In pop’s top songs, harm disguised by charm
The sensitive misogynist is all over the charts these days.
Drake, the Weeknd, Justin Bieber — there they are, moaning about the emptiness they feel whilst sinking into bottomless mounds of money and/or drugs with many, many beautiful women night after night. Then apologizing for it and hating themselves for all the fun they had the next morning.
Oh, the agony of it all. And by the way, lads, just because your discographies are choked with songs about how you feel bad about treating women like garbage and how your inability to truly “love” or “commit” has forced you to treat them like garbage, you are not absolved of routinely treating women as, yep, garbage in song.
It’s not as explicit as, say, Eminem back when he was imagining murdering on/off ex “Kim” and taking his toddler on a burial run after slashing mama’s throat on “’97 Bonnie & Clyde,” but at least there was no mistaking his use of misogyny as entertainment. And I, for one, appreciate that: as a thinking human being, I have no recourse but to confront what it means to consume and enjoy that sort of objectionable content for fun.
Yet some of the biggest and most celebrated Canadian albums of 2015 — Drake’s million-selling If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, the Weeknd’s Beauty Behind the Madness and even Justin Bieber’s Purpose — are built upon similar, if far more subtle, foundations of “casual misogyny.” Only rarely is this acknowledged, however, because the artists have managed to glaze over the general sexism of their oeuvres with a veneer of regretful, tormented sensitivity.
The Weeknd’s whole thing has been based on the celebration of remorseless, drug-addled hedonism and the remorse of the post-coital comedown since House of Balloons started it all in 2011. But if we’re going by the lyrics, he clearly hasn’t learned anything about how to treat the ladies despite all the tormented soul-searching that’s gone on over the two EPs and two LPs to follow.
Abel Tesfaye, in character as the Weeknd, attained peak creepiness when he appears to issue a lover a group-sex ultimatum on Echoes of Silence’s “Initiation.”
That character is less overtly violent but still on full display, right from the top of Beauty Behind the Madness, proclaiming on “Real Life,” “Tell ’em this boy wasn’t meant for lovin’.” He then welcomes an endless stream of ladies into his lair and dismisses them afterwards with such parting bon mots as “Stupid’s next to ‘I love you’ ” (“Losers”) and “If I had her, you can have her, man / It don’t matter” (“Often”).
On “Tell Your Friends” he invites others to enjoy similarly meaningless throwaway liaisons with “The n--ga with the hair / Singin’ ’bout poppin’ pills / F---in’ bitches / Livin’ life so true.”
Meanwhile, Drake — “everyone’s favourite ball of Canadian sensitivity,” as People recently put it — spends a good deal of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late and the recent single “Hotline Bling” lamenting the nice girls who eventually left.
God forbid they might actually be getting on with their lives and even “wearing less and goin’ out more” now that he’s, you know, regretfully makin’ it rain in a club in another city or doing whatever other activities involving beautiful ladies he hates himself for doing with all that awful, awful money he likes to talk about.
Bieber’s Purpose, for its part, is one long plea to be given one more chance after all his indiscretions.
But it’s also one long, breathy come-on trying to lure women into the boudoir.
“I’ll take every piece of the blame / If you want me to,” says Bieber on “Sorry,” acknowledging that he’s made mistakes “maybe a couple hundred times . . . But you know there’s no innocent one in this game for two.” If he admits he’s wrong, maybe she can too and then they can “say forget this.”
By the way, he adds, “I’m missing more than your body” — which is exactly what guys say when they’re trying to get their hands on that body. Not that these attitudes are anything new, but these songs are having a cultural moment on the pop charts.
Now Magazine contributor Mark Streeter quips that he’s groused around his own office, as this writer has done, about “pop in 2015 being overfull of Men Who Know They Are Bad And Are Not All That Bummed About It.”
Nevertheless, he adds, “I also don’t think it’s necessarily contained to men; the broader umbrella of ‘vulnerability’ that critics like to invoke when talking about these pop stars seems also present in people like Lana Del Rey, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna and Azealia Banks, to name a few, either in the form of embodying some gaze fantasy or being ‘unapologetically fierce’ or what have you. Likewise, I think Father John Misty trades in the ‘I’m a piece of s--- and I know it’ persona, but it’s coded onto a classic-rock aesthetic (sic) instead of hip-hop or R&B.”
Toronto music writer Anupa Mistry — who recently scored an ultrarare face-to-face with Tesfaye for Pitchfork — points out the same comments made above about the Weeknd, Drake and Bieber could be equally applied to songs by One Direction or Magic! (“‘Rude’ is just as ‘woe is me’ as ‘Hotline Bling’ ”).
“I can’t speak for the Weeknd; when I talked with him there certainly wasn’t much nuance in his answer to what women in his life think of the misogyny in his music. But I think Drake makes songs about emotionally narcissistic men while also making a point of surrounding and aligning himself with strong women — and black women in particular — in his real life,” she observes.
There might even be some good to come from the vulnerable, tormented characters they portray in their music. “I wonder if what these guys are unintentionally doing is reversing the persistent and damaging trope that women are always the emotional/irrational ones in romantic relationships,” Mistry adds.
Alicia Atout, who presides over the website A Music Blog, Yea?, concurs with Mistry that none of today’s pop stars are necessarily “being any more misogynistic than anyone else.”
But she does have a mild issue with artists who get an easier ride for espousing such attitudes “if they try to hide behind a facade or character, and both Drake and the Weeknd do this. I prefer to hear people shoot straight and have the balls to say what they mean.”
All this heart-on-sleeve business can get very confusing. Back in the day, a sentiment like “Smack My Bitch Up” staked its ground much more clearly. But the same message delivered with a little tenderness is still, ultimately, the same message. brayner@thestar.ca