Good Booty

by Ann Powers

  In 2005, a Tallahassee “rappa ternt sanga” (Jamaican-style patois for “rapper turned singer”) named Faheem Rashad Najm, but better known by his stage name of T-Pain, helped the romance of the strip club cross over to a massive pop audience. He was also the first performer to fully show off the novel possibilities of the otherwise controversial Auto-Tune. Auto-Tune was invented by engineer Andy Hildebrand in the late 1990s strictly as a tool to help perfect the sound of the recorded voice. The singer and actress Cher had a dance club hit in 1998, “Believe,” in which her producers used it as an effect, to make her sound like an angelic cyborg. T-Pain, inspired by the use of the more primitive vocoder in 1980s R&B, took Auto-Tune to extremes, bending and morphing his vocals until they were sometimes almost unintelligible. Though many described T-Pain’s music as robotic—one 2007 review compared him to a “horny, alcoholic android”—the New Yorker magazine critic Sasha Frere-Jones came closest to capturing its uncanniness: “In his hands, the program becomes pop music’s rose-colored glasses, or a balloon’s worth of helium inhaled . . . His vocals hang, flickering, and suggest not a technological intervention but a chemical one.”30

  T-Pain’s accomplishment was the creation of giddy confusion between the flesh and mechanics, calculation and emotion: he was the soft self, celebrating. He found the ideal balance in his signature song, “I’m ’n Luv (wit a Stripper),” which became a Top 5 hit in 2005. In it, T-Pain, along with the rapper Mike Jones, sings the praises of a performer who convinces her customers that she feels more than professional obligation toward them. It’s an update of the tender, chilling Temptations soul classic “Just My Imagination,” in which the male narrator imagines a whole life with a woman who walks by his window every day, only to reveal, in the song’s last line, that “she doesn’t even know me.” The object of T-Pain’s affection does at least know her would-be paramour is looking at her, and she looks back—“right in my eyes,” T-Pain sings, thinking this means he’ll have her home and in his bed in no time. In the end, though, he’s left guessing if her interest is feigned or genuine. “She don’t even know me,” he sings, echoing Eddie Kendricks’s earlier dreamer-cum-stalker. After using Auto-Tune to twist and buoy his singing throughout the song, T-Pain murmurs that line in his vulnerable natural voice.

  In 2005, the New Orleans–based writer Alison Fensterstock noted that the more upscale gentlemen’s clubs of the early 2000s created “a fantasy dating zone . . . where women way out of your league would approach you, reaffirm your heterosexuality, let you relax outside the confusing and changing world of gender relations and then basically disappear from your life until you choose to return.”31 In his song, T-Pain longs to break the barrier between this comfortable but expensive construction and real life, all the while knowing how unlikely it is that this will happen. His subject matter is the distortion of reality that takes place when erotic performance explicitly involves money. The form the song takes—the unstable Auto-Tuned vocal—mirrors this predicament. It’s unclear whether the listener can really know T-Pain as a singer, just as he doesn’t really know the woman whose direct look is likely for show.

  In the couple of years following T-Pain’s breakthrough, his Auto-Tuned voice became ubiquitous on hit singles: he collaborated on seven Hot 100 singles in 2007, and showed up nine times on Billboard’s club-oriented Rhythmic Top 10 chart. Many other artists explored Auto-Tune on their own, usually within songs that described seduction and sex acts. Rapper Lil Wayne used it to enhance his double entendres on “Lollipop,” a No. 1 song about oral sex. Snoop Dogg, whose laconic rhyming style defined cool in gangsta rap, employed it on his highly explicit hit “Sexual Eruption.” Some artists also employed Auto-Tune to communicate vulnerability in a way that hip-hop’s swagger usually didn’t accommodate. Most notably, Kanye West used it throughout his 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak, inspired by the death of his mother (in a grim twist for this cyber age, during plastic surgery) and his breakup with his fiancée, the fashion designer Alexis Phifer. The album, West said at its launch party, was about “emotional nakedness”—something he could achieve, apparently, only while wearing the costume of Auto-Tune.

  The rise of Auto-Tune coincided with the rise of a new kind of “raunch culture” that differed in tone from the sexual experimentation of previous eras. Young women were embracing not just erotic freedom, but the aspects of the sexual economy that feminism had once taught them were sexually oppressive: pornography, obscenity, and, within limits, sex work. Some feminists had long argued that sex work could be liberating if women remained in control of their labor; a side gig in a strip club was fairly common among young bohemian women (and even feminist academics) starting in the 1980s. Life online accelerated the mainstreaming of these attitudes. Amateur pornography was becoming ever more common, and for those who wanted to be less explicit, strippers offered an example of forthright sexual behavior that seemed powerful and fun. YouTube abounded with videos of women trying out routines on self-installed stripper poles. Health clubs began offering Strippercise classes. The general tone behind these developments was celebratory, but also somewhat cynical. Raunch culture focused on sex as a power game, and suggested that softer feelings about romance—represented by the red roses offered to contestants on the television dating show The Bachelor—were, though enjoyable, just a form of artifice. Tenderness, this version of the stripper sensibility suggested, was as fake as a crooning vocal processed through Auto-Tune.32

  If love couldn’t be trusted in this new era, neither could music. Auto-Tune was just one of many computer tools that played up the manipulated nature of voices, and indeed of all musical elements held up as authentic, within recorded music. Critics of these methods of enhancement, many themselves musicians, considered them to be cheater’s tools and feared for the loss of real human presence. Defenders argued that innovation, not some notion of “the real,” was the genuine article that made pop special. The embrace of Auto-Tune shared something with raunch culture: it presupposed that a certain basic inauthenticity was at the heart of human self-expression. Everything was a performance, even within our most intimate experiences of voice and flesh and the human heart.

  The sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein came up with the term “bounded authenticity” to describe a shift in sex work in the 2000s, away from brief encounters and toward the “girlfriend experience,” in which men would purchase not only carnal contact but emotional support and companionship, if only for a night.33 Her term also well describes music like T-Pain’s, in which a voice is twisted by machines, yet somehow wrung out more thoroughly by the manipulation—the computerized elements reshape and heighten emotion in these songs, rather than deadening it. “Bounded authenticity” also accurately defines sexual encounters online, where lovers who have often never met in person dare each other to go further and reveal more, precisely because their interactions are contained within the glowing screen.

  In a culture increasingly dominated by online interactions, the “bounded authenticity” of sex work, typified by the figure of the stripper, becomes more appealing because it recalls the highly performed identities each of us cultivates when we log on. The same is true of music that blends human and electronic elements. “Increasingly, the identity of just about anyone living in a digital era is a synthesis of real-space and online expressions of self,” wrote Palfrey and Gasser in Born Digital.34 In this hybrid way of being, old ideas about pure experience—whether sexual, musical, or emotional—were falling away. The show that is sex work started to seem a lot like the one women, and men too, put on whenever they entered social media. The sound of T-Pain’s altered voice echoed the chopped-and-screwed selves people constructed constantly, fingers caressing keyboards as they became something more or less than what they they could be offline.

  Such enormous changes could not occur without moral panic. The Internet was reassembling humanity itself; on a more specific yet still startling level, it was also taking the recording industry apart. The creation of the MP
3 audio-coding format made it possible to easily distribute music online. Next came Napster: the original peer-to-peer file-sharing program, created by college kids Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning in their dorm room, that freed songs from the confines of bought-and-sold CDs and made them as exchangeable as imaginary spit in an erotic chat room. It wasn’t long before the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group representing labels and distributors, sought legal action against downloaders, many of whom were just kids. The narratives of these lawsuits resembled those that formed around juvenile delinquency in the 1950s. Many of the cases that caught the media’s interest were brought against women and even young girls; in 2003, for example, twelve-year-old Brianna LaHara of New York was charged with storing more than one thousand songs illegally on her computer. “According to news reports, Brianna believed that she was allowed to download the music from the Internet—partly because her mother paid a monthly subscription fee to be connected to the Web,” noted Palfrey and Gasser.

  Congressmen determined to stem the tide of online file sharing linked the act of downloading MP3s to another, more old-fashioned “sinful” activity: viewing pornography. Children seeking to download the latest hit by a favorite rapper could stumble across the Triple-XXX videos that rolled like tumbleweeds across the landscape. Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, California Democrat Henry Waxman said, “give children access to the vilest hard-core pornography.” “P2P stands for piracy-to-pornography,” Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment, told a New York Times reporter in 2003.35 The panic surrounding music downloading was sexualized, in part, because a real connection existed between acquiring music and viewing pornography. Anyone who has copped a new album via a BitTorrent site has likely been assaulted by jiggling, butt-slapping women in the video ads for porn that keep these shadow systems funded. In general, though, the link between downloading music and pornography addiction was more projected than proven.

  It was definitely true, however, that young people were exploring sex in cyberspace. Once P2P networks evolved into social media platforms like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, young people were accustomed to being outrageous within these fluid communities. The same environment that transformed them into music-sharing lawbreakers turned out to also be a safe-feeling space where they could share their bodies—or at least the images, sounds, and thoughts their bodies made possible—in selfies, videos, and erotic chat. “Teenagers may not own much, but they develop a very early and clever sense of the most important thing they will ever own: their bodies,” wrote the educator S. Craig Watkins in his 2009 portrait of online youth, The Young & the Digital.36

  For all the boisterousness with which a new generation embraced social interactivity online, questions remained. What limits should or could be drawn around sex and emotional intimacy when the physical couldn’t be separated from the virtual? The Internet lover thinks differently about the limitations of her own body, which can be cleaned up with a filter in a photograph, or done away with altogether while sharing a fantasy with someone via texts. Perhaps this increasingly common experience of being multiple and, if not unlimited, at least unfettered, is what has made the experience of pushing limits a central subject within twenty-first-century popular music.

  Some major artists explored the complexity of this bounded/unbound state via their own biographies. Rihanna, for example, who started her career as an adolescent Jay Z protégée instinctively bolder than most pop stars her age, faced a crisis when her boyfriend, the singer Chris Brown, brutally assaulted her in his car following a Grammy Awards week party in 2009. After that incident, for which Brown was sentenced to five years’ probation, Rihanna frequently used her songs to confront violence within relationships. Hits like “Russian Roulette” and her duet with the rapper Eminem, “Love the Way You Lie,” suggested that she felt that both victim and victimizer were complicit in violent relationships; like a modern-day version of the daring dancers of the Jazz Age, she examined the choreography between victim and brutalizer as a complex and seemingly irresistible series of dangerous moves. Rihanna also favored increasingly bawdy lyrics in her up-tempo songs, presenting herself as a sexual aggressor who considered love a game and herself a daring player. Three years after Brown beat her face in, Rihanna even reunited with him for the X-rated song “Birthday Cake”—as if to say that no story, even one so brutal, is simple when sex is involved.

  Many listeners were repulsed by Rihanna’s choice to record “Birthday Cake” with Brown and puzzled by the raunchy image she constructed instead of embracing one more redolent of female empowerment. Such seemingly willful perversity abounded in pop during these years. Women artists ruled the charts, but their ascent did not achieve what the feminists of either the 1970s or the riot grrrl ’90s might have hoped. Each new star assumed a slightly different spot within a cartoonish card deck of sexualized female archetypes. Katy Perry played a vintage pinup girl, shooting whipped cream out of her candy-colored bra and singing about losing her virginity in various ways—with a man in “Teenage Dream,” with a woman in “I Kissed a Girl.” Lady Gaga played the perverse imp in vinyl fetish wear; she turned that role into one of liberation with her anthem “Born This Way,” which became a signature song for a new generation of LGBTQ liberationists. Nicki Minaj, the leading female rapper of the era, focused fetish seekers on her prodigious backside, celebrated in her songs like “Anaconda,” which climaxes with the chant: “This one is for my bitches with a fat ass in the fucking club!” The one millennial pop star who didn’t engage with explicit material was Taylor Swift, whose roots in the more conservative country music world allowed her to become famous without foregrounding sex. Yet even Swift was shaking her booty (comically, at least) in her videos by 2014, when she made a decisive jump out of country into mainstream pop.

  What really preoccupied the pop world in the new era was the view from the edge, and it was confused and contested, changing all the time. The greatest strides came in LGBTQ equality: same-sex couples were free to marry in a majority of states by 2014, and for the first time, musicians like the American Idol singing contest finalist Adam Lambert, the indie-pop duo Tegan and Sara, and the viral-video maven Troye Sivan were beginning their careers as openly gay or bisexual. Yet other rights were threatened. In several states, abortion became nearly inaccessible due to legislative restrictions placed on providers and on women themselves. Was this a time of greater acceptance of diversity when it came to sex, or of increasing restrictions? In the physical realm, both seemed true. In cyberspace, both realities also manifested simultaneously. Sexual conservatives, often religiously motivated, gathered together within diffuse communities like Quiverfull, a fundamentalist movement arguing for a strict biblical interpretation of gender roles and family life. People seeking sexual freedom congregated on hookup apps like Tinder and Grindr.

  There wasn’t even a general agreement about what sex might be anymore. Those mobile apps that could lead to an afternoon of play with a stranger were also often simply used as titillation, as users scrolled through available dates and swiped left or right to signal approval or rejection. That activity itself became an erotic act for many—what one famous Tinder user, the alternative rock singer Adam Duritz, called “the freakiest video game EVER.” The widespread phenomenon of sexting, or sending pornographic texts from one’s phone, further confused the definition of the carnal. “Our only way of being alone was to do it over the phone,” one young woman told the journalist Hanna Rosin about her relationship with a trusted boyfriend in her semirural community, when Rosin investigated the rise of sexting among teens for the Atlantic in 2014. “It was a way of kind of dating without getting in trouble. A way of being sexual without being sexual, you know?”37

  Being sexual without being sexual. This was different than pushing the limits of necking in the 1950s or rubbing close during a dance marathon in 1919. The flesh could no longer be relied upon as a guide to resolving the ambiguities of desire. In cyberspace, you were safe bu
t also vulnerable in new ways: to photographs being distributed by your partner, to the harassment that became known as “slut-shaming,” or to simply being misinterpreted, being failed by the vagaries of language and code.

  In 2013, a song entered this confusing space that seemed to encapsulate its contradictions. Its very title—“Blurred Lines”—evoked a state of radical uncertainty. The music itself didn’t sound futuristic at all. Based on the 1977 Marvin Gaye song “Got to Give It Up,” it was a nostalgic party anthem sung by a male protagonist trying to convince a “good girl” to get loose with him, on the dance floor and, presumably, in the bedroom. Though it was composed by the producer Pharrell Williams, the name attached to the single belonged to Robin Thicke, a white singer who’d been kicking around the middle of the R&B charts for a decade with sensitive ballads attracting a mostly female audience. This was an about-face for Thicke: a dance-floor burner full of double entendres and attempts at persuasion that bordered on harassment.

  If the lechery of “Blurred Lines” could have ever been in doubt, its video was explicit. Three topless female models wearing nude panties and white sneakers appear alongside a fully clothed Thicke, Williams, and T.I., the rapper who provides the song’s middle break. The men cajole the women, who dance and flirt but ultimately stave off their advances. The presence of whimsical props, including a goat, an oversized bicycle, a plush dog, and a giant foam finger, adds an element of the surreal. Thicke’s last name—a phallic double entendre in and of itself—flashes, recast as a Twitter hashtag, across the screen. So does the phrase “Robin Thicke has a big dick.” The shoot was helmed by Diane Martel, the same director who had extolled the “amazing freestyle” talent of strippers more than a decade earlier. Martel often played with explicit imagery in her work, and it was her idea that the women in “Blurred Lines” be so exposed. She secured an all-female crew for the day, to ensure “zero sexual tension,” as she told one reporter. The pink-lit blank backdrop was Thicke’s idea. The props, Martel said, came from “the creative graveyard where the ideas that are too crazy go and wait for the right project,” and indeed they have the feel of a trash bucket on a hard drive—weird, stray thoughts manifest as abandoned toys. The video doesn’t have a linear narrative; it’s just a lot of prancing, flirting, and rebuffing. No one takes off any clothes, or puts them on. This is seduction stalled in an artificial safe zone, where men can be voyeurs and women, exhibitionists, and nobody gets hurt.38