Photographs I can't understand.

I'm trying to read — well, scan — "25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going" in the NYT Magazine.

This is one of these tarted-up pages at the NYT website that made me blog (on March 9th): "I'd like a browser that can be set so nothing moves on my screen unless I click something to make it play/Can I get that anywhere? I loathe movement near something I'm trying to read...." If you want to see what I'm saying I loathe, you'll see it if you click through. The moving image behind the words at the top of that page physically nauseates me. Intellectually, I deplore the clutter, which waves in our face the NYT's desperate need for us to believe that it's a trendy website and not just an old newspaper displayed on screen.

Now, I do appreciate the play button at the entry for each of the 25 songs. You can instantly play (and pause) as you read (or instead of reading). But I am appalled at the hand-drawn squiggles around the various words and images. The Times says it's going to "tell us where music is going," but I've seen squiggles like that before, so the message to me is, we're going back to the 1980s.

But what I really want to talk about, as the post title indicates, is a photograph — this one, accompanying the first song, "Bodak Yellow," by Cardi B, next to the all-caps text, "AN UNAPOLOGETIC ANTHEM FOR WOMEN IN A YEAR OTHERWISE DEFINED BY PANDERING AND SETBACKS":



The photograph doesn't seem to be "for women" or in opposition to the "pandering and setbacks." It seems to embody the retrograde attitude toward women. That heavy makeup and that dopey, sleepy expression might be aimed at other women, but if it is, it's not in a way that fits with the idea of an "unapologetic anthem for women," which sounds like marching in the streets and denouncing oppression, not weakly melting into a selfie.

But the NYT has, for whatever reason, decided to promote Cardi B as an icon of feminism. On my own, I would not read any further. I'd just be disgusted, but since you're here, I'm going to read the entry (which is by Jamie Lauren Keiles).

Women in this world are taught to believe that every problem must have a buyable solution. Not sleeping well? Get a lavender-vanilla pillow spray. Overrun with stress? Buy a skin-care routine. The market is rife with solace for sale — a product on offer for anything that ails. 

Popular music is another one of these products. Isn't an "anthem for women" a proffered cure for a presumed woman-specific ailment?

This past year, our own systemic subjugation was no exception. With a former beauty-pageant owner in the White House, Clinton in Chappaqua and high-profile men being exposed for their crimes, feminism reached its most shoppable form....

Keiles references pussy hats and other paraphernalia that — I'll use the headline's word — pandered to women after the election. And what does the song do?

Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow” ... begins with an outright provocation: “Lil [expletive], you can’t [expletive] with me if you wanted to.” 

Let's be clear. The first expletive is "bitch" and the second is "fuck." Cardi B is addressing women with contempt.

Her tone is confident in a way that feels easy. To paraphrase one commenter on YouTube: It’s a song that will make you want to fire your own boss.

Let's check NYT's characterization of the lyrics, which you can read here. I really don't have the patience to read and think about all these lyrics, but I cannot see how they are in any way an "anthem for women." They might be an anthem for a woman. The singer seems to want to brutally dominate everyone else. She brags about material goods, claims to be "the hottest in the street" and taunts other women — "Think these hoes be mad at me, their baby father run a bill... If I see you and I don't speak, that means I don't fuck with you/I'm a boss, you a worker, bitch, I make bloody moves." That sounds like one woman hating other women.

The NYT writer brings up pussy hats and "pussy" is a big word in the hating-Trump enterprise, so let me show you the occurrences of "pussy" in this song. The first is a literal reference to the singer's genitalia:

I might just feel on your babe, my pussy feel like a lake
He wanna swim with his face, I'm like, "Okay"...

The second appearance of "pussy" is the insult to another person (whom she's threatening with gun violence): "If you a pussy, you get popped, you a goofy, you a opp." The lyrics site (linked above) helpfully explains a joke: "Getting 'popped' is slang for getting shot, which Cardi B connects to the sexual image of 'pussy popping' in which a woman exposes her genitals by bending over in a provocative way." "Opp," we're told, means "opposition... members of a rival gang."

The third appearance of "pussy" is, "My pussy glitter as gold, tell that lil bitch play her role." Again, I'm seeing the complete absence of sisterhood. I can see how an individual woman might feel strong by imagining herself in the place of the singer, insulting and hating and threatening and demeaning all the other women, but that is not a strength that has anything to do with women banding together in a political movement.

I think the NYT is obtuse, perhaps deliberately, but at least I do now understand the photograph.