Good Booty

by Ann Powers

  That’s what Martel and the artists imagined, perhaps, but it’s not how women viewing the video responded. “Blurred Lines” was an instant hit; even though it was quickly banned from YouTube because of the nudity, one million people viewed it within its first few days online. Yet within weeks the video and the song had engendered a groundswell of angry responses. Many women felt that the song was an apology for harassment and even rape. “Has anyone heard Robin Thicke’s new rape song?” wrote the feminist blogger Lisa Huynh shortly after the video’s release. “Basically, the majority of the song (creepily named ‘Blurred Lines’) has the R&B singer murmuring ‘I know you want it’ over and over into a girl’s ear. Call me a cynic, but that phrase does not exactly encompass the notion of consent in sexual activity.” Another blog post juxtaposed lyrics from the song with images from an online photo exhibit of rape victims holding up signs inscribed with their assailants’ words; they often matched. Rare among women, prominent music critic Maura Johnston wrote a defense of the song that cited its humor and the way its lyrics unspooled not like a harangue but as one half of a dialogue, concluding in a musical fade-out signifying that the situation remained unresolved. A fan of R&B familiar with the prevalence of come-ons in the genre, Johnston found the song alluring.39

  One person with an interesting view of “Blurred Lines” was Robin Thicke himself, who called the video “existential” in an interview. The singer proved to be an untrustworthy source—a year after his hit charted, he admitted that though he received a writing credit, he didn’t contribute anything to its composition because he was drunk and high on painkillers in the studio. “Existential” applies, however: as transformed within the video, “Blurred Lines” effectively evokes the indeterminate experience of engaging erotically online. Its blank background is actually a white cyclorama, a cinematic cousin to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” infinity cove; it creates a “limbo effect,” where action seems to run on a loop. The strange props add to the dreamlike atmosphere. The clothed men and nude women seem like porn actors but without any notable physical contact—there’s not so much as a kiss—this is the opposite of hard-core pornography. Instead, it’s an endless, circular tease, as is the song itself, with its highly repetitive lyrics, its looped groove, and the disembodied whoops that punctuate the melody like movements toward orgasm that never reach a peak.

  Pharrell Williams borrowed those whoops, and much else in “Blurred Lines,” from Marvin Gaye, whose soul recordings in the late 1960s and 1970s set the bar for seductive R&B. Gaye was a master of ambience and indirection, riding tidal rhythms that signified pleasure directed by a woman’s undulating desire rather than a man’s linear release. In “Blurred Lines,” Williams took that organic feel and made it shiny, plasticene. The beat is tight; the sound, compressed. Thicke’s vocals are mostly a mumble. Johnston wrote, “‘Blurred Lines’ is sensual in a way that isn’t wholly reliant on any sort of consummating act.” In fact, it’s not sensual at all, in the conventional sense; it unfolds light and airy, free of the bottom that bodies provide. This is the sound of online sex, where a mild-mannered man might risk the language of aggression, and a self-respecting woman might even accept it, entertaining possibilities she wouldn’t tolerate in the flesh. Or perhaps she would just ignore it. “Blurred Lines” is a one-way conversation, it turns out. Thicke could be talking to an empty avatar.

  The controversy over this song’s content raged on for much of 2013, but the following year it was superseded by new questions about the song. A series of suits and countersuits between Williams and Thicke and the Marvin Gaye estate exposed just how much the producer had relied on the earlier song within his compositional process. A judge eventually ruled that enough similarities existed between “Blurred Lines” and “Got to Give It Up” for the family’s lawsuit to proceed, and a jury found the songwriters guilty of copyright infringement. A song risking images of sexual violation turned out to be grounded in artistic trespassing. And though the song’s true author, Williams, is African American, the fact that Thicke, a white interpreter of a black style, was its frontman connects “Blurred Lines” to the questions of self-possession and miscegenation at the historic core of American popular music. Cultural miscegenation yet again provoked anxieties framed as sexual.

  “I know you want it”: the mantra of “Blurred Lines” encapsulates the risk and possibility of popular music, its frequent violations and its freeing encouragement to unleash unrecognized desires. Americans have so often wondered, alone and together, what they want erotically. Songs and dancing and all the talk surrounding music can never answer that question clearly or definitively. The answer shifts and shimmies like rhythm itself, like a body in the throes of pleasure.

  EPILOGUE

  On April 23, 2016, two and a half years after Beyoncé rode to pop supremacy on her sexified surfboard, she debuted another surprise album, this time not via the porn-soaked Internet but on the relatively dignified cable network HBO, home of award-winning “event television” programs like The Wire. Lemonade is to Beyoncé what a marriage counseling session is to make-up sex: highly emotional but purposeful, focused on issues instead of sensual impressions, meant to foster dialogue that builds toward a future. Superseding the intimate, fantasy-filled inner monologue represented by Beyoncé, Lemonade reaches out with a strong undertone of feminist solidarity.

  Unfaithfulness is its most obvious subject. By the time of their 2014 On the Run World Tour, the rumors of his cheating that Jay Z and Beyoncé had long quietly fought back were beginning to tarnish their celebrity role-model marriage; in these songs, the singer stands strong as “the wife” who reminds the rapper, “I give you life,” presenting herself as a take-no-guff truth teller and taking control of her publicly displayed private realm once again. In songs like “Don’t Hurt Yourself” and “Sorry” (catchline: not sorry), Beyoncé takes her place in music’s long line of blues queens, confronting the ways love can lay a woman low without compromising an ounce of her pride.

  Lemonade is also a political album. Like the classic blues, its lyrics locate intimate stories within a larger framework of African American marginalization and displacement. In the companion piece that made the HBO Lemonade debut so powerful, six video directors created tableaux evoking the quadroons and other Creole women of New Orleans, that city’s recent struggles after the federal government’s tepid response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, and the hardships faced by Southern African Americans after Reconstruction—all historic reference points that related to Beyoncé’s own life as the Houston-born “Texas Bama” daughter of a mother from Louisiana and father from Alabama. The black feminist poetry of Warsan Shire, read in voiceover by Beyoncé, links these images in menstrual-bloodstained confessionals about the ties binding African American daughters to the crises their mothers and grandmothers endured: “You find the black tube inside her beauty case where she keeps your father’s old prison letters. You desperately want to look like her. You look nothing like your mother. You look everything like your mother.”1

  Received ecstatically by music critics and fans alike as a gift to Beyoncé’s strong base of African American female fans, Lemonade also continued the artist’s open alliance with a new activist movement founded by women of color. That loose coalition had been building across America via the Internet, arguably since Katrina and definitely since the death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed seventeen-year-old shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer in 2012. It coalesced on social media and in the streets after the subsequent police killings of two unarmed African American men, Michael Brown and Eric Garner. In Ferguson, Missouri, Brown was shot multiple times by a police officer he encountered in the street, and his body left on the ground for hours. People gathered in protests that spread nationwide, often anchored by the chant “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” The same swell of protest occurred in Staten Island, where the cry was “I Can’t Breathe,” commemorating the fact that Garner, who had asthma, died in a chokehold. Garner’s arrest on suspicion
of selling loose cigarettes—a misdemeanor—was captured on video via a bystander’s phone, and went viral. So did a cell phone video of witnesses discussing the killing of Brown as his body lay nearby.

  The movement is called Black Lives Matter, but it could have been Black Bodies Matter. Its impact had everything to do with the way technology allowed people to see and hear how people’s bodies were affected by violence in real time. As people realized they could record and distribute these encounters, images proliferated of African Americans being shot at close range, held to the ground, and otherwise restrained by police. Some videos came from security cameras near the sites of the altercations, but most came from witnesses, capturing violence using the same tools that, in different moments, might allow them to share sexy selfies with a lover or scenes of themselves dancing with friends.

  The virtual world was colliding with the physical one in horrifying ways. A national debate on the use of deadly force raged. Police and their supporters maintained that, in most cases, the responses were justified, and the courts often supported this view. Yet the images unsettled people. A cell phone video showed Cleveland twelve-year-old Tamir Rice’s body prone in the distance, near the pellet gun police had mistaken for a lethal weapon, as his sister screamed, “They killed my baby brother!” One showing Baltimore man Freddie Gray being put into a police van raised questions about what happened during the van ride, after which he died from head and neck injuries. Instantly distributed, these videos often took the place of conventional news reports in forming public opinion, and fed the wave of activism that was itself organized through social media. By summer 2016, when Diamond Reynolds live-streamed the aftermath of the fatal shooting of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, during a traffic stop, Black Lives Matter had become the most significant grassroots movement confronting racial inequality in America since the 1960s.2

  As the Black Lives Matter movement grew, mainstream musicians like Beyoncé, who had mostly steered clear of forthright political statements in the past, began to reckon with it. The pop world of carefully generated sounds and images, already opened up by social media, now had to deal with raw material that preoccupied the public precisely because it was not prettied up. Black activists’ insistence that others see systematic violence as the day-to-day experience they endure, despite the gains in civil rights that reached a high point when Barack Obama became the first African American president in 2008, is now backed up by evidence they themselves can generate. Just as the photographs of lynchings had shocked people in the 1930s, when Billie Holiday sang, in “Strange Fruit,” of bodies “hanging from the poplar trees,” now these videos reinforce the truth of racism: that it is not abstract, not merely an idea or a flaw in the system, but a visceral reality.3

  With Lemonade, Beyoncé negotiated a turn that few would have expected even a few years before, when consciousness about these issues was rising but the pop world was still distracted by Miley Cyrus’s twerking and other titillations. Cyrus was only an “It” girl for a season. Blunders like the interview in which she spoke of some media outlets’ editing of her racy “We Can’t Stop” video in the same breath as Martin’s killing made her a less-than-viable spokesperson either for a new attitude among youth or for increased interracial understanding within pop. Few who were engaged in the push for change furthered by Black Lives Matter saw anything progressive in Cyrus’s gyrations.4

  The hip-wagging dancers of 2013 did not still themselves, and sometimes they spoke up, too. The rapper Nicki Minaj has emerged as a major star in this era, a skilled verbalist who is also an expert dancer; her song “Anaconda” extolls the power of the good booty while openly criticizing white America’s simultaneous denigration and appropriation of the black female form. Beyoncé herself, who has been championing good booty since Destiny’s Child had a hit with “Bootylicious” in 2001, continues to perform her own versions of the shimmy-shake even as she calls for greater respect for herself and her spiritual sisters. But a new sobriety, even censoriousness, now dominates the cultural mood, and this includes a certain discomfort about sexual self-expression. People are talking openly again about the problems of cultural appropriation, and about how black women often represent sexuality in music without being granted the right to their own self-possession. In league with these concerns, women musicians and fans of all races are speaking out in greater numbers about feeling exploited or suffering abuse within the good-time environments of their rock and hip-hop scenes.

  The music writer Jessica Hopper started a firestorm in August 2015 when she called for “gals/other marginalized folks” within the popular music world to post personal experiences of sexism on her Twitter feed. Hundreds of responses poured in. Hopper’s outreach inspired others. More women began speaking out about being harassed or raped by male musicians or music-industry executives. This mostly happened on an individual or grassroots level, in private online groups or through personal social media pages. But the secrets of the pop machine also threatened to leak when the pop singer and songwriter Kesha Rose Sebert sued her longtime producer, Lukasz Gottwald, in 2014. Seeking to terminate the contract that tied her to his company, Sebert accused Gottwald of drugging and raping her, and being “tyrannical and abusive since our relationship began.” She lost in court, but other artists voiced their support for her, feeding an ongoing critique of music’s pleasure culture that demands a reassessment of the fine lines between artists’ self-expression and exploitation by others, and between erotic encounters that enrich people’s lives and the kinds of encroachments that can destroy them.5

  These events within the music world reflect and intertwine with larger developments within American culture. Within the expanded realities of online life, people may feel more free, but new perils also present themselves, along with a great awareness of the ones that have always been present within the often unequal power exchanges that structure even our most tender interactions. The shocking yet all too commonplace revelations of Black Lives Matter show how black people’s bodies remain under siege; other forms of activism do the same for women’s bodies. A new generation of college students is fighting back against sexual assault on campus, reviving the “take back the night” activism of earlier feminist generations, now across cyberspace. Online sexual harassment and “slut shaming” have also become the focus of activists standing up to male “trolls” empowered by the anonymity and mobility the Internet affords. Women online are waging real, terrifying battles with harassers, whose behavior goes beyond lewd comments to include practices like “doxxing”—the procurement and online sharing of personal material including home addresses, intimate photographs, and credit information. Women have always known they need to protect themselves as they move through spaces dominated by men. Now the identities they shape in virtual space are proving just as vulnerable. Yet it’s also much easier to expose and organize against violators, thanks to the ability to share information instantly and widely. A new generation of activists believes that there is reason to rage, and reason to hope.6

  How music’s erotic expressions fit into these challenging but absolutely crucial conversations isn’t always clear. Protest makes sense: great new works like the rapper Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly have given activism a fresh soundtrack by expressing community pride and voicing the urgency of the public moment. It’s more difficult to figure out how to express intimacies, or make room for pleasure, at times when thinking about the body demands facing the many ways it can be diminished, even extinguished, instead of serving as a vessel of joy. Yet to contemplate this disjuncture, and to use music to live with it, is to return to the very birth of it as an American art form. There we are again, among the dancers in the streets of new cities as they try to reach out to each other and—every one of them, women, men, and transgender, white and of color, all really undefinable—demand to own themselves.

  “Freedom!” Beyoncé cries in her best church voice on the song by that name on Lemonade. And, in the same breath: “
I can’t move.” This anthem calls down the spirit of resistance that American music has conjured for as long as these sounds, African at heart, have existed. Not only Martin Luther King Jr., but his favorite singer Mahalia Jackson, and her inspiration Bessie Smith, and the Creole women whose names no one remembers, and the market women in Congo Square—all buoy and sustain her singing. So does that cry of “I can’t breathe!” from Eric Garner, which isn’t a shout for liberation, but evidence of the way those in struggle keep getting knocked down. The key samples in “Freedom” reinforce this tension: one is a sermonette from a Memphis Church in 1959, with a female congregation’s hymnody giving life to a male preacher’s words; the other is a work song recorded in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm penitentiary, where men sent coded messages of hope and defiance within the chants they shared under guards’ watch. Blending these elements as history has done, Beyoncé and her cowriters created a freedom song that lives within the loop of uplift and oppression always present in American popular music, which can seem confoundingly accelerated today.

  “Freedom, cut me loose!” Beyoncé begs. She’s just an entertainer; this is just music. But as people struggle, she knows, they reach for this: a way of remembering how to be somebody. When we think we can’t move, the music is always there to say we can.