Names and Things

108. J. GEILS BAND, "Centerfold"
Produced and written by Seth Justman
EMI America 8102 1981 Billboard: # 1

109. HOLE, "Celebrity Skin"
Produced by Michael Beinhorn; written by Billy Corgan, Eric Erlandson, & Courtney Love
DGC 1194 1998 Billboard: # 85

There's an old friend of mine from high school--let's call her "Nellie," because she played Nellie Forbush to my Emile de Becque back in the day--if you Google Nellie's real name, the first eight or so hits refer to a nude scene from a fairly well-known Hollywood film that was released around the time I knew her. She is nude in that movie, even in that scene, but the pictures that those webpages connect to her name are not pictures of her.

For someone of a younger generation, the idea that there could be nude photographs of a friend of mine up on the web must seem positively quaint. Gens X and Y have been snapping pics and videos of each other and posting them online with abandon now for at least a decade. That's one of the many things that makes J. Geils' "Centerfold" a real historical artifact: an era in which you could be surprised to encounter nude images of someone you knew in school seems so very long ago. We have all been so fully pornographied now that some people can actually be blase about it.

But Peter Wolf is not singing in this silly little single about someone who made private photos that suddenly became available to millions of people. He's singing--well, he's actually singing about himself (typical man), but the young woman whom he is remembering in this song presumably chose to allow a professional to take nude photographs of her, possibly as a stepping stone to a more varied career in the entertainment industry. That was the case with my old friend Nellie: the producers of that film she was in spotted her during a location shoot in Manhattan, asked her if she wanted to be in another scene, there was nudity involved, would she mind that, etc. As it turned out, she was in a second movie the following year, also shot in Manhattan, and this time she wore lingerie. Among us old theatre pals (who were not seeing much of her anymore at that point), the joke was that in her third movie she would be fully clothed. As far as I know, she was never in a third movie.

To hear Courtney Love sing about it, though, such decisions might actually be a viable career path--or maybe not. It feels as if Love is doing that chicken-hearted thing here of being autobiographically ironic by pretending her song is about someone else. Let's not kid ourselves, though: this song is most assuredly about her, even if the publication she was plagued by was probably not Celebrity Skin but Fox Mulder's favorite Celebrity Sleuth. In retrospect, it's clear now that the marketing of nude, semi-nude, or just plain titillating images of celebrities was only getting warmed up in the pre-Britney-Lindsay-and-Paris era when this single was released. I'm sure at the time Courtney thought that she had the whole situation under control. I'm using them, I bet she thought, they're not using me. If she chose to wear an outrageous outfit to get publicity, or to play Larry Flynt's mistress in order to advance her acting career, she was using people's image of her as a way of gaining wider currency for herself.

This seems like another one of those cases--and there are so many of them in pop--where the song in time proves so much wiser than the singer. Ten years on, I'm not sure I'd say that Courtney Love used the star-making machinery more than it used her. The popular image of Love today mostly casts her as the multiply addicted bimbo who married St. Kurt, while the fact is that she was responsible for at least one great rock and roll album (Live through This) and at least a half-dozen very thoughtful songs. That's no small achievement. Still, to a lot of people, she's little more than bright blonde hair, a ton of eye makeup, and a pair of prominently displayed breasts.

As Shakespeare's Mark Antony maybe should have said, the porn that women do lives long after them, but their art is oft interred with their plummeting CD sales. That's why I'm so glad that all those webpages got Nellie's real name wrong--no, that they got her name right and her body wrong. Because Nellie's body should belong to her. Images of it should not be out there for idiots to drool over. Like Courtney Love, the Nellie I knew was an artist, in this case a truly gifted comic actress. I hate thinking of her reduced to a tough answer in a porn trivia game.

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.

How Dirty Vibes Get Clean

189. LIL JON & THE EAST SIDE BOYZ ft/YING YANG TWINS, "Get Low"
Produced by Emperor Search, Bryan Leach, Lil Jon, Rob McDowell; written by D. Holmes, E. Jackson, S. Norris, & Jonathan Smith
TVT 2394 2002 Billboard #: 2

190. USHER, "Yeah!"
Produced by Usher Raymond; written by Chris Bridges, Sean Garrett, LaMarquis Mark Jefferson, Rob McDowell, James Phillips, Jonathan Smith, & Patrick J. Que Smith
Arista 59149 2004 Billboard: # 1

The life cycle of a pop style in just two singles.


Crunk, like gangsta before it, can present a problem for some listeners. In the best crunk singles, the vibe is slammin, but the lyrics can give you pause. Lil Jon's "Get Low" is an obvious example of this: it has a great dance groove that makes you want to get out on the floor, but its lyrics (about a trip to a strip club) can make you want to take a shower after listening. Even the trembling vocals of the East Side Boyz on some of the verses can make you feel a little shaky.

Fast forward two years, and here's Lil Jon again, this time fronting for Usher. You know: sweet, cleancut, sexy but not sleazy Usher. The poor boy's being cornered by a girl in a club. He's so cute that you've got to believe that this happens to him all the time. But this girl is something special, her power is almost hypnotic, and soon enough he's caught up in a 21st century Billie Jean scenario. None of it is his fault, you see?

The two songs, of course, have essentially the same groove, and this is how you make dirty music clean: Ludacris and Lil Jon serve as Usher's dirtyminded wingmen; Usher just plays it smooth and "Aw shucks"es his way through the song. In "Get Low," Lil Jon and his boys talk it up, but let's be serious: they're almost certainly going home alone. In this song, Usher presents himself as more acted upon than acting, but he is probably not going home alone. The earlier single is filthier and more explicit, but this song more strongly implies the possibility of actual sex, sex that the singer will probably explain away tomorrow as something that "just happened."

And then there's the whole question of where the two songs are set. "Get Low" seems to be set in a strip club, but by the end of the song there's a shoutout to all the girls on the dance floor, suggesting that the performer now thinks he's in a dance club. (The song in fact did lead to a popular line dance that pretty much corresponds to the instructions in the chorus.) "Yeah" seems to be set in a dance club, but the featured performers' interpolated guest flows sound no different than what we heard in the earlier single.

So which is worse: frankly crass objectification of women, or the smooth rationalization that explains it away? You know what? I'm not entirely sure that that's the real question. I think the real question is why everyone seems to be confusing dance clubs with strip clubs in the first place.