“Funny the way it is,
Not right or wrong,
Someone’s heart is broken,
It becomes your favorite song.”
As the corny chorus of the Dave Matthews Band’s newest single titled “Funny the Way it is” suggests (see, I told you all that I’d weave DMB into my posts!), individuals’ personal experiences with love, relationships, and emotions in general have manifested themselves in multi-modal textual, musical, and video texts for well, ever. As technology has changed, and still continues to change, so does the means and complexity of the expression (for a good laugh, Google “break up tweets”). When identified with via the masses, certain texts have moved beyond simply being distant representations of the emotions of the original writer, to being accepted as representing the unique emotions of the individual consumer. In other words, consumers may no longer distantly view the text as an abstraction of an outsider's emotions, but directly integrate it into their individual identities as a means to process and represent their own unique experiences. “When I hear that song, it’s like they’re talking about ME!” Is something I’ve heard teenage students say over, and over, AND over again. And, I’m sure I’ve said it many times myself!
When the above scenario happens, we’re talking some major BLING BLING for artists producing such texts! Whether or not we personally “like” and / or find Lesley Gore, Fiona Apple, or Lil’ Kim “appropriate,” young people have integrated these writers’ respective texts into their own identities as a strategy to make sense out of the new experiences they encounter as adolescents. Whether or not we like the process or not, it is INEVITABLE! And, within the context of this particular assignment, and as a future teacher, extremely USEFUL, I might add. Depending on the discourse, we as educators consider analyzing the past extremely important. Social Studies teachers analyze the past to better understand the formation and interpretation of our modern constitution (I'm being reductive, I know). English teachers analyze the past to better understand how humans have collectively come together, or not, to process love, hate, life, and death. And so on and so forth, you get the drift. To add to the teacher’s toolbox, pop culture texts can be yet additional “windows” to the past and explored alongside traditional sources to further illuminate the conditions of the past, present, and future.
Throughout my graduate program so far, my colleagues and I have talked frequently about how the discourse of English may be used to lay bare certain pervasive ideologies operating throughout history, explore how they work, question them, and most important, DO SOMETHING ABOUT THEM if we do not believe that they set us in the “direction” we want to go as a global society. Although there are many, many ideologies that I believe are relevant to explore, the texts of “It’s My Party” (Gore), “Criminal” (Apple), and “How Many Licks” (Kim) serve as windows to take a detailed look at the power relations between men and women. When read together, these texts largely work to further reify the dominant ideology that women’s only power is afforded via their inherently uncontrollable, hyper sexuality, and are therefore considered an “illegitimate” power that requires control and moderation by men’s “legitimate” power.
Composed nearly 50 years ago in 1963, “It’s my Party” positions Gore as the female subject of the song as being fixated on one thing and one thing only; securing the love of the male “Johnny” who is responsible for guiding the song’s narrative-like trajectory. Although the accompanying imagery is significantly more toned down than what the viewer finds in Apple’s and Kim’s more contemporary texts, Gore is similarly represented as a hyper sexualized being pining over what she cannot have; Johnny himself. This hyper sexualization is further reinforced as the camera pans across the dancing female Gore, with her female backup dancers moving their bodies to the music, potentially alluring Johnny with their femininity to come appease Gore and her wish for Johnny.
However, as the narrative-like lyrics go on to tell, Gore has witnessed Johnny leave the party with another female, Judy: “Nobody knows where my Johnny has gone, but Judy left the same time, why was he holding her hand, when he’s supposed to be mine.” At this point, the all too familiar course kicks in, and the viewer witnesses Gore’s strategy to re-possess "her" Johnny; crying, and otherwise making her own party as miserable as possible until she gets “her” Johnny back. As a cumulative result, Johnny is positioned as the arbiter of not only Gore, but the “fate” of the entire party at large, which could be interpreted as an extended metaphor for many things including Gore’s life, community, and overall society, itself. In other words, Gore’s only power of crying is rendered completely illegitimate and non-effective to Johnny’s power to select yet another sexualized party guest that will submit to him, sans the “bitching;” an example of the reinforcement of yet another modern stereotype of the woman as the crazy “bitch.”
Gore continues to illegitimize her power over her party as she repeats the chorus of the song: “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to… YOU would cry too if it happened to you.” As she directly addresses her audience, Gore attempts to rationalize her actions by insisting that other female listeners would do the same thing if they were in her shoes. However, despite Gores strategy of self-sabotaging her party via her crying, she does not hold the final power as Johnny has committed himself to Judy. Overall, the cumulative ideology broadcast by Gore to her 1963 audience is that women are completely subject to men’s power, with no higher level strategy aside from screaming and crying available to help themselves.
Fiona Apple Criminal video
Composed nearly 13 years ago in 1997, “Criminal” positions Apple as being similarly hyper sexualized, but with much more explicit images. Where the “raunchiest” thing to be seen in Gore’s 1963 video is women dancing, the images in “Criminal” leave nothing to the imagination. As we see the camera pan around the seedy apartment with beer bottles, cigarettes, and half-naked bodies scattered about, we KNOW that some scandalous stuff went down. As the lyrics are paired and closely read with these images, Apple is positioned as inherently not in control of her own hyper sexuality, causing her to commit the adultery that she has regardless of its moral implications: “Heaven help me for the way I am… But I keep living this day like the next will never come.” Through these lines, Apple implies that she has been “created” an immoral being, and begs to be changed and “saved.” However, because she is inherently so hyper sexualized, she therefore has no legitimate will and perhaps ability to control herself, deciding to continue with the behavior that she is ashamed of.
Where Johnny is the final arbiter and holder of power in Gore’s song, the nameless, and faceless, man to which Apple wishes to atone is the holder of power in “Criminal:” “And I need to be redeemed to the one I’ve sinned against because he’s all I ever knew of love.” By the end of Apple’s video, it’s clear that she is stuck in a complicated pattern of sinning, wishing to atone, but enjoying the sin too much to atone, and overall perceiving no way out if left to her own devises. Although a possible interpretative stretch, I read this text as just BEGGING for a sort of Deus Ex Machina to enter the textual world, break Apple’s vicious pattern, and “save” her. But, it’s highly unlikely to me that such a power will intervene. As such, Apple’s fate and “salvation” rests on being forgiven by a legitimate source of power, a power that is never realized as Apple’s inherent sexuality blocks her from committing to making the actual “play” for her “redemption” that she begs for: “I’ve got to make a play, to make my lover stay, so what would an angel say, the devil wants to know.”
Overall, the cumulative broadcast broadcast to Apple's 1997 audience is that women are naturally “damned” by their hyper sexuality. Although women may wish to break free of the pattern of behavior that dominates their lives, their inherently sexualized being naturally prevents them from taking any initiative, forever causing them to remain in a submissive, “damned” position.
Composed nearly 10 years ago in 2000, Lil’ Kim’s “How Many Licks” most explicitly positions woman as inherently hyper sexualized beings. As similar to Apple implying that she had been “created” a hyper sexualized being via heaven, Kim similarly positions herself as being “manufactured” as such as she is literally “assembled” in a sort of factory. The extended metaphors here are very complex. If Kim and her three personalities are being “manufactured” on an assembly line, there is logically someone doing the manufacturing. As we can see by the behavior of each of Kim’s three personalities, Kim is likewise “programmed” to do anything sexually without such behavior coming into conflict with any traditional moral paradigms. The viewer can later see that Kim is enjoying her behavior as she states, “That’s what I liked about it!” in response to a graphic sexual experience.
However, Kim’s third personality, “Nightrider Kim,” throws an interesting monkey wrench into the equation. At one point, Kim pulls up next to a man on the street in her sports car and text flashes across the screen stating, “She doesn’t satisfy you. You satisfy her.” On the surface, I read this scene as reinforcing an ideology counter to what I have been arguing throughout this post; that woman are in control of their sexuality and therefore use it to manipulate and hold power over men. However, as I read deeper, I was reminded of my previous interpretation of someone literally "manufacturing / programming" Kim herself. Although Kim is indeed in control of her man via her sexuality, is this basic behavior actually HER choice? Or, was this behavior literally programmed into her while being created on the assembly line? If the answer is the later, Kim’s power over men is an absolute illusion, as someone else is in control of her core behavior from the start as yet another way to satisfy their masculine need of sex.
Overall, the cumulative ideology broadcast to Kim's 2000 audience is extremely complex. On the surface, it looks as though Kim is telling her audience that woman’s sexuality affords them a tremendous amount of power control over men. However, Kim calls into question woman’s very free will and choice as she implies that such power may be a “manufactured” illusion as yet another means to serve men.
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THE IMPORTANT PART!!!
Earlier on in my post, I argued that integrating pop culture texts into the classroom can accomplishing a number of valuable instructional goals including laying bare pervasive ideologies operating throughout history, exploring how they work, questioning them, and doing something about them if we do not believe that they set us in the direction we want to go as a global society. Throughout my above analysis, I’m fairly confident that I at least exposed a couple of ideologies for you. CHECK. I also believe that I explored their inner-workings. CHECK. Then, that exploration of their workings led to some questions about them. CHECK. However, this is as far as I feel as I was able to get with you, as the writers of these original texts stop here. Lil’ Kim goes as far as questioning WHO exactly is in control of women’s behaviors, but stops there. None of these artists go the extra step and offer an alternative ideology / way to challenge the existing ideology as a way to create change. As a result, although perhaps getting us as a global society to the questioning stage, I believe that the dominant ideologies I have described and analyzed above continue to be perpetuated.
For example, view a current artifact of 2009 pop culture; Taylor Swift’s music video titled “You Belong to Me:”
Other than Swift’s character ending up with the guy at the conclusion of this text, how is it any different in terms of the ideologies it communicates than the other three texts? Just like Gore’s text, Swift’s entire world is centered on attaining the affections of a man. Just like Apple’s text, Swift’s identity is in a state of “limbo” (as the viewer can see by her trying on outfit after outfit), and completely contingent on the acknowledgment of an outside power. Just like Kim’s text, Swift ends up with the guy, but the viewer is forced to question if this is what SHE really choose, or if the choice was already “programmed” into her. NONE of these texts go the extra distance to offer up another competing ideology to challenge the existing. However, if Taylor snubbed the guy at the dance near the conclusion of the video, adolescent girls would be less likely to identify with it as it would not as closely “speak for” their experience, and Taylor Swift wouldn’t make as much, if any, money.
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Therefore, I have arrived at the following behemoth question after completing this assignment…
-When using pop culture texts, how do we as educators work WITH our students to discover and discuss additional, competing ideologies?
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