CUE RECORD SCREECHING TO A HALT.
Wait.
Wait.
Pop song lyrics about a man who beats his girlfriend so severely she SCARS are now a thing we can just drop in and blow by like nothing has been said are okay now? This is a thing? This is not any cause for concern?
Holy crap.
Look, I know I am an apologist for someone pretty rightly famed for his (fear and) obsession with women, and even I don't pretend he wasn't a misogynist. The songs he wrote which caused the most outrage were the most clearly fantastical.
This tune today? Nothing fantastical there. Quite pointedly prosaic and personal, this is a song about the curvatus en se personal foolishness of youth, and the bit about SCARRING A WOMAN just goes by without the slightest notice, even by the writer/singer. "I'm trying to make it up" basically is all we hear, which ... is not enough.
It's bad enough people are obsessed with a now years-old saga of two of the wealthiest and most famous music starlets of their time on-again/off-again dating each other ages after HE BATTERED HER VIOLENTLY. It's bad enough there remain huge swaths of "entertainment" dependent upon the rape and terrifying abuse of women and little girls in our culture (see also "news" cycles breathlessly relating to the latest Pretty White Girl abduction or murder - see also G-d damned LAW AND BLOODY ORDER SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT, which of course is at its most painstakingly special when someone has been specially, sickeningly violated and we get to explore THAT in loving detail).
No, now we get to SING, popular little teenaged songs, glorifying the inchoate angst of little boys who HIT GIRLS - meanwhile that girl is herself an invisible figure in this song, left either as the inspiration for the poor boy's cruelly debilitating self-interest or perhaps someone he'll need to be discarding soon, as she is the cause of unhappiness for him. Meanwhile the ABUSE he has inflicted upon her isn't even a FOOTNOTE in terms of the meaning of the song.
This is seriously just peachy. Boy howdy, I hope the idiot-hole who wrote that happy tune sure will make kabillions of kilobucks off it.
Please say something, please comment, please be horrified or explain to me I mis-heard this, or something - someone ... !
Editing to add: nope. The lyrics are, if anything, WORSE in b/w.
Please say something, please comment, please be horrified or explain to me I mis-heard this, or something - someone ... !
Editing to add: nope. The lyrics are, if anything, WORSE in b/w.
2 comments:
I'm with you completely. Our accelerating descent from decency scares the crap out of me. SVU?! No longer enough to require a MURDER for a cop show to exist, there's gotta be a rape. Look for the Sandusky episode during sweeps (spoiler, he's arrested for killing the priest who made him a victim all those years ago).
What really fries my bacon is that rape in itself is too "BORING" for television now. No, now it has to be child rape, or serial rape with lots of sick bells and whistles. It's got to be PERSONAL for some overwritten cop character, and it's got to come with excesses of preachy/quasi-"educational" exposition. And it's got to be shown, too. Because what's the fun of merely knowing a genuinely demented act occurs, if we can't watch it.
I remember when L&O (the original - not one of the eighty or so spinoffs they've spawned over the past ninety years on the air) was truly scary and had some sort of core value to it. Now it's just a blurring series of hideous, exploitive shocks.
Reasons I like my little Roku box: NOVA Science Now, Egypt's Golden Empire, Columbo (!!!!), even Frasier and Cheers. Even the more disturbing crap I watch (hello, "Battlestar"!) doesn't involve the sick treatment of children. Gugh.
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