before I say any more on this, I redirect you to Sarah Thankam Mathews’s (also) long essay related to this topic from this weekend. If you don’t have time to read it, here are my two favorite quotes:
“The left position has always been: You’re working all the time, and every once in a while there’s an event called an election. This should take you away from real politics for 10 or 15 minutes. Then you go back to work. The left position is you rarely support anyone. You vote against the worst. You keep the pressure and activism going.” - Noam Chomsky, in 2020
We can say, no lever of power should be untouched in the race to survive, to guard our rights and freedoms, to protect ourselves and ours. We can tune out of palace intrigue and elite gossip and turn our energy to where it counts. We can recognize that we often needfully plan the work of politics using the unit of years, not months, as our enemies do. We can comfort individuals who are rightfully and understandably fearful for the future by bringing them into the fold of the collective; collective fear and the organized mobilization that can result from it is a potent thing. We can, sure, fine, as needed, take fifteen minutes in November—to participate, to vote, or to persuade people in key states to mobilize, whatever is a better use of our time—and then get back to the work.
What does the work look like for artists? If music videos become sincere again, does that defeat fascism? No, but getting culturally closer to the idea of feeling real emotions again, getting more comfortable with seeing someone be sincerely afraid, sincerely heartbroken, sincerely joyful, sincerely hopeful, especially on the internet, can truly push the needle towards us as a collective being able to embrace sentimentality.
I constantly reject sincerity in my mind. I reject sincerity in the type of art I want to be making (I too would prefer to be joking around about how funny and silly it is to be living on the brink of fascism), and yet, given everything I am espousing here, I do have an obligation to be honest now too. It is a deeply scary world we live in, and if I take a step back from reading jokes about the shooting (none of which I will personally make, because I know how to stay off of a watchlist unlike some people on the Internet, lord), it is scary to think about the possibilities that leftists, liberals, or anyone unassociated with the MAGA right may face outside, now that Trump supporters have been led to believe political violence is on the table. And who knows what Trump will say about all of it (unfortunately he does not have the best track record on not stoking political violence from his base).
Links:
If footnotes were a part of the already-established Detective Work form, I’d be using the shit out of them right now. Especially at the mention of David Guetta, because I need to remind you all that even if this world is insincere, it seems that he personally isn’t. Please recall “this record is in honor of George Floyd…shout out to his family,” immediately followed by the “I Have A Dream” MLK sample.
My favorite sincere movies that immediately come to mind: Brief Encounter (1945), All That Heaven Allows (1955), and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Each of these movies immediately left me with the bittersweet feeling of knowing they’d never make something like this today, but also, wow, these movies are so special.
Many of you have heard me talk about this before, but Blindboy Boatclub’s podcast episode on “how irony was deliberately dismantled post 9/11”. A lot of what he emphasizes is the immediate sharp turn away from irony post 9/11, because a lot of 90s irony was predicated on a post Cold War feeling of triumph— it’s easy to make ironic music about wanting to die and air shows where people engage in dangerous stunts, like Jackass, if you genuinely have a sense of security in your state of the world, and 9/11 challenged that feeling of American safety for the first time in decades.
If I recall, he actually spends some time talking about how early-2000s music videos were an extravagant and grand reaction away from the insincere irony of the 90s. I’d be curious to hear about what he has to say about where we are now— especially because I don’t think that the people who are being ironic or satirizing our present-day circumstances are necessarily doing so, while feeling safe (maybe it’s a false sense of safety or a coping mechanism).
A couple weeks ago, Kelly Hayes wrote an essay about hope, in the wake of some of the more terrifying SCOTUS decisions. I am grateful to Kelly (and Sarah Thankam Mathews, linked above) for taking the time to provide real answers, in the face of a deeply unsettling world we are entering.
Ultimately, I am left wondering what obligation artists, even “non-political” artists, have to push us towards greater comfort with authentic emotion and sentimentality. I certainly feel some need to personally interrogate why I feel dissatisfied with the idea of creating this form of art. Perhaps artists should just make whatever they want to make, and for some artists, that’s primarily reliant on irony. And that’s not a bad thing at all— after all, there is an audience for everything, and irony does serve an important purpose. But as I continue to consume and admire work of this bent, I also have to ask myself, what has shaped my tastes to be this way, and what am I hiding from?
Take care,
Samyu 🔎