(Because it’s ridiculously funny, in a completely unintentional way…)David Brooks created a new threshold for stupidity in editorial journalism today in the New York Times (here). It’s almost a historic occasion, actually.
His subject is the recent spate of what I guess you would call “girl-hate-guy” songs; the Inquirer had something about this yesterday I believe – I really didn’t pay too much attention since life is short and I was too busy dumping on the paper for other reasons.
I’ll give you some examples from Brooks’ column; in the song “Before He Cheats” by Carrie Underwood, the girl, in a rage over seeing her beau with some little blonde harpy, busts up the headlights of his car with a baseball bat and does other stuff to it. In “Girlfriend” by Avril Lavigne, he implores her guy to dump the girl he’s messing with “so she can show him what good sex is really like.” And in “U + Ur Hand,” Pink plays with guys to get them to buy drinks for her before she shoots them down, telling them “it’s just you and your hand tonight” (do you kiss your mother with that mouth, Pink?).
I should hasten to add that these interpretations come from Brooks’ column and nowhere else (I attempted to find the Inquirer column in question through Google and philly.com’s awful search engine, but I was unsuccessful).
If Brooks’ column were composed of only what I’ve just mentioned, I wouldn’t waste your time by mentioning it. However, Brooks the know-it-all sociologist believes that these songs reflect the fact that young people face a “social frontier” and are responding here in a uniquely American way, much like Clint Eastwood did in his movies including “High Plains Drifter” (from which the above pic was taken) and in the manner Humphrey Bogart did in “The Big Sleep” and Charles Bronson did with his characters, presumably in the “Death Wish” movies.
I swear, I couldn’t make this stuff up (and Brooks should be careful, by the way; he’s infringing on Michael Medved’s turf here a bit).
I will cut Brooks just a bit of slack and note that movie themes became more personal and boundaries concerning violence, sex and language were broken with establishment of the ratings system in the late ‘60s, which I believe yielded some of the finest films ever made (“The Godfather” Pts. 1 and 2, “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Network,” “Chinatown,” “The Conversation,” “The Last Detail,” and on and on).
However, in each of the movies Brooks mentioned, the characters experienced a level of suffering through which they sought fulfillment through vengeance with their stories explained in a way that lent a more thorough and credible examination of who they were and why they did what they were doing than you could obtain through a three or four minute long pop song (though of course I do not advocate vengeance for reasons of fulfillment; I don’t believe that can ever be achieved anyway).
In “High Plains Drifter,” Eastwood’s character (depending on your interpretation) is the ghost of the town sheriff seeking revenge after he was killed. In “Death Wish,” Bronson’s wife was killed and his daughter was sexually assaulted, causing him to go nuts. And I’ve never been able to figure out the exact plot of “The Big Sleep” in a way that would lend itself to some kind of easy explanation (though Bogart played hardboiled characters in other urban movie dramas such as “Knock On Any Door” where, as a lawyer, he tried to keep young thug John Derek off death row).
In all of the songs Brooks mentioned, though, a bunch of pissed off women are bitching and acting up in response to stupid behavior from their boyfriends. That’s it. That has nothing to do with “an autonomous Lone Ranger fantasy hero” amidst a “wide open social frontier.” It’s simply immature, stupid conduct all the way around.
And the songs will probably make tons of dough for the performers and Brooks will continue to write puritanical drivel over other assaults on common sense brought to us by the “entertainment” industry, thus proving beyond a doubt that money drives all of this instead of “ambiguity and uncertainty.”
Besides, if Brooks wants to hear good music instead of this stuff, he should check out this instead.
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