January 04, 2010
top 25 songs of 2009: a five-paragraph essay on song 5
"Party in the USA," Miley Cyrus. A couple years back, sugarhigh! promised that Miley Cyrus would surely, sooner or later, succeed in buying a terrific song (but that in the meantime her position in the country arena had already been taken by the little-known Taylor Swift). And so, finally, she has. As mentioned earlier, this is not the first contribution to the countdown by producer/writer Doctor Luke, an American carefully trained in the ways of Swedish songcraft a la Max Martin, which is to say, hip-hop inflected synthpop for 14-year olds, a/k/a "the sound of the last 13 years since Robyn Is Here."
But this tradition and crew are not the only indications of the song's profoundly ambivalent relation to hip-hop. It's hard, no, impossible to enjoy Miley's disavowal of Jay-Z, who appears in the original lyric as the auteur of "my song." Britney plays the same role in the second verse, which Miley has seemed fine with; how could she not, given Britney's role in the Cheiron story? But Miley would claim not to have ever heard a Jay-Z song (really? really?) and shortly take to replacing "Jay-Z" with "Michael" in live performance. Like Michael the song, already a curious melange, turned white. Whatever, girl. It's a fab track, yeay you, and you are condemned to performing "Can I Get A..." as an encore for all of 2011.
Regardless, no amount of disavowal can efface the song's telltale heart. The song begins with a bright, superclean electric guitar loop with a bounce beat underneath, as Miley flies into LAX for a party, and there she is rolling through the streets singing "Welcome to the land of fame-excess." We are 18 seconds in, and a male backup singer punctuates her line with a "whoa!" It's hard to think of a single-syllable word as having a particular inflection, but it does — and if you want to hear the exact same inflection, you should listen to the "hey" that punctuates Nelly's "Ride Wit Me." It first comes rather at the 19 second mark, male backup singers punctuating the phrase "oh why do I live this way?" That song, you will recall, begins with a bright, superclean electric guitar loop with a bounce beat underneath, and involves driving around various places. And when Nelly flies into town for a party, it's in New York. Totally different.
Well, so what? The structure of a hit song is based extensively on the structure of another hit song; neither big news nor crime. And it does so while simultaneously avowing/disavowing the theft (through the displacement of Nelly onto Jay-Z, and then the banishing of same); this is interesting if you are at all like us, but scarcely front page news. If anything, it's a nice footnote for Eric Lott. But it is perhaps a useful reminder of something important about 2009, which is what "post-racial" really meant. It certainly didn't mean that structural, systemic and overt racial discrimination had come to an end — unless one ignores all data except for the outcome of a presidential election, which we admit was a popular undertaking. Black people, and other people of color, still had to bear the burden. The phrase meant that the US was post-racial for white people (to be more specific, as this must seem obvious to many, it meant that the US was post-racial for Miley's core audience). The debt for centuries of theft was finally put paid, rendered invisible. Or so was devoutly hoped, and pretended — a pretense with the power of reality.
The concept doesn't mean that Nelly is now free of any markings, but rather that Miley is, in that sense of free. This is the politics of the "death of hip-hop" — it survives but beyond politics, without the power to signal difference, marginalization, race. Or to phrase things anther way: we are post-racial to the extent that an incredibly elaborate set of determinations has got us to the place where a song can be at once entirely dipped in the language of hip-hop and come out of the river shining of country grammar.
Posted by jane at January 4, 2010 12:11 AM | TrackBack