WORDS BY Thiamando Pavlidis @thiamand_no ART BY Madison Marshall @madagasc.art
Not So Fresh: 30
POP MUSIC AND ITS PROBLEMS CW: BRIEF DISCUSSION OF SEXUAL ASSAULT
Bad Lyrics I am a trashy pop music apologist. My taste in music has been described as “bad”, “objectively bad”, and even expressed by just groaning. Spotify once even told me to “chill out”. Over the years I’ve been a K-Pop fan, a Eurovision/Europop-enthusiast, a So Fresh CD collector and a ’90s house/Eurodance tragic. I haven’t willingly listened to an acoustic guitar in years. With bad music comes bad lyrics, and oftentimes bad artists. ‘Bad’, however, can mean many different things, from questionable, to downright criminal. So, how do we distinguish between songs that are products of their time and artists with unforgivable actions? More importantly, how can we learn from these past mistakes?
Issue 02/2021: Growing Pains
I distinctly recall that my primary school had optional after-school programs. One of these was a hip-hop dance class, where we were taught choreography to The Black Eyed Peas’ ‘My Humps’. I also owned a So Fresh: Hits of Autumn 2006 CD to ‘My Humps’, which led to eight-year-old Thiamando singing about “making you scream” because of “all my humps”. While the lyrics themselves are nothing strange (remember, we’re living in the age of ‘WAP’), So Fresh including that song in a CD set marketed mainly towards children and pre-teens, and an after-school program teaching a dance with said song speaks more to an institutional desensitisation of pop lyrics than to the intentions of the artist. Not all music is supposed to be kid-friendly, and it’s up to those in charge to distinguish between what should and should not be accessible to children. Where lyrics in songs like ‘My Humps’ are inherently sexual, certain ‘problematic’ elements of pop music are less defined, and not addressed the same way as sexually explicit lyrics are. Therefore, it’s more difficult to filter out for younger audiences.
