Frequency of Suffering

Unlike most people these days, I still rely on CDs for my daily driving’s soundtrack. My car, built in 2002 and in my life since 2004, is not equipped with a means of playing digital music, and even predates the day satellite radio became a standard feature. This fact has been mildly annoying to me for the past 10 years, and recently my self-piteous complaints about it had grown in frequency with each passing day. Then, probably shortly after they reached critical mass—around Thanksgiving—my CD player stopped working.

Well…shit.

Out of desire to serve penance (or maybe because I’m lazy; you decide), I have yet to take the problem to my mechanic to fix. Two months of no CDs means two months of radio—which is two months too many.

I haven’t listened to the radio regularly since buying this car [I really only listened regularly for a period where the cassette player in my previous car broke and there was nothing else; don’t bother raising your hand if you sense a pattern], and for good reason. I have settled into my “old fuddy-duddy” stage of life nicely, and have no desire to assault my eardrums with the likes of Justin Bieber and Pitbull. I’ll take another replay of my mix CD with a Cormega freestyle and an unreleased Talib Kweli track from 2006, please and thank you.

Now I don’t have that luxury which I so callously cursed. Instead I have two stations of top-40 and another of rock and alternative [Note: if Pittsburgh still has a hip-hop/"urban" channel, I’ll be damned if I know what it is]. And I’ve come to a few conclusions while enduring this psychological experiment of juggling the most limited musical options the first world has seen in the past 60 years. I now lay them out for you, in no specific order.

1. Taylor Swift’s secret of success.
   
   She’s not a good lyricist. She’s really not that good of a singer. And, on the shallow male side of things, she’s not that attractive. Real world “7,” but a celeb “5.” So the normal reasons for a woman reaching pop stardom in this nation don’t apply. But Taylor has something no one else does: a brilliant strategy built around prolificacy.
   
   In the old days—when I was the age of her target audience—flooding the market with your songs was a good way to flameout. Oversaturation meant listeners soon grew tired of hearing you, and would then seek out other artists to play in their Walkmans. But today’s paying audience—millennials—have attention spans the size of an ant’s dick, and as a result frequency is now much more important to keep a presence in the market.
   
   The true cleverness of Swift, though, is that she folds variety into the repetitiveness. Today I heard no fewer than four different Taylor Swift songs on the two top-40 stations during my one hour of drive time. And while I certainly heard some individual songs by other artists more times during that same timespan, Swift’s tracks came in as a fresh palate cleanse each time, to the point that I often forgot I’d just heard them 24 hours earlier. Think of it like M&Ms; we all know that no matter what color they are, they’ll taste the same. But if you’re given a choice between a bag that's only oranges and a bag that's a regular mixture of different colors, which will you choose?
   
   
2. Pop is a woman’s world...
   
   Michael was the king, but the king is dead (RIP). In today’s pop world, guys seem to come across as inauthentic. I really don’t care that Shawn Mendes is tired of some girl’s kisses. One Direction got me to listen to a song once, but mostly because I was daydreaming and not paying attention to whatever they were whining about. I now change the station if I hear it coming on again. Nick Jonas’ “Jealous” is actually pretty good production-wise, but that’s mostly because it sounds like an Usher track from 15 years ago. The lyrics, though, sound like a sixth-grader talking about a crush.
   
   But if when Demi Lovato’s “Confident,” Selena Gomez’s “Same Old Love,” and Ellie Goulding’s “On My Mind” spin up, I’m hitting the volume up button and cheering them on. Alessia Cara and Elle King might be two huge stars in the making, if they can keep churning out genuine artistry like “Here” and “Exes and Ohs” (the lyricism of the latter is just pure genius).
   
   Maybe it’s just me. It’s probably just me. But I believe Demi’s self-assertiveness. I mentally high-five Selena while she rids herself of some jerk (it’s Bieber every single time in my mind). Ellie is plagued by emotions after a hookup. Who hasn’t been through that? I can listen to these ladies all day—especially if it means Bieber and Pitbull don’t get airtime.
   
   
3. ...But at least one of those women doesn’t belong in it.
   
   
   
   Adele poses a much different version of the “Why is this person famous” question than Swift. Whereas the latter is lithe but unimpressive vocally, the former is all voice and no (traditional) beauty. Twenty years ago Adele would have been relegated to opera, or ghostsinging for a lip-synching model. Maybe she should’ve pursued opera; at least then she’d be backed up by an accomplished production and have someone else writing her lyrics.
   
   Prior to this sudden immersion into the world of current music, I’d never heard an Adele song. My friends say I had to have been in some place or watched some show where she was warbling out one of her tunes. I honestly don’t think that’s true; but if it is, it says even more that I didn’t take notice. Hearing “Hello” come echoing over my speakers for the first time, I was mesmerized…by how indistinctive it was.
   
   The production’s okay, and at first I thought it was part of the formula that made her famous. Then I heard “We Were Young.” Yeah, no. She might as well have Will Ferrell standing behind her with a cowbell in the recording booth.
   
   The one thing left that could possibly explain the kind of acclaim she receives is lyrics. But there’s no winning work here, either. In “Hello,” she decides that the guy she broke up with years ago “clearly” isn’t upset anymore, because he’s not answering her phone call.
   
   Ummm…what?
   
   If there’s anything spectacular about Adele’s lyrics, it’s the sheer narcissistic delusion it takes to draw the conclusion that the person she knows she hurt years ago must be over it, because he doesn’t want to talk to her. If he was truly hurt, he’d be dying to hear the sound of her voice, right? He’d be waiting feverishly for the day she came back? Fuck. Outta. Here.
   
   
4. The Weeknd is a powerhouse, and the only exception to #2.
   
   
   
   The only song I bump harder than Gomez’s? “The Hills.” Yeah, I’m eight months late to the party. But here’s an instance where an artist not only delivers on all levels, but takes a few risks while getting there.
   
   I was hesitant when the first few bars of “In the Night” first strode confidently through my speakers—An 80’s retread? I thought we left that kind of stuff back in the 90s?—but I was quickly hooked, pushing my Members Only sleeves up and bobbing my head to the beat.
   
   To this point, there’s only one The Weeknd song I have a problem with, and that problem has nothing to do with The Weeknd himself. But I can never hear “Can’t Feel My Face” and not picture Tom Cruise singing it. Damn it all to hell.
   
   
5. Hip-hop is no longer pop.
   
   
   
   In two months of radio play, I’ve heard exactly three hip-hop tracks played by 96.1 KISS and 100.7 Star: “See You Again” by Wiz, “Love the Way You Lie” by Eminem, and “My House” by Flo Rida. That’s it [I’m not including the few times a Pitbull song has come on and I've changed the channel because, you know, it’s Pitbull, not hip-hop]. And remember, this is top-40 radio, where the playlist gets repeated every hour on the hour. “My House,” the only one of these songs to be released in the past 10 months, has only queued up twice.
   
   Compare that to my last regular exposure to radio, when Ludacris, Em, Jay-Z, Nelly, Chingy, and even Snoop Dogg were regularly spreading hip-hop’s growing empire across the bubblegum territories of pop. Now hip-hop’s been brushed aside, and the “non-conformists” are young white women (Adele, Alessia Cara).
   
   Is this only what it’s like in Pittsburgh? How am I the only one seeing it? Did police unions take over pop music stations, locking up and killing off all of the young hip-hop artists? The hell?

*sigh* I really need to get my car to the mechanic. *turns up Selena Gomez*

Big Girls Don't Cry Wolf

I was uncomfortable. I was outraged. I was…jealous.

Some undeserving clown was kissing Bar Rafaeli, and it wasn’t me. I should be that undeserving clown!

A lot of people have had a lot to say about the Go Daddy ad that aired during the Super Bowl, which featured an international supermodel (Miss Rafaeli) doing tongue-jujitsu with a nerdy, overweight guy (Jesse Heiman). Very little of what was said was positive. Scratch that; none of it was positive.

And while—at first—those disapproving voices seemed only to be agreeing with me, I began to see things differently once my own selfish ire wore off. If my initial disdain for a meaningless television commercial was born from my desire to be the one lip-lockin’ with Bar, what was fueling the wave of criticisms from everyone else? Over the years, Go Daddy’s sexually-charged stunts have slowly desensitized us to each new ad they’ve released. Why should this one suddenly awaken new disgust? Were Entertainment Weekly writers, newspaper columnists, and talk show hosts only chiming in because they were jealous, too? Perhaps, in some cases. But more and more, it now feels like something far worse: bigotry.

Let’s imagine, for just a second, that the man swirling tongues with Bar in that ad had been Channing Tatum. Just what would the public response have been? I, and other gents such as myself, would likely still be outraged for a good minute or two, simply because it wasn’t us. Tatum’s wife, Jenna Dewan, might also be a little peeved (also due to jealousy). But would the mass public’s sentiment have been as harsh? Would "backlash" have been an accurate term to describe the entertainment media’s reaction to watching two hot, consenting adults get mouth-friendly to promote a web domain service that no one knows is a web domain service? Highly unlikely. That’s not to say no media mouthpiece would speak against the ad. But you’re fooling yourself if you think he or she would spend more than 140 Twitter characters on the subject.

Quite simply, the objection towards this Go Daddy ad exists solely because the male lead is unattractive. He was chubby. He was nerdy. He was ginger! *shivers* How dare they force such lechery upon our chaste eyes!

Now, for the sake of argument, let’s look at this story from another angle: How would all of this have been treated if the model had been male, and the nerd had been female? If…some guy [admittedly, the only male model’s name that I know of is Derek Zoolander], some Adonis whose jaw line was chiseled from a marble slab and whose abs could stop a bullet, was passionately kissing an overweight and unappealing woman in glasses, would we hear those same judgmental voices crying out in the name of decency? Hell, not only would those people be silent, at this very moment they’re probably a click away from attacking me for suggesting a hypothetical woman is “overweight and unappealing”.

And there you have it, the double-standard. Attractive man + attractive woman? Stamp of approval. Attractive man + unattractive, chubby woman? The next Rebel Wilson. Unattractive, chubby man + attractive woman? Not on MY television!

Why is it okay for everyone to be repulsed when a male romantic lead bears the deficit in physical beauty? The audacity that it takes to perpetuate this fraud of social mores is staggering. And yet it seems to have slipped past almost all of us without so much as a second thought on our parts. When a woman doesn’t fit the Hollywood norm, she’s an inspiration; when a man doesn’t, he’s a punchline.

Now, to be fair, for years Hollywood has enforced much stricter physical requirements on women than on men. While everyone from Jackie Gleason to Steve Buscemi have played leading men who’ve gotten the girl, it’s only been more recently that the door has cracked open for “regular gals”. [Sidenote: This is a term that’s ridiculously misused; Melissa McCarthy and Adele are both extremely talented women, but they’re not “regular” when it comes to body types. Let’s just be honest, here. I am far from the Channing Tatum end of the spectrum. But I’m also not delusional enough to think that being out-of-shape makes me as big as Billy Gardell. And I wouldn’t refer to Gardell as a “regular guy” just because we both need to cut back on carbs.] Lena Dunham is proving, one uncomfortable-for-everyone-but-her nude scene at a time, that women don’t have to be off-duty swimsuit models to be stars. We’re in the dawn of a girl-power era, and the result is “unlikely” leading ladies such as Wilson and McCarthy. But, if it’s wrong for society to be offended when one of these ladies kisses her hot male costar, why isn’t this true when genders are reversed and it’s Go Daddy’s nerd lothario? For all of the pro-curves, equality-for-big-gals cheerleading that occurs today in pop culture and social media, where’s all of the support when the person in question is male?

The move towards less-unrealistic standards for leading ladies is certainly refreshing. But centuries of misogyny won’t be erased by a sudden overcompensation in the opposite—yet equally unfair—direction.

*puts on pair of glasses* Now, Bar: About a follow-up ad…