“Oh yeah, he’s my boy/Oh yeah, I’m his toy.”
The lyrics weren’t that great. But the song was really good.
For those who don’t know, as I didn’t up until this weekend, the song is called “Sun Blows Up” by the boy-girl duo Cars Can Be Blue. Cars Can Be Blue is a tremendously catchy slice of saccharine-sweet, girl-fronted bubblegum indie pop. And just like cornbread, ain’t nothing wrong with that.
So as I was enjoying this little sugar pill of a song, I had a thought that left a sour taste in my mouth: If this same band sang this same song but with a guy singing about a girl instead of the other way around, no one would like it. It would be lost to the sands of time as yet another overly naive young man pining derivatively for a girl. But somehow, by having a girl sing about pining for a boy, it gets a free pass as fun and adorable.
I risk coming off as a misogynist for saying this, but hear me out. There’s a complicated set of interactions going on here. It seems to me that in modern pop music, especially indie pop, women are allowed to write songs from an incredibly naive standpoint, while the same sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm in men is viewed with criticism and suspicion.
For example, Andrew Wilkes-Krier, better known as party animal, musician and occasional motivational speaker Andrew W.K., was the living embodiment of enthusiasm and naive ebullience in his songs, nearly all of which include the word “party” in the title. Aside from an incredibly devoted fanbase, Andrew was routinely savaged by the (non-U.K.) press, infamously getting a 0.6 rating from indie tastemakers Pitchfork for his debut album “I Get Wet.” The reason seemed to be that the skeptics questioned his authenticity.
It is risky to compare a white-sneakered bearded maniac who makes the thickest slabs of party rock ever to cutesy girl-fronted groups, but it still seems that women, when they want to, can be critically accepted for simpler lyrics than men can.
However, this isn’t the songwriters’ fault. This whole phenomenon is more of the product of hundreds of years of music history and sexual politics. Since rock music and rock criticism has been and still is overwhelmingly male-centric, less is expected of female songwriters.
In the “˜60s, while the Beatles were trusted to write their own songs, girl groups like the Ronettes were having songs written for them by svengalis like Phil Spector. The groups were given an image, a set of songs and then pushed out on stage to be objects of desire.
At around the same time, this sort of image mongering was going on with all male groups at Motown, but female artists have consistently had to work harder to shake the precedent set by girl groups to achieve artistic autonomy without the guiding hand of a manager or label executive.
In other words, it seems that not only will critics allow simpler lyrics from women, but that they’re actually expected in certain cases. This obviously has great ramifications for gender equality in rock music.
However, upon closer examination of Cars Can Be Blue and the tween girl group revival phenomenon, there is, for the most part, an undercurrent of subversive bitterness in the music . Rather than just playing into the hands of male critics, bands like Cars Can Be Blue and the Pipettes have taken the naive-girl formula and reiterated it for the modern age with more bite, cynicism and a dash of snottiness.
So maybe I shouldn’t be so critical and think that girl-fronted groups are “getting away” with something by being cute and having more concise lyrics . If anything, I’ve taken my eyes off the real culprit.
Thy name is Fergie.
If you missed out on Andrew W.K.’s speaking engagements too, then e-mail Jake at jayres@media.ucla.edu.