Liar

687. NIRVANA, "Come As You Are"
Produced by Butch Vig; written by Kurt Cobain
DGC 19120 1992 Billboard: # 32

Actually, Kurt, you did have a gun. That was part of the problem.

Actually, Mr. Lipton . . .

456, SOPHIE B. HAWKINS, "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover"
Written by Sophie B. Hawkins; produced by Ralph Shuckett
Columbia 74164 1992 Billboard: # 5

457. KEYSHIA COLE ft/MISSY ELLIOTT & LIL KIM, "Let It Go"
Produced by Keyshia Cole, Ron Fair, and Manny Halley; written by Keyshia Cole, Missy Elliott, Kim Jones, Jack Knight, Canion Lamb, and James Mtume
Geffen 000997611 2007 Billboard: # 7

Okay, I have no idea what I want God to say when I get to the gates of Heaven, but if I ever do appear on a resurrected form of either Inside the Actor's Studio or Apostrophe, I am more than ready to declare my favorite curse word. It's damn.

Yes, my best friend would certainly hold a brief for "fuck," and Peter O'Toole's extended riff on the correct way to utter "sonofabitch" (not to mention its importance for modern cosmology) in the neglected sex-and-cloning comedy Creator is awfully compelling, but for me "damn" is the true aloha/shalom of the lot. Emphasize or extend any of the sounds and you communicate a slightly different meaning. Feeling cheated? Hit the D as hard as you can. Thunderstruck by a truly gobstopping aesthetic wonder? Stretch the A out and make it slightly nasal. I could go on and on, but I'm sure grasp the point: damn is the utility expletive.

Here I just pluck out two handy instances: a white one and a black one, as it turns out. Sophie B. is mad as hell but knows she's in a losing fight, while Missy (no disrespect, but did anyone buy the single for Keyshia?) dispenses with the nominal topic of the song and advises us to just surrender to the groove. In both cases, in order to truly communicate, all the singers had to do was kick out the damns.

"Shoot" I have no respect for, but "dang" I'll get to further on up the road.

Awareness Is Not the Same Thing as Attention (Just Ask William James)

138. JAMES & BOBBY PURIFY, "Shake a Tail Feather"
Produced by Papa Don; written by Otha Hayes, Verlie Rice, & Andre Williams
Bell 669 1967 Billboard: # 25

139. QUEEN, "Fat Bottomed Girls"
Produced by Roy Thomas Baker and Queen; written by Brian May
Elektra 45541 1978 Billboard: # 24

140. SIR MIX-A-LOT, "Baby Got Back"
Produced by Rick Rubin; written by Sir Mix-a-Lot
Def American 18947 1992 Billboard: # 1

141. SISQO, "Thong Song"
Produced by Kevin Liles & Sisqo; written by Mark Anderson, Desmond Child, Tim Kelly,Joseph Lango, Bob Robinson, and Robi Rosa
Def Jam 562599 2000 Billboard: # 3

142. MYSTIKAL, "Shake Ya Ass"
Produced by Charles Temple; written by Chad Hugo, Michael Tyler, Pharrell Williams
Jive 42721 2000 Billboard: # 13

A third of a century of B.A. in pop. No, not Bad Attitude. Butt Awareness. I first encountered the term in the early 1990s, although obviously the phenomenon to which it refers predates that era by quite a few years. Still, the early 1990s do seem in retrospect like some sort of crossover moment for popular representations of the posterior--a moment of epistemological emergence, if you will.

Like the other singles listed here, James & Bobby Purify's "Shake a Tail Feather" easily made the Top 40, chiefly on its strength as a dance tune.

The song itself is undistinguished and yet surprisingly durable, with multiple renditions stretching from the Five Du-Tones' original 1963 version to the Cheetah Girls' 2006 cover for the soundtrack of Disney's Chicken Little. The Purifys' version stands out, though, chiefly because of Papa Don's production. It's also worth pointing out, in light of the records considered below, that the reference to the butt here is more metaphorical than strictly anatomical. The singers seem quite happy to just dance in the club with the woman to whom they sing and don't necessarily require anything more from her.

Eleven years after the Purifys' tribute to dance club display, Queen received numerous protests from feminists for their own song's focus on that specific part of the female anatomy. Obviously, the picture sleeve for their double-sided single didn't help, but I've always thought that this song got a bit of a bad rap. It's nowhere near as sexist as the Stones' "Some Girls," which received protests around the same time, and it does provide a bit of a useful corrective about body image. This is a song that exhorts men to broaden their horizons and accept women of all body types. Ain't no beauty queens in this locality, the lyric goes, and it implies that that's a good thing, that widely circulated images of female beauty can desensitize consuming men to the charms of real-life women. If you take the song seriously (which I know may be a patently ridiculous thing to do). it is less about the culturewide objectification of women than about how heterosexual men do and don't visually appreciate the women that they know. Obviously, a man should not assess a woman wholly by her looks, but visual attraction is still an undeniable component of sexuality.

I suspect that this particular issue is more of a heterosexual (or if you insist heterosexist) phenomenon. This song is credited to Queen's lead guitarist Brian May, while its flipside, "Bicycle Race," is credited to the band's frontman Freddie Mercury. Nevertheless, Mercury delivers May's lyric with conviction, striking a blow for broadly conceived definitions of physical beauty everywhere.

Some of the protest against Queen may have been racially tinged as well. Nine years later when Spike Lee made School Daze, his musical about a historically black college, he received some negative comment for featuring a big dance number baldly titled "Da Butt," but these comments were mostly of the "shande for the goyim" variety: how could you let the ofays see something like that? what will they think?

By the time Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" came along in 1992, however, Butt Awareness had become an open sign of racial distinctiveness if not downright pride for some African Americans. While it may be arguable whether Queen's single is a self-conscious critique of widely circulated images of female attractiveness, there is no doubt that Sir Mix-a-Lot has his preferred mass culture targets lined up in a row here: Cosmo (too thin), Playboy (too fake), rock videos (too lifeless). The shoutout to Florence Griffith Joyner seems to be a stab at racial bragging, and I've always read the "red beans and rice" line as an attempt by a Seattle-based African American male to self-consciously include his Caribbean sisters in this oddly anatomical pride parade.

In the end, there is a world of difference between "Baby Got Back" and Mix's 1994 mammary-themed follow-up single "Put 'Em on the Glass." The former song is about appreciating the variety of female beauty, while the latter is simply about a lazily undifferentiated interest in, as Mix grunts repeatedly at one point, "lungs." Nevertheless, it was this latter song that pointed the way to the future, to singles that were more graphic and anatomical than the Purifys' old dance stylings but less personalized than Queen's and Sir Mix-a-Lot's tributes. Viewed side by side, "Thong Song" and "Shake Ya Ass," both released in 2000, give us the twentyfirst century hiphop version of a butt-based madonna/whore complex. Sisqo, liberated from Dru Hill, is now apparently worshipping fulltime in the Temple of the Butt. He chants and keens his adoration but dares not approach his sacred vision--or presumably notice that there is a human being attached to it.

As for Mystikal, don't be fooled by his old school, Cab-Calloway-meets-James-Brown vibe. This song features a scenario that will become all too familiar in 21st century dance and hiphop tracks, a scene on which I've already commented in my brief treatment of crunk. In this song, the singer tells the women to line up and move exactly as he tells them to. As in later "club" singles, the distinction between dance clubs and strip clubs seems blurred, and Mystikal's alternation of direct physical orders and promised material rewards make the epithet "ho" seem all too literal here. The line between appreciation and objectification is crossed in these two songs, more obviously in Mystikal's, more subtly in Sisqo's. The women in question are just body parts here, and the men singing about them don't seem to have even a perfunctory interest in the souls that animate them.

So, over four decades since the Five Du-Tones' original single, we have ended up here: with a variety of culturally provided images against which young men can physically measure the women that they actually know. I don't think that's progress, but it definitely qualifies as some kind of cultural evolution. (Some kind.)

Call me a nut, but I would really like to hearken back to one word in Brian May's easily dismissed lyric for "Fat Bottomed Girls": locality. Locality, specificity, individuality, soul--that's the core of beauty. That's what animates it, physically, romantically, or even purely sexually. And the more heterosexual men measure the varied real women that they know against the stylized icons that pop provides, the more they lose their grasp on their intoxicating souls.

This Is Our Moment, This Is Our Time

700. 10,000 MANIACS, "These Are Days"
Produced by Paul Fox; written by Robert Buck and Natalie Merchant
Elektra 64700 1992 Billboard # 66

For a moment, a very brief moment, this particular 10,000 Maniacs song captured its time in history, which is only appropriate since it's a song about making sure that remarkable times don't pass without proper notation. The lyrics concern themselves with personal rather than public history, with the flush of youth and how intense your feelings and insights can be in that phase of your life. The singer is clearly beyond that phase, but she isn't rueful or judgmental. She's just telling the young person to whom she is speaking that she should remember this moment. She should (in the words of an earlier song that was less historical and more universal than most people appreciated at the time of its release) keep your eyes wide/the chance won't come again.

Buck and Merchant's lyrics here aren't particularly inspired, not even on the rough-hewn level that Dylan's had been thirty years before. As with the Stooges' "T.V. Eye," it's the music that carries the real meaning here. This was the one single above all else where that odd mix of old folkie instruments that the Maniacs liked to play actually gelled. All that strumming makes it feel as if something is bubbling under the surface for the whole song. The lyrics may adopt the perspective of a slightly older person looking back on her youth, but the music still exists in that glorious, giddy, inchoate moment, where the visions are inspired and come fast and furious, just before one needs to think about translating them into concrete plans. In my own version of this kind of youthful moment the guitars rocked a lot harder, but I still concede the general resemblance.

The historical moment this song captured, in spite of itself, was the dawn of the Clinton era. I can even give you a date and an approximate time: 21 January 1993, maybe around 10 o'clock at night. That was the night of the Clinton Inaugural, and 10,000 Maniacs were one of the featured acts at the Rock the Vote Ball because they were, as Dennis Miller pointed out in his introduction of them, Chelsea Clinton's favorite band. There were better performances that night--1/2 of U2 combined with 1/2 of REM to do a boffo a capella version of "One" (which actually is a great song); Don Henley sang "Dirty Laundry" as if it were the night of the Gary Hart inaugural; and Michael Stipe combined with Merchant and the Maniacs to do a version of "To Sir with Love" that made me seriously reconsider all those bad things I had previously said about Lulu--but, even with all that, "These Are Days" was unquestionably the song for that night. If you hunt up the band's performance that night on YouTube, you'll see that they all knew it, especially Merchant. Never before and never since/I promise.

As they took the stage that night, 10,000 Maniacs almost certainly knew that they would be breaking up very soon. There was pretty much just a valedictory performance on MTV Unplugged (as opposed to all that mad shredding they usually did in concert), and it was all over. Merchant went solo and the rest of the band just limped along. By the summer, this song was being used for promos for Class of '96, a Fox series about college life that starred, among others, Kari Wuhrer.

And Bill Clinton? Sometimes it's hard to remember how much he did accomplish as President, because the shutdown, the sexual relations, and the rise of global terrorism just loom so large in retrospect. But the truth is, no President could have accomplished what we wanted him to accomplish when he took that oath of office. Even if he hadn't been a sex addict, he was still just a mortal, not the angel Gabriel.

Pay no attention to the date and timestamp on this entry--I'm writing it at 11:17 pm Tuesday 3 June 2008 and I haven't felt this hopeful about my country since all the way back then. But I'm afraid. I'm afraid to hope this much, because . . . well, because of history. I know all the things that can go wrong. I know how politicians can let you down. I know that the most secure way to be is smug and cynical and sarcastic and pragmatic. At my age, I'm supposed to have outgrown the stupid credulity of youth.

But I still remember knowing how it was meant to be. And there's a man over there who's daring me to be foolish, daring me to hope. Even though I'm supposed to be wiser than that, I might just take him up on it.