It’s Just a Song?
by Guthrie Ramsey | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
A while back I had my undies knotted up about all the social and print media coverage that the film Django was getting from the critics. I asked publicly and honestly why a project that many found so fraught was getting all of that digital ink. In my view, there were so many other cultural expressions to engage. The critic and scholar David Leonard provided a satisfying response when he said that mass mediated work of that magnitude provided him—someone who lived outside of a major cultural center—a way to speak about the issues he cared about to a large audience, knowing that many had also seen/heard a work in question. In social media years, the Django controversy seems like about a decade ago.
Although the Chinese calendar says it’s the year of the snake, we, in the Western hemisphere know that it’s clearly the year of Mrs. Beyoncé Carter, whose energy, marketing muscle, talent, female pulchritude and every rump shake creates its own bibliography and outcry. Her literal behind is famous and probably has an insurance policy. As a historian, I resist following the crowd for topics to think about, but as a professor with a group of undergraduate scholars to teach in my American Musical Life course, her ubiquity allows facile connections with large issues of social, musical, and historical analysis. Beyoncé-course and its discontents provide a great platform to introduce music production and meaning of the 20th and 21stcenturies.
I was minding my own business when a young scholar Regina Bradley sent me her blog “I Been on (Ratchet): Conceptualizing a Sonic Ratchet Aesthetic in Beyoncé’s “Bow Down,” which takes up Beyoncé’s new recording with the provocative hook “Bow Down, Bitches.” Bradley’s piece and its embedded links gave me a primer in ratchet discourse and introduced me other scholars who have discussed it. Regina does an admirable job analyzing the intertextualities and prior texts of the lyrical, instrumental and discursive aspects of the recording. Shortly thereafter, another young scholar, Maco Faniel sent me his highly contextualized blog “I am from that H-Town, I am Coming Down: Bow Down (Respect Us and Understand us in Context.” Faniel writes ethnographically about Houston’s early 1990s hip hop scene (which was a backdrop for Beyonce’s formative years), offering an informed window into this recording as it references site specific personalities, sonic conventions, and social attitudes from a vibrant historical moment. I appreciate this reading as it resonates with my own work on music and migration in the mid-20th century. Black southerners have never believed that northern media-scapes were superior to their own—just different.
And there was much more written. Judging from the amount and intensity of the Twitter feeds, blogs, Facebook posts, and email exchanges, we’ve got a live one here. Concerns about “Bow Down” have run the gamut. Was it appropriate feminism? Were her distracters simply “hating,” in predictable, garden-variety ways? Were her defenders standing up for feminist complexity? Shouldn’t we celebrate a very visible and obviously quite busy sistah’s moment to get her ratchet and nostalgic on in peace (and in front of a global audience base)? Were her critics dissing her black southern hip-hop roots, a tendency found in much pop music criticism? Shouldn’t she be allowed to speak back to her relentless critics--why did she lip synch?--why did she have to call it the “Mrs. Carter” tour?--why did her documentary have that infomercial feel?--why did she dress so scantily and gyrate so, so . . . during the Super Bowl? Add up all this constant pestering to that pile of dishes and diapers she probably has to wash in Mr. Carter’s house /and/ mix in the expectation to look glamorous even at the corner bodega together with the pressures of running a global pop music empire designed to keep her every artistic utterance before the masses while at the same time being fiercely private? You’d probably want to call out a few bitches, too. Plus, isn’t this “just a song” anyway, as one of her defenders claimed in a post?
Well, songs are important, and here’s why.
I define a song as a collision of structure, circumstance, and experience. They are incredibly powerful things, particularly when they are mass mediated. They do meaningful cultural work, and that’s why we care. The musicologist Carolyn Abbate wrote that “musical sounds are very bad at contradicting or resisting what is ascribed to them . . . . they shed associations and hence connotations so very easily, and absorb them, too.” In Race Music: Black Culture from Bebop to Hip-Hop I wrote that musical styles and social identities are a lot alike in that they are both processes that signify in the social world. And further, social identities share an important attribute ascribed to musical sounds: connotations and associations about identities are “very easily absorbed.” It’s part of the magic.
For these reasons, and in the tradition of Grimm’s fairy tales, “Bow Down” for me is both gift and poison. I’m curious about the structure of the track, its mode of production, the maker of the beat, its chop and screw elements, its three modes of timbral address in the vocals. On the formal elements of this song, both Bradley and Faniel have more than sufficiently described the “circumstance” of this song—its historical and geographic identity. At the same time, I find the sentiment of the lyrics—the emotional focal point of a song for a majority of listeners—are sophomoric, unfortunate, and, perhaps, even worse.
But, really—it’s just a song, one might still insist. Structures (lyrics, melody, harmony, timbres, rhythms, textures, technologies) are merely abstract principles. And, true: circumstances (the historical and geographic location where these structures form can always be appreciated as insider, local knowledge. We’ll always have to work diligently to discover and “hear” those meanings. Yet my third element of what constitutes a song—experience—allows, and, in fact—insists on thinking about how many other ways songs are made in and, indeed, make other contexts, other social worlds.
Here’s another context for why this song, circulated by one of the most mass-mediated pop platforms on planet Earth is lost on this listener. I learned about and experienced our inauguration singer’s latest installment in the following context.
I never like to see news trucks in my neighborhood unless they’re documenting some special performance in our modest band shell in the park. This morning on my way to catch the G train hustling to my favorite local café, I see the trucks, the unwelcome visitors. “What happened?” I asked the old dude with the toothless, weary face standing at the subway entrance. “A little girl got raped on the bottom floor,” deadpanning without changing his expressionless expression. “Where was the police?” he muttered as I dashed underground in the neighborhood now memorialized as the one that produced the talented Jay-Z. This terrible news was through serendipity collapsed with my experience of this song.
It had been a couple of weeks of ups and downs. Major news networks empathized and even sympathized with a sixteen-year-old girl’s attackers in Steubenville, Ohio. Two of the girl’s female classmates are arrested for threatening the victim for having the courage to testify after her motionless image was circulated on social media, her rapists holding her by the limbs like a slain calf. Part of their defense was that it was all just a joke.
The week prior had plunged me in other art worlds outside of the one in which this song circulated. I got to perform with the icon Amiri Baraka as he admonished the crowd of young poets and activists on the importance of establishing their own media platforms in order to keep their messages uncompromised. Got to see my colleague and friend the scholar and activist Salamishah Tillet, with whom I co-taught a course titled “Jazz is a Woman,” on MSNBC teaching America about rape culture and the importance of empowering girls as well as teaching our boys that they have a part to play as well. Got to participate in a book event about the South African singer and activist Sathima Bea Benjamin and her struggle to locate her freedom as a woman in music during the Apartheid era. Got invited by Darnell Moore, fervent activist for gender equalities, to comment on musical masculinities for The Feminist Wire, a site that I admire for its straight forward and radical message that women are human. (This might be greeted as news for some). At any rate, I was experiencing some enlightenment and hope when I confronted “Bow Down, Bitches” on a YouTube video with thousands of views.
One of the issues that I’m working through here is that, I believe in artistic freedom just like I believe in academic freedom. And I experience life in a variety of subject positions that demand I hear texts in a variety of ways. I don’t think it’s appropriate, on a lot of levels, for me to police what some women find empowering. But I also think its my right and responsibility—as a man who has a measure of influence in shaping young minds and building a safer world for my granddaughters through action and discourse—to contribute to the debate.
I deal professionally in four political economies: academia, mass media, social media, and the “art world.” I should also mention that I have a wife, a mother, sisters, daughters, granddaughters and other women I respect, love and from whom I learn. In the academy, the idea of “objectivity” has, thankfully, been revealed as a faulty construct to invisibly enforce one’s political agenda. We can now explain things from our various subject positions as well as connect the ideas and texts we study with our own lived experiences. We can now, thanks to the field of cultural studies, write about pop culture and build substantial and well-respected careers doing so. In the world of social media we can circulate our ideas quickly, test-run our theories, and build supportive communities of knowledge sharing—our carefully cultivated circles being our judge and jury. And in the art world we can question, conceptualize, and circulate our ideas about the social world through visual and sonic modes in ways that don’t have to be didactic, formulaic, nor immediately understood to have an impact.
As a result of a confluence of experiences I’ve had lately and the various spaces I occupy as a man, scholar, musician and critic, I’m going to continue to wrestle with corporate sponsored music that has such visceral impact and shock value. The sheer ubiquity of pop music expressions force us to have conversations with kids with whom you’d rather be talking about times tables, geography and why they are /not/ bitches. You know the old adage—if you have to explain a joke… Again, this music is not tucked away in some avant-garde museum exhibition: the same person being paraded around by POTUS and FLOTUS to middle school kids as a role model released it proudly. Maybe its time for a Jeremiah Wright moment and create a little distance? Just last month we—the community of people who understand that public language and discourse matter—were flummoxed when a writer at the institution The Onion tweeted to thousands of followers a vulgar slur about Quvenzhane Wallis. Matt Kirshen, a comedian and writer, responded on Huff Post Comedy how we had all missed the nuance of the joke. Right.
Maybe I should only respond as a dispassionate academic who works on mass-mediated texts, sometimes on social media, and as one who loves uncovering the subliminal messages in artistic work. (Maybe she doesn’t mean “literal” bitches here, and even if she does, it’s not our job to require a rich, influential woman to adhere to a politics of respectability, which is yet another way to police the inner-ratchet she has every right to express). Or maybe despite my efforts to keep my ears open and not “age out” of the cultural critic game, I’m out of place, behind the times and am, in fact, one of the bitches this lady is singing to.
For now I’m going to wonder, holding fear for the women I love, if the dude (or dudes) who was raping that baby three blocks from my house and where my wife takes public transportation was told something like “bow down bitch,” was called a c@#$ like that cute little self-possessed actress—this is just a complicated joke that you’ll understand better one day when you’re old enough to get ratchet. You’ll remember this as one of the things that made you complicated. Those who don’t agree with my critique are welcome to their own. But as a man who has lost a sister to domestic violence, I think I’ll stay in my lane and stick with my belief that demeaning language circulated widely by powerful corporations is one of the places where bad things start. It doesn’t work for me no matter how fine the pitchwoman or tight the melisma, particularly in today’s climate in which vulnerable women are under seize.
Oh, well Bubba, just funin’. Maybe Gramps just needs to go sit down somewhere, stop trying to police peoples and let mass-mediated millionaires do they thing on the internets. Let these folk make dey money. Maybe put on some nice jazz. Like trumpeter Nicholas Payton’s recent release, a CD titled Bitches…
LOL and SMH @ Bow Down Bitches [insert perfunctory colon]#HUHandWTF?
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Guthrie Ramseyis the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Follow him on Twitter at @DrGuyMusiqology and Musiqology.com
Title: It's Just a Song? Guthrie Ramsey on the Context(s) of Beyonce's "Bow Down"
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Rating: 100% based on 99998 ratings. 5 user reviews.
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