Lyrics That Disturb Me: (Fun Edition)

Above I've embedded the song "We Are Young," by a band called Fun. The singer opens the song by crooning the intro section in a style that makes me think of a male Tracy Chapman. It sounds folky and sweet, but here's a snip of what he's actually saying:

My lover she's waiting for me just across the bar
My seat's been taken by some sunglasses asking bout a scar, and
I know I gave it to you months ago
I know you're trying to forget
But between the drinks and subtle things
The holes in my apologies, you know
I'm trying hard to take it back

Wait, what? What is this about him giving his lover a scar? Violence happens. People should be able to write about it, and there are plenty of songs with violent lyrics that I like, but I'm starting to identify a pattern: It annoys me when the violence gets packaged in sweet-sounding vocals, as part of a song that is going to get treated as a fun anthem by thousands of kids drinking in bars. This creates a sort of dissonance that really makes me squirm.

As far as I can tell, this song is about a guy who did something horrible to his lover some time ago. She's trying to forget about it and stay with him, and he's never managed to really apologize. Instead of addressing the problem, the two of them go and get drunk a lot and enjoy the sense of closeness that comes from carrying each other home. Take a look at the lyrics, and correct me if I'm wrong.

Sure, you can tell this story, but I don't like the way this song's breezy chorus makes people perceive its message. This song is being used to sell Chevys and stuff. I think that's weird, and not okay.

Airborne Toxic Event's Slut-Shaming Single

What passes for romantic so often transforms to slut-shaming when you poke at it just a little. There's a song all over the radio that's been driving me crazy this way--All I Ever Wanted by the Airborne Toxic Event.



This song has all the trappings of romance--violins, a calculated yearning tone in the singer's voice, and an air of nostalgic longing. But there's a moment that reveals this song's true misogynist colors:

In the night, you whisper like a ghost and you look so shaken. You're so quiet and small and you tell me you want to be taken. I just never think of you as the kind of girl who would say that. You suddenly seem like some faceless thing in my grasp.
-- Airborne Toxic Event

On the surface, he's just sad--he's surprised that she's not who he thought she was. But when you think about what he's saying, it amounts to, "I thought I was with a nice girl, but it turns out she's just another slut."

What I get from these lyrics is that the woman expresses sexual desire or a sexual fantasy. Maybe she asks him to fuck her hard. Maybe she knows he won't like for her to say it that way, so she says she "wants to be taken," implying rough sex, or sex where he dominates her.

He responds with, "You're not that kind of girl! Are you??" "Kind of girl" is the slut-shaming giveaway here. What "kind of girl" asks to be taken, I wonder? A dirty one? A slutty one? Maybe he's shocked that she's a sub rather than a domme, but I'm really not getting that from the rest of the song.

Now, there's a way to say, "I didn't know you were that kind of girl," which sounds impressed or admiring. Say she rolled onto him and rode him up one side of the bed and down the other and he came harder than he ever knew he could. He might then have said he never thought she was that kind of girl, as in, "I didn't know she had that wild, bestial sexuality in her! That is so awesome!"

But if that were the sentiment, I doubt he would follow with, "You suddenly seem like some faceless thing in my grasp."

This girl's sexual desire has transformed her from a human with whom he's having a love affair to a "faceless thing" described in a repellent fashion.

I looked up slut-shaming to make sure I had the phrase right, and it turned out to apply to what I'm talking about almost exactly. Here's a quote from Finally Feminism 101:

Put in the most simple terms, slut-shaming happens when a person “publicly or privately [insults] a woman because she expressed her sexuality in a way that does not conform with patriarchal expectations for women” (Kat, Slut-Shaming vs. Rape Jokes). It is enabled by the idea that a woman who carries the stigma of being a slut — ie. an “out-of-control, trampy female” — is “not worth knowing or caring about” (Tanenbaum, p. 240).

This song bothered me for months before I figured out why, and it's because it makes me feel the way the quote above describes. I am the kind of girl who might say I want to be taken. I also might be perceived as a "nice girl" who wouldn't say that--if you caught me under my real name, that is. It's a nightmare to imagine getting up the courage to express the one only to have a guy respond the way he does in this song--especially with that sweet, sensitive romantic tone he affects.

And in the end, it's the tone he uses that offends me most of all. This "nice guy" isn't being nice at all. Or romantic.