Our Mister Brooks
David Brooks, supposedly a smart fellow, has tried yet again to take the pulse of cultural America. And yet again he has no idea how to do it. His latest screed purports to show how today's popular culture in America is so unlike that of decades past.
If you've been driving around listening to pop radio stations this spring and summer, you'll have noticed three songs that are pretty much unavoidable, and each of them is a long way from puppy love....
When Americans face something that's psychologically traumatic, they invent an autonomous Lone Ranger fantasy hero who can deal with it. The closing of the frontier brought us the hard-drinking cowboy loner. Urbanization brought us the hard-drinking detective loner.
Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don't get married until they're past 30. That's two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn't a transition anymore. It's a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules.
The three songs with these "Lone Rangers" are by Carrie Underwood, Pink, and April Lavigne. All three tell no-good, low-life men to sod off. This surely scares someone like David Brooks to pieces, for if women can tell their boyfriends to stop sleeping around, then gay marriage has to be next.
But the best part is Brooks's assertion that angry women getting revenge on their unworthy partners is something new:
If you put the songs together, you see they're about the same sort of character: a character who would have been socially unacceptable in a megahit pop song 10, let alone 30 years ago.
Baloney. Here's a three-part long-distance dedication from Tim in Massachusetts to David in New York.
- The first is from 1995 (that's 12 years ago), in which Alanis Morrisette bitterly tells her ex-boyfriend just how upset she is. And her attitude was hardly "socially unacceptable" in 1995—even without being released as a single, it was all over the airwaves then, and was the most recognizable song on an album that sold over 14 million units in the United States.
I want you to know, that I'm happy for you
I wish nothing but the best for you both
An older version of me
Is she perverted like me
Would she go down on you in a theatre
Does she speak eloquently
And would she have your baby
I'm sure she'd make a really excellent mother - The second is from 1979 (that's 28 years ago), when Pat Benatar lashes out at her cheating partner. One might say that she is "like one of those battle-hardened combat vets, who's had the sentimentality beaten out of her and who no longer has time for romance or etiquette." Indeed one might. "Hit Me With You Best Shot" sold over 1 million singles and hit the ninth spot on the main Billboard chart.
Well you're the real tough cookie with the long history
Of breaking little hearts, like the one in me
That's o.k., lets see how you do it
Put up your dukes, lets get down to it!
Hit me with your best shot!
Why don't you hit me with your best shot!
Hit me with your best shot!
Fire away! - And the final one goes back to 1966 (that's 41 years ago), in which we find that the kind of revenge that Carrie Underwood is plotting in 2007 was certainly part of pop culture in previous generations. It was, however, a a bit more pedestrian and a bit more metaphorical. With her Number One hit in both America and the United Kingdom, here's Nancy Sinatra.
You keep saying you got something for me
Something you call love but confess
You've been a'messin' where you shouldn't 've been a'messin'
And now someone else is getting all your best
Well, these boots are made for walking, and that's just what they'll do
One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you
But here is the best part. The Wikipedia entry on Sinatra's song tells us that "Nancy Sinatra was encouraged by Lee Hazlewood to sing the song as if she were a sixteen-year-old girl giving the brush-off to a forty-year-old man. And here is Brooks decrying the bitterness and anger that today's culture creates:
[The character in these songs is] disgusted by male idiots and contemptuous of the feminine flirts who cater to them. She's also, at least in some of the songs, about 16.
One of these days, some male columnist will write what women have known for millenia. Some men can be brutal, nasty, and swinish. Some of them prey on young women. It is not a bad thing—indeed, it is a very good thing—to call them on their misdeeds.
Just because David Brooks just noticed this sort of thing happening on the radio does not mean that it is something new. But perhaps he would have noticed if he were not so afraid of women speaking their minds.
Labels: Alanis Morrisette, angry women singers, April Lavigne, Carrie Underwood, David Brooks, Nancy Sinatra, Pat Benatar, Pink
