Overclocked: Race to the Bottom

Welcome to another installment of Overclocked, in which I, your humble blogger, think too hard about things for your amusement.

Today I'd like to talk about the direction Pop Culture is taking. Without getting into too much detail, I work in a setting where I'm frequently subjected to radio stations that play whatever crap is currently most popular. Typically, this boils down to the same dozen or so songs repeated six or seven times each during the course of a day.

In retrospect, I can say I took some perverse amusement watching Rihanna, Britney Spears and Katy Perry racing to the bottom of the cultural barrel in the following timeline:

Rihanna releases Rude Boy, a song about rough sex. No euphemism either, though it's explicitness is muted (I like it when you pull my hair/I like it when you touch me there)

Britney Spears, not to be outdone, releases 3, a song about threesomes. Again, this is not veiled with innuendo. The song is explicit and obvious about what's going on.

Rihanna, affronted by this tired, played out performers' attempt to upstage her on the brazen promiscuity front, releases S&M, a song that features the lyrics "Sticks and stones may break my bones but chains and whips excite me."

And, as if to make sure nobody should doubt her cred, she takes these two songs and goes on a tour that features Chris Brown.

Katy Perry, who must have been watching this scuffle with great amusement, trumps all of them, then releases "Extraterrestrial," a song about something that rhymes with pentacle grape, and is again not hiding behind euphemism. It features the lines "You're an alien/you're just too far in/it's supernatural" and a male voice saying "I'm 'a disrobe you/then I'm 'a probe you/ I abducted you/ so I tell you what to do/ I tell you what to do."


Rihanna seems to have taken her defeat in stride, and is taking the "I never wanted to win in the first place" attitude. I say that because her latest song, Man Down, sounds an awful lot like the work of a woman who is trying to disown the reputation for writing two songs about enjoying getting roughed up in the bedroom, and then going on tour to sing the songs with an ex boyfriend who beat her up.

Which is a roundabout way of saying the song has all the trappings of attempting to be deep, without actually being deep.

Man Down is, at it's core, a ripoff of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody that is flavored with, and I'm completely serious here, The Little Drummer Boy.

No, seriously. The refrain literally goes:

Rum bum bum bum
Rum bum bum bum
Rum bum bum bum
Man down.

The basic gist of the song is a woman telling her mother that she killed a man, in public, over a minor disagreement and feels really bad about being having to hide from the law.

Which is where I point out that at least Freddy Mercury's take on this theme was that he'd done it, and would have to face some consequences.

One of the bars in the song that sees a lot of repetition is:

I didn't mean to hurt him
Could've been somebody's son
and I took his heart when
I pulled out that gun

So... if you didn't mean to hurt him, maybe you shouldn't have pulled a gun on him. Just sayin'.

I know, I know. Hindsight and all that.

Also, what is this "could've been somebody's son" nonsense? Every man is somebody's son. It's not like he sprang from the ground fully grown and ready to disagree with Rihanna about a subject she was touchy enough to kill over.

Just because he's made up doesn't mean that your narrative doesn't have to make sense.

Then again, perhaps I expect to much, because another line that sees a lot of repetition is this:

Mama, I just shot a man down
In central station
In front of a big old crowd

So maybe if she's dumb enough to shoot a man dead in front of a crowd of people, maybe we can't assume she's smart enough to know where babies come from. I guess there's some continuity there.

Speaking of repetition, there's a whole lot of that going on. The song lyrics read like an essay by a high school student who can't quite figure out how to fill up a hundred words, so she starts repeating herself. But she repeats herself inartfully, with bars like:

Look, I never thought I'd do it
Never thought I'd do it
Never thought I'd do it, oh gosh
What ever happened to me
Ever happened to me, ever happened to me
Why did I pull the trigger
Pull the trigger, pull the trigger, boom
And end a (racial epithet redacted) end a (racial epithet redacted) life so soon
When me pull the trigger, pull the trigger, pull it 'pon you
Somebody tell me what I'm gonna, what I'm gonna do

Rum bum bum bum
Rum bum bum bum
Rum bum bum bum
Me say wah man down (A weh me say)
Rum bum bum bum
Rum bum bum bum
Rum bum bum bum
When me went downtown

'Cause now I am a criminal, criminal, criminal
Oh lord have mercy now I am a criminal

So, is she a criminal? Because she's being so damn coy about it that I can't tell.

Lyrically, the song is obviously a train wreck, but it does provide some insight into the pop culture mindset. You see, most people working in pop culture as entertainers; singers, actors and the like; tend to be very high on gun control (among other things). When you write songs, you write songs you think people will connect with. You strive to achieve universal understanding.

If you're writing this song, you're idea of the universal experience is that if you have a "simple altercation" (as the lyric in the song describes it) and you have a gun, you will end up shooting somebody. Either you believe this, or you believe it will ring true with a majority of your fans. Art is truth, even bad art.

Seen in this light, it's no wonder Hollywood types want to clamp down on gun ownership. If you think that most people can identify with a mindset that would take an argument and resolve it with a hail of gunfire if only you had the weapons available, then naturally you think that human beings are too dangerous to be trusted with weapons.

I don't know how the song would have played out if Rihanna's character hadn't owned a gun. Presumably she would have reasoned with him, since the volatile addition of a firearm clearly destroyed her ability to foresee consequences for bad behavior.

Or maybe she would have just pushed him in front of a train, but that wouldn't have been a cautionary tale, since nobody thinks we should ban trains. (Some people want them to be privately run, but despite what you might have heard that's not the same thing.)

Most likely, though, she just never would have written the song at all.

Which is probably the best argument for disarmament that I can think of.

Overclocked Episode 2: Rapture, human nature, and which one Andrew Ryan was wrong about.

Welcome to the second irregular installment of Overclocked, in which I go off the deep end and think too hard about something in the hopes that my tortured musings will entertain you. Kind of like Christians in Rome, except the lions are all figurative and live in my head.

Lately I’ve been playing Bioshock 2, which takes place sometime after the game that Ken Levine conceived and sometime before the series ceases to be a profitable brand. The two games have more than Big Daddies and creepy little girls with glowing eyes in common. Both games are skewering one political viewpoint while a significant number of players of the game think they’re skewering a different ones.

In Bioshock the first, the message most people took from the game (at least as far as I can judge by reading reviews) is that capitalism = bad. In fact, the message of the first one is that objectivism doesn’t work as a form of government. I can understand the misconception. At its core, free market capitalism is about letting entities sort out the best way of doing things for themselves with minimal supervision, and that people who earn money should be allowed to keep it. There is common ground there, but the difference is that free marketers favor a system by which property rights can be enforced. This gets back to the whole “keeping what you earn” thing, because there are more people than just government officials who look at your money and think “that belongs to me!”

The objectivist doesn’t agree. To the objectivist, you are entitled to keep only what you can keep. If someone with a bigger gun than yours comes along, well then your money belongs to him now. Unless he falls into some kind of repetitive pattern where he exposes a weak point for you to exploit every third attack. But since life isn’t a Zelda game, that’s not very likely.

The problem with most objectivists is that they don’t even recognize the possibility that someone with a bigger gun would try to take your stuff. Thus, the problem of objectivism is not that objectivism is objectively wrong, but that objectivists are incurably optimistic about human nature. They don’t think out the consequences of their own policies under the immutable fact that human beings are nasty, wicked creatures who will do what benefits them in the easiest way possible unless someone or something stops them from doing so. That’s why societies have laws and constabularies.

This blindness that objectivists have for the unscrupulous is precisely why Atlus caught Andrew Ryan so off guard in Rapture. To Ryan, he had created a true utopia, in which everyone was free to explore their own full potential in the absence of stifling laws or cultural mores. It simply never occurred to him that anyone would want to run the place for his own gain. Just like it never occurred to him that it might be a bad idea to let people give themselves super powers by freebasing sea slugs. What they do with their bodies isn’t his business, right?

Bioshock 2 is likewise likely to be misunderstood. I expect people will take it as a shot at Christianity, when in fact it’s about fascism.

Yes, yes. Feel free to pat yourself on the back. I’m sure you’re the first person clever enough to think “what’s the difference” to the above sentence. Good for you.

Fascism usually starts where you have a disproportionate amount of losers in a society. I don’t mean losers in the forty-seven-years-old-and-his-mom-still-picks-his-clothes-for-him sense, but in the actual I-tried-to-open-a-business-and-lost-my-shirt kind of way. When you get a lot of society’s losers in one place, you get at least one person who sees those losers and realizes that there is power in numbers. That person will then take up the cause of the downtrodden and offer them something they want, or think they want. Chances are they don’t even believe what they’re peddling; they’re just trying to get power.

For Sophia Lamb, she saw that people were missing G-d. Ryan, being the secular humanist and objectivist libertarian that he was, saw religion as a hindrance to the greatness of man. So long as you believe in a power greater than your own, and adhere to artificial laws handed down from some musty old book, then you can never be truly free. Or so Ryan would argue. So naturally, religion was discouraged in Rapture. And bibles are the only books to be banned.

The interesting thing about Bioshock 2 is that it changes the meaning of some of what the player saw in the first game. The first game featured smuggler’s crates full of bibles, and the introduction of the spider splicers had them spouting pseudo scripture instead of the usual incoherent ramblings the player had come to expect from splicers. This was to be taken as hypocrisy on Ryan’s part; the great champion of freedom in all things taking the decidedly totalitarian step of banning literature as subversive. In the context of Bioshock 2, we see that Ryan wasn’t simply preventing people from reading the good book, but was defending Rapture from the fascistic rumblings of Sophia Lamb.

This is made clear in the audio logs, in which Ryan voices his disapproval of Lamb’s coordination of artistic activities in Dionysus Park. He explicitly says that he disapproves, but as it’s Lamb’s property, he has nothing to say about it. But he adds ominously that he will take a sledgehammer to the place if his investigation of Lamb confirms his suspicions.

This exposes Ryan not as the megalomaniac we first took him for in the first game, but as a tragically deluded figure who truly believed his vision would be best for everyone, and was trying to defend the nature of Rapture against elements who would turn it into another totalitarian state.

Lamb, however, is the prototypical power-grabbing fascist aspiring to dictatordom. She uses high flown rhetoric about unity (in Lamb’s case, the buzz word is Family, but it might as well have been Worker, Proletariat, or any of a hundred terms that real-world fascists use to claim they speak for the people) to whip up support for her agenda, but she’s certainly not above strong-arming the odd surrogate mother into giving up a child if it benefits her. Lamb’s own transgressions against the family are forgivable, even laudable, because her only real principle is that of the attainment of power. Because, like any fascist, she believes that everything would be beer and skittles if only she ran everything.

Ryan was actually trying something new. Something that had never been tried before. But it didn’t work out, because people are people. Lamb is just rehashing the ideas and tactics of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joe Stalin and Che Guevara. That never works either, for much the same reason.

Which is kind of fitting, when you think about it. What could be more appropriate to a sequel than a villain that cranks out the same old rhetoric hoping that it will work this time?

Overclocked Episode 1: Country and Strong Women

Welcome to Overclocked! A new feature for Free Toy Inside, in which I (the author) think too hard about a given subject in an attempt to ruin for myself and everyone else. It’s a bit like Yahtzee’s zero punctuation review, but instead of quick-tongued lambasting and humorous scatological references, I’ll be making earnest philosophical arguments that will hopefully be self parodying enough to keep you entertained.

This week I’d like to discuss the song Before He Cheats, by “country” singer Carrie Underwood.

I hear this song frequently, because it’s played on the radio station that’s piped into the production line and engineering labs at my work. Also, I’m a country fan and this song was unavoidable for a few months back when it first came out. It’s not country, but more on that later. The song is about a supposedly wronged woman who exerts her revenge by destroying her boyfriend/husband’s truck. The description of the damage wrought is described in gleeful, almost pornographic detail. The listener is intended to revel in the destruction and to applaud the singer for being one tough cookie. All of these premises are questionable.

First off, I’d like to address the lack of empirical evidence that the singer provides the listener as justification for her vandalizing rampage. Let’s consider the first line.

Right now, he’s probably slow dancing with some bleached-blonde tramp and she’s probably getting frisky.

I added emphasis over the key words in this line: probably. Right off the bat, the singer is telling us that she doesn’t even know for sure that her husband/boyfriend is actually cheating on her. Every wrong thing that the man allegedly does in the song is prefaced by the word “probably.”

Given the extent of the vandalism that the singer believes is justified based on speculation, one can only wonder what she would have done to the man she were certain of his perfidy. But we don’t know he’s actually cheating. Indeed, we don’t even know if he’s in the bar.

Now, it would of course be ridiculous to expect any significant backstory in a song. But generally wronged-woman songs are more resolute in their assertions of wrongdoing. If the singer is unsure about the activities of her allegedly wayward man, how are we to assume anything she says about him is true? How do we know he didn’t lend his car to a friend to impress the woman she imagines so vividly in the bar? How do we even know there is a woman at all? Is it beyond the realm of possibility that her man is drinking beer and shooting pool with the guys?

The singer doesn’t tell us she saw him doing anything. She tells us what she imagines him doing because she saw his car in a parking lot that it presumably shouldn’t have been in. And even that assertion is tenuous, because we don’t know why he’s not supposed to be there.

As the listener, we honestly don’t even know that he knows they’re in a relationship. Given her unhinged state of mind (in which she destroys a car based on speculation of wrongdoing) it would not be out of bounds to assume that she’s some sort of dangerous stalker.

Next, I’d like to speak to the affront to the tradition of the strong woman/wronged woman theme that has been part of country music since the days of Patsy Cline. “Before He Cheats” does not carry on that tradition. In fact, I would argue that the singer represented in the song is a very weak specimen of womanhood indeed. And here’s why:

First off, when she envisions what kind of woman her wayward man may or may not be seducing, she immediately bypasses the high road and goes straight to cattiness. In the following two lines, we see her creating a straw-woman to be the object of her man’s desire that is an affront to her, presumably more authentic, brand of womanhood:

Right now he’s probably buying her some fruity little drink ‘cause she can’t shoot whiskey

And

Right now she’s probably up singing some white-trash version of Shania karaoke.

Here we see classism and elitism. The first line quoted above is the female equivalent of saying her competitor has a small penis. It’s ugly, and it doesn’t show the singer as a strong woman. It exposes her, rather, as petty and insecure.

The second line is kind of a one-two punch of sorts. Both calling her alleged opponent white-trash while implying that she’s not even woman enough to like real country music, as if that’s what Ms. Underwood were peddling here. Shania Twain has long been criticized among country fans for being too pop-ish, and her music has many of the same trappings of pseudo-strong grrl power cheerleading that Ms. Underwood’s has. So not only is the singer being classist, but also hypocritical.

This is not to say that the wronged woman (if indeed she be wronged) has no call to criticize the Other Woman. But given the context here, the insults are too petty to be considered anything that would come from a position of strength. This is pure lashing-out. She created this specter of a woman entirely for the purposes of feeling superior to it.

Likewise the singer’s actions against her allegedly cheating man show weakness, not strength. This is petty, “you-hurt-me-so-now-I’m-going-to-hurt-you” stuff, and is a break from the kind of “It’s a Little Too Late” attitude that the likes of Tanya Tucker embody.

Consider the “retribution” that is described in the refrain:

I dug my key into the side
Of his pretty little souped up four wheel drive.
Carved my name into his leather seats.
I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights
Slashed a hole in all four tires
Maybe next time he’ll think before he cheats.

These are not the actions of a strong woman. These are the actions of a woman who doesn’t value herself enough to believe that she can hurt her man just by leaving. She lacks confidence in her own worth, and perhaps even fears there is some justification for her man’s alleged actions. When Reba McIntire sings about walking out, you know that she believes that’s the worst possible thing she can do to her man. Not only does she realize that a cheating man isn’t worth her time, but she realizes that depriving him of her very presence is the ultimate insult.

Not so with Carrie Underwood in this song. She doesn’t believe that her absence is stern punishment, so she vandalizes a thing. She believes herself to be worth less than the truck, or at the very least she believes that her man values her less than the truck.

This brings us back to the earlier point: Why does she imagine her man is cheating on her without evidence? Did she not look because she’s afraid to know the truth? Does she secretly fear that her man’s low valuation of her in comparison to the truck is somehow valid?

I would postulate that she’s not mad that he is cheating on her, but rather she’s mad because she thinks it might be her fault.

There are two reasons why she would create this fantasy of adultery based on simply seeing her man’s truck in a bar parking lot. The first is that she doesn’t trust him. The second is that she doesn’t have confidence in herself to keep him from going astray. In either case, she isn’t really mad at him, but at herself.

In the first case, she would be mad because she stayed with him even though she didn’t trust him to not do what she accuses him of. In the second case, she’s mad because she couldn’t keep him at home.

Either one explains everything. The attack on the truck, lauded by the shallow as a victory for the strong woman, is actually very self destructive. She carved her own name into the seat of the car. Did she not expect the law to get involved? Did she expect “He was probably cheating on me in that bar” to be enough justification for a jury to vindicate her? Did she expect the owner of the truck to say “Gosh, you’re right. I was really being a tool,” when faced with the vandalism?

Given her obviously unhinged state, it’s possible. But she would have been arrested, punished, and would become the fabled “psycho ex girlfriend” to the alleged cheater. The truck can be repaired or replaced, but now she has a criminal record to follow her around everywhere. Do you suppose, the next day when the anger and whatever liquor she may have been drinking have worn off and the policeman is showing her a picture of her name carved into a leather seat that she thinks it was worth it?

If she does, that doesn’t make her a strong woman. It makes her a psychopath.

The woman portrayed in “Before He Cheats” is nobody to be celebrated. It is the snarling bluster of a wounded animal, lashing out pathetically at whatever target is easiest in the hopes that other observers will mistake it for strength and leave her alone.