by Bobz purefunk.com.au
The history of popular music contains a wide variety of music and an equally varied coterie of characters making that music. When we love a song or an album or even just the performer, what are we pledging to that song, that musician? What are we giving of ourselves and why?
And I’m not talking about that track that you like that has the great beat but you can’t quite remember who it’s by. I’m talking about the songs, albums and performers we love. The over-arching question is - what is our relationship to their music?
Take Chris Brown for example. We love Chris Brown. We love the way he dances, we love the way he looks and we especially love the music he makes. We love ‘it’, but do we love ‘him’? How do we reconcile the music with the man? Do we reconcile the music with the man, or should the two remain separate, with the images in the video-clips being an extension of the music and not the man?
Music fans have had to face this dilemma time and again. As they got older, the baby boomers (your parents and grandparents) had to reconsider their love for The Grateful Dead and The Rolling Stones, after they became more responsible, had kids and questioned the drug addled lifestyles of their musical heroes. And don’t forget the loyal legions of Michael Jackson fans, most of whom have been grappling with their feelings for Jackson's eccentricities for many years now, although with Jackson, the music ultimately exonerated him.
Whilst Michael was weird and therefore ‘not normal’ in the eyes of mainstream America, Chris Brown always seemed well-adjusted and just plain cute. But whilst Jackson fought off several legal challenges to his moral throne, Brown had no choice but to plead guilty to a shocking crime for which there was evidence. There was no hiding this one. Brown had done something morally reprehensible, and so mainstream America and many other fans had to ask themselves - should the man/music divide still exist?
Brown blurred this line even further, as he sported a pink bow-tie and awkwardly failed to apologise on Larry King live. Was that the man or the musician we were now seeing? That was then followed by his album ‘Graffiti’, which contained songs that were bogged down in self-pity and contained lines like “Why is it so easy for you to blame/I’m only human, we’re all the same”. If his fans were expecting contrition, they were looking at the wrong guy.
In 2011, Brown, like us, can no longer hide who he is. For superstars like Brown, this has been proven time and again to be true. His private life is no longer private. His music, which was once a pop world constructed around his image, is now an image cast in the shadow of his real world.
So is a hot song, just a hot song, or is it more than that? Can we forgive Chris Brown for the sake of a hit? What if that ‘hit’ is the song ‘Deuces’ and features lines like ‘Always hoping for the worst, waiting for me to fuck up/You'll regret the day when I find another girl, that knows just what I need/She knows just what I mean, when I tell her keep it drama free’. If we go by the lyrics, whatever apologies he may have issued to Rihanna in the past must have had an expiry date.
‘Deuces’ is a weirdly meta piece of pop culture, a diss record to a former flame who suffered humiliation and physical abuse at the hands of the disser. How do we take that song? Can we look at the lyric as being about ‘relationships’ generally, rather than about a particular relationship; or are we watching someone write revisionist history in the form of a pop song? It’s not easy to listen to your head or heart when your feet are tapping along with the bassline. As Becky Bain of Idolator pointed out "As damning as some of the lyrics are, this emotional jam is actually a step in the right direction for Brown."
Chris Brown(the man) and his music seem to be moving forward as one, and this man is asking us to draw a line in the sand as to what we accept as morally acceptable and morally unacceptable in music and life. It would seem that if Chris Brown cannot burn the bridge that spans the man/music divide, then neither should we.
We need to pick a side.
Could it be irresponsible to invest yourself emotionally in musical concepts (Deuces and his future recordings) that were borne out of the self-pity of an abuser who has cast himself as the victim.
No comments:
Post a Comment