David Guetta/Akon

Discussion time. Back in May (May 28) I blogged this from Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed:

“From Curtis Mayfield to 50 Cent, from Nina Simone to JayZ, black music has declined in its quality and lost its moral stance. That’s the contention of the cultural critic Paul Gilroy”.

With that view in mind, please feel free to check out the lyrics of David Guetta and Akon’s latest song - below. I recently had the temerity to suggest to someone that these were extremely sexist lyrics. They roundly rejected my claim. What do you think? And of course, a question is begged - what is sexism? And another - what effect, if any, do media have upon us?

Lyrics from “Sexy Bitch”

She’s nothing like a girl you’ve ever seen before!
Nothing you can compare to your neighborhood whore!
I’m tryinna find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful!!!

The way, that booty movin’ - I can’t take no more
Have to stop what I’m doin’, so I can pull up her close
I’m tryinna find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful

Damn Girl!!!

Damn, you’s a sexy bitch, sexy bitch!
Damn, you’s a sexy bitch!

For what it’s worth - my interpretation. The title itself is sexist - use of the derogatory term ‘bitch’. The third line - strange - why is it hard to describe a girl without being disrespectful? One suggestion given to me was that this would involve comparison with other girls, thus putting them down, and that would be disrespectful. I find this hard to believe - there’s no mention of other girls - except the ‘neighborhood whore’ in the previous line, and since she’s already been labelled a whore, it seems hard to envisage how Mr Guetta or Mr Akon could be any more disrespectful. Unless of course it is simply an empirical observation. That last sentence is a joke of course if you remember either Kuhn or Popper. So my feeling is that he (the singer/songwriter) means he can’t describe the girl without being disrespectful because he would have to describe her with reference to her sexuality and her physique. He hints - I think - that he wants to describe her physical attributes, but recognises that this might be considered ‘inappropriate’ in some way; too presumptuous perhaps. Yet that is contradictory because that is what he does in the very next line, and throughout the song. My conclusion is that the singers/writers hold contradictory views about women, men and sexuality. These contradictions enable them to simultaneously claim to ‘like women’, even to put them on a pedestal, to celebrate femininity, whilst at the same time seeing women as existing purely as sexual objects whose primary purpose is to satisfy men’s sexual impulses. I would agree wholeheartedly with Paul Gilroy -never mind the reggae of the 70s - contemporary black music - or at least some of it - is a long, long way from the sensitivity and humanity of 60s Motown, of singers like Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and so the list could go on and on. But is this to adopt a puritanical, Mary Whitehouse view of some types of pop music? Not at all. If you want to know about good ways of representing sex in pop music there are any number of singers, bands, whatever, to listen to, but who do it in a good way. Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, Van Morrison, The La’s, even Ian Dury, and more recently Gnarls Barklay and Cee Lo Green. And many others.