the first noteworthy blog rock mp3 of the year was leaked yesterday. lil wayne's "prom queen," from his forthcoming rock album (downloadable here). it's awful. completely awful. much much worse than even this (embedded below) lil wayne rap-rock precursor, awful in its own right, could have indicated.
but while "prom queen" is not worth listening to as a song, per se, it does reveal a fundamental truth about pop music.
from the most recent issue of cometbus:
aaron cometbus: i knew the woman who "silly girl" by the descendents was written about, and for her it wasn't an honor. the guy had treated her like crap and then wrote this song that's sweet on the surface, but it's actually sort of blaming and demonizing her.
blake schwarzenbach: i don't think i'd relish being immortalized as "silly girl." i'm glad i never gave anyone that assignment. i try not to write from that place in romantic songs, that place of awful blame and castigation.
this is the truth that "prom queen" reveals, that underneath probably 75% of all of the pop songs written from a male point of view, there is a generic persona, the persona of the male singer singing a song about lost love, and it is the condition of these songs to blame and demonize women, some more subtly than others, as aaron cometbus points out.
dudes are loving the shit out of kanye west's 808s and heartbreak. i mean really loving the shit out of it. and it's a nice little pop album, if pretty minor in the grand scheme of pop albums. but this is the album where kanye west tries to humanise himself, to get his intended listener (dudes) to see past the arrogant jackass multi-multi-millionaire who collects very expensive bad art and wears custom made louis vuitton sneakers and relate to him. and he does this by... blaming and demonizing a woman.
for a variety of reasons, 808s and heartbreak was destined to sound dated the day it was leaked. in fact, as the album's musical citation of 80s yacht rock and synth ballads and its dated references (to robocop, stephen king, dr. evil) show, obsolescence was built in (you can practically see kanye holding a boombox above his head). but, as face palmingly stupid as his lyrics are, kanye's a smart guy. i was talking to my friend patrik about this, that it's a completely minor throwaway album, but staged to seem timeless, with the marriage of its old-timey [whoa, did i just say that? —ed.] peter gabriel/"stepping out" sound with kanye's gimmick du jour autotuned vocals, as if declaring from the first that we'll be hearing "street lights" in elevators and dentist offices for as long as there are buildings and teeth. and that, if nothing else, allows kanye to lay claim to "reinventing" the completely obsolete genre of the singer-songwriter album ("for the 21st century," as it were). and this, in turn, has sold him a million CDs in two months in this economic climate, and even higher numbers of mp3s.
lil wayne also uses the autotuner, both on last year's smash hit "lollipop" and on "prom queen." but lil wayne's own 2008 platinum super hit album, the carter III, shows that when he gets down to business, when he cuts a track he means for the ages, he puts the autotuner away. "lollipop" and "got money" (the t-pain track) were to move records; on "a milli," that was lil wayne working on his craft. it's a silly opposition, between commercial work and hard, formal work, but it's one lil wayne clearly makes on the carter III, because lil wayne is interested in genre, in different kinds of pop songs, and what he can do with them. and that's what "prom queen" is, lil wayne playing with the generic conventions of the rock star, blaming the woman who done him wrong like he's bragging about his skillz on the mic.
the song, as has been stated on idolator, is basically "sk8er boi" sung from the point of view of the dude. but that's the other thing—as much as lil wayne's high school revenge song repeats camera obscura's "you're not a teenager, so don't act like one" sentiment to kanye's immature emo sneer and his "i keep your love locked down, you lose, you lose" nonsense, it also reveals the inherent stupidity of "sk8er boi," which, while sung by a girl, was really a song written for boys. which is to say that "sk8er boi" plays out the fantasy of teenage boys, narrated by the pretty girl those teenage boys ventriloquise in their dreams. the ridiculousness of "prom queen" rehearses that narrative and we the listener get to watch this narrative play out in all its sad, melodramatic glory ("prom queen" lyrics here).
