Thank you, Cardi B.
For a couple of years, I’ve been wrestling with the question of whether it’s culturally insensitive not to embrace today’s hip-hop and R&B. The musicians I’ve seen live in the past two years — Silversun Pickups, Belly, Metric and July Talk — don’t attract a diverse audience. (Though it’s worth noting there’s at least one biracial person in that group of bands.)
My self-loathing bottomed out when I went to see Aimee Mann (for the zillionth time) with Jonathan Coulton opening. The audience was about as white as a Proud Boys rally, even though I’d guess the percentage of Trump voters and other insufficiently enlightened people would be in single digits.
Then Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion released WAP, maybe the most gleefully vulgar song in history. As is usually the case when a Black musician’s work is wildly popular, critics fall all over themselves to hail how empowering the song is.
And the critics’ response finally made what’s left of the neurons in my brain click together …
The problem with WAP isn’t the graphic cartoonish depictions that add to the already warped view of sex in the zeitgeist. It’s not even the gratuitous references to hos (“whores” in this case) or the n-word. It’s not that it’s shocking. It’s that this is what we expect from Black musicians today.
Ben Shapiro didn’t quite get it in his criticism of the song. Please don’t be shocked. The last time he careened into the music world, he gave a textbook “appeal to authority” fallacy by invoking his dad, apparently a music theorist, when he claimed rap wasn’t music. Unfortunately for Shapiro, first-generation music theorists like 12tone have YouTube channels, as does Adam Neely, a musician who issued a controversial 44-minute discussion telling me I wasted my time as a music major*, I mean, pointing out that what we traditionally call “music theory” is culturally limited, at times intentionally so. Shapiro pops up just after the 25-minute mark in Neely’s piece.
In this case, Shapiro owned himself in hilarious fashion, focusing on WAP’s reference to a “bucket and a mop.”
Which was in the first line in the second verse of The Bad Touch, a 20-year-old song by Bloodhound Gang:
That video has 345 million views, but perhaps Shapiro hadn’t noticed it. Less likely is that he’s unaware of the most notable antecedent of venerating a Black woman’s private parts would be the Rolling Stones in 1969. Yes, it’s Brown Sugar, which doesn’t have as many bleepable words but has a lot of imagery Mick Jagger is trying to take back.
White women haven’t been shy in expressing sexual agency either. Madonna made a career out of it and is now staring down ageist critics by, as a clever AFP piece puts it, putting the “sex” in “sexagenarian.” Sarah McLachlan is more subtle, making middle-aged lust sound classy.
Tori Amos, on the other hand, is not subtle, as Bob’s Burgers memorably parodied with the help of the great Megan Mullally.
Even YouTube’s algorithm gets the joke, popping up the Tori Amos song Icicle as one of the top results on a search for the Bob’s Burgers clip.
Also, Raspberry Swirl isn’t about making a smoothie in exchange for well water.
But if you ask a music critic or Tori Amos fan about these songs, they’ll likely put them in some sort of nuanced construct. Amos dwells in a realm of complicated emotions and fairy tales — sometimes overreaching, sometimes not — and she deserves the respect she has gained over more than 25 years of creating characters through music and exploring everything from straight-ahead piano music to odd time signatures that veer close to prog rock.
Another critics’ darling is Liz Phair, who debuted on the music scene with her own “wet” song on the candid album Exile in Guyville. The explicit language served the purpose of capturing the complicated mix of sexual agency and regret in a song like Fuck And Run.
So we keep talking about these songs a couple of decades later. We may not even agree on how to interpret songs or their writers/performers. At a Tori Amos concert in the 90s, a woman yelled, “You’re not beautiful!” and apparently meant it as a compliment. A man responded with “Bullshit!”
Black musicians typically don’t get similar treatment. The thinkpieces on WAP are mostly about how wonderful it is to celebrate sex or how funny it is to trigger Shapiro and company.
The point of this isn’t to reinforce Shapiro or narrow-minded music theorists’ notions of aesthetics. Personally, though, I think WAP crosses that Spinal Tap line between stupid and clever — or, in the words of Natasha Leggero, it’s not my cup of jizz. (Do not Google that reference. Where’s the eye wash?) I’ll also never be comfortable with music that drops the n-word and non-ironically refers to women as whores or hos.
But that’s me. I’m not going to claim civilization is falling apart just because WAP is the №1 song of the Pandemic Age so far. I don’t care for most modern pop music — which is another rant — so why should WAP be any different? Aesthetics aren’t absolute. No matter how the Shapiros and Tucker Carlsons may wail, WAP is no more harmful to society than any other gleeful sex romp like Poison’s Talk Dirty to Me and frankly less objectifying than “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” rock tunes like Supertramp’s Goodbye Stranger and Rod Stewart’s Stay With Me.
The problem is that WAP merely reinforces the narrow box into which we’ve placed “Black music.” If it’s not talking about sex, weed, bling or guns — sometimes with alarming misogyny that isn’t going to go away just because Rihanna and Cardi B forcefully expressed sexual agency — the mainstream isn’t paying attention.
That’s not Cardi B’s fault. It’s ours. We think Black musicians can do hip-hop and modern R&B, and that’s it.
Consider the 70s and 80s. You had meaningful R&B like Stevie Wonder, who says more with a hi-hat and snare than most people say with an album’s worth of lyrics. You had funk and disco that moved even the dancing-impaired among us to get down-ish. You had rock, with Living Colour and Fishbone revving up the guitars along with the social commentary. You had multi-racial jam bands like the Allman Brothers, Dave Matthews Band and Spin Doctors. You even had some public recognition of jazz — we could all name a Marsalis brother and Herbie Hancock, even if we knew them mostly through Jay Leno and Rockit.
Black people invented this music. White people invented AutoTune.
And White people made the box into which “Black music” has been confined for too long. Time to take a peek outside.
(*) The last course in my music major sequence was Philosophy of Music, which wasn’t limited to Western classical ideas but certainly spent a lot of time with them. The teacher, a beloved figure on campus who sadly has since passed away, was Black. FWIW.
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