Let's talk about TOTAL HOARS.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

No, rly.

There's been a tendency for quite some time for srs critics (ie: heat magazine, Perez Hilton...) to scream 'SL4G!' at various popstars for having suggestive videos/lyrics or going out with no pants on or daring to lock lips with an age-appropriate member of the opposite sex. Some songs, like 'Dirrrty' are obviously meant to be about Having It Off quite a bit and posing in FHM never makes you look coy but even so, it's the suggestion of slvttery rather than actual slvuttery. The Pussycat Dolls may have started off as strippers but 'Buttons' is as sexually explicit as they get and their clothing is no slvttier than Malibu Barbie's, in fact considerably less so most of the time. Even Ho-rap generally keeps control of the situation, leading to a degree of respect at least being demanded of the listener, whether they give it or not.

This year, though, there seem to have been a number of at least semi-mainstream releases that just circumnavigate the "suggestive" bit, say respect is for the unambitious and leap straight into "advanced slvttery" without losing a false eyelash. Let us consider, for instance, Girlicious.
Here is the actual, genuine, finished official video for ladylike ballad "Stupid Sh1t":

No seriously, that is the official video. I do not lie to you. I actually like the song, really, quite a lot but whilst I didn't see the show that created Girlicious, I assume this is the culmination of a series of tests to see who was the biggest hoar. Whilst not all their videos are quite that insanely cheap, that does without any shadow of a doubt smack of "advert for new range of feminine hygiene products for the working girl."

Girlicious do also have the song 'Like Me' which is a sort of boast-off between the group concerning which of them brings more boys to the yard, etc. and contains the memorable phrasing:
If I had a stiff one
You'd be all on that (I'm on fire)
Which has fascinating sexual polical connotations (and is quite cute in dealing with girlcrushes, if anything about Girlicious can possibly called 'cute') possibly if anyone can be arsed to work up a heavy thought process regarding the lyrics of a Girlicious song and is followed in the rest of the song by the comment by one of the girls that no one else could get as many boys as her because "it aint easy being easy, baby." Quite right, too- I for one could not walk four feet in stripper heels, let alone dance in them.

Then let us consider Danity Kane, who've been mentioned before but deserve mentioning again. Their new(ish) product, 'Welcome To The Dollhouse' is almost certainly one of my top albums of the year and I love it lots, yet they are a bunch of what can only be described as 'fame-hungry sl4gs' so epic that I have a total lack of empathy with the whole thing. Here, for your delection, is 'Strip Tease;' a demure work considering the transitory process between being clothed and nudity:

Believe me, I really love that bit where it goes "and I just can't keep my clothes from falling down" but this does rather reach into an almost-parodical zone where the usual sniffy comments re: popstars' clothes falling off become inspirational posters.

Then of course we have Tila Tequila, whose cover of Pop Open track 'Stripper Friends' by Aimee Allen takes the concepts of Low-rent Hoardom to what must surely be identifiable as the closest point to their zenith yet reached:

Aside from the fact the cover is absolutely horrible (especially since some of Tila's own songs or at least songs I don't recognise as covers are sort-of good) to a point where I actually had to check I wasn't accidentally playing two songs at once several time whilst listening to it, since I honestly believed no one could have even semi-released something with such messed up beats, Tila is something else, really. Girlicious and the Danitys look like amateurs compared to her and indeed (and by no means do I mean this in a sort of 'HA!' way) afaik, Tila was an actual stripper at some point.

Still, as previously mentioned, the Pussycat Dolls are quite tame despite stripper origins and there's always Tila's appearance on 'I Like To Fvck' by (also featuring Hot Rod & B Dozier) which alexmacpherson posted earlier in the month but which I shall embed again now in case you missed it:

As Lex said at the time, the bar has been raised by that.

The questions I wish to put to the poptimists panel are thus:
-How do we all feel about this? Does it make you want to tell them to put some clothes on? Do you find it offensive? Does it titillate you? Do you just not care about the whole thing?
-What other examples of Hoar-Pop are there around? I would like to add to my collection, since I find it interesting in an anthropological way.

Did Her Name Is Nicole ever get released/leak, semi-relatedly?

Also, totally unrelatedly, have we had a thread about the new Cyndi Lauper album? If not, can we have one?

Comments

[zenith.livejournal.com]

That seems to be 'Damaged' rather than 'Strip Tease'. Or is that a deliberate mistake/joke?

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Whups, no, that's me failing at YouTube. *goes back to correct*

[koganbot]

My guess is that a lot of the audience for "Stupid Shit" is female. I really have no idea why I think so. Just a feeling. Which would mean Girlicious are modeling how to behave rather than being titillating. (In any event, I can't imagine being titillated by this. That's not what it seems to want to provoke.) (Of course, there's no reason that they can't be modeling behavior AND titillating.)

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

That's what my guess would be, too, hence the feminine hygiene advert look. It's interesting (to me, anyway) that this hoar-pop seems to be a construct of the screaming gossip culture that calls all celebrities skanks and thus makes (sort of) celebrities out of slvts.

I would also agree that it's totally non-titillating, except in the sense of titillating scandal. Something about it smacks me as being somehow similar to the MySpace celebrity slvts, like Audrey Kitching and KiKi Kannibal but I'm not really sure why.

[koganbot]

But anyway, to answer one of your questions, the Danitys' music is what's grabbing me, but I've not yet to pay much attention to the lyrics/image, which means that I don't expect to be interested in their whoriness (but that doesn't necessarily mean I won't be, once words and image penetrate).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I wrote an Idolator comment about "Like Me" making a joke about the "more subtle" single option, "Stupid Shit," and I mentioned that it had an "ambiguously meta" video. But I'm not sure what I mean by it -- something like what I was arguing about "My Humps" a while back, but less effective: basically I was arguing that the "My Humps" video (reflecting the song) was some kind of commentary, if not exactly critique, of "raunch culture," or what you might call "slut culture." The extent to which it adopts the culture to comment on it, and to what extent this negates its potential as critique (in the same way that lots of people NOT reading it this way suggests it might be ineffective at a mass level, but I still maintain that's the readers' problem, not the song's) is unclear to me. The fact is it's just not sharp enough, even though I still think its tongue is firmly enough in its cheek that no one should read it "straight."

"Stupid Shit" is more complicated but also less interesting. Its tongue is in cheek, but...I mean, just because it's "about" dressing slutty or whatever the hell else, and has a sense of humor about itself, doesn't mean that it's not also TYPIFYING the behavior it seems to be "in" on. I think "My Humps" just barely avoids this pitfall -- it's not typical of anything; it's a bizarre, almost incoherent amateur assemblage of raunchy cliches from a group that had other stylistic options (they've done flashy videos before -- this is an ANTI-FLASH video). Girlicious's video is amateurish, but it doesn't make a point of it. Its voyeurism isn't much of a commentary on voyeurism, but there's something a little off about it. Not sure how I feel about that, except that I enjoy the song much better when I'm not watching the video (unlike "My Humps," which I think is enhanced in its own way by the video, even though it doesn't need the video).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I still think that "raunch culture" is generally mythological, in the sense that it's trying to fit too many disparate cultural tendencies (and value judgments about those tendencies) together into a coherent "system," BUT if we do acknowledge a raunch or slvt cvltvre, I would call the MySpace stuff, and to a lesser extent Girlicious, POST-raunch, which I'd call about as strong as "postmodern" -- a vague sense of knowingness that isn't as obvious with the pre-post stuff. So "My Humps" is post-raunch, XXXtina is raunch. (This is related somewhat to a discussion koganbot and others were part of about "Ren and Stimpy" and its differences between Looney Tunes and stuff like Rocky and Bullwinkle -- the latter are plenty self-aware, but koganbot sez there's a "patina" of something more winky in "Ren and Stimpy").

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

"about as strong as postmodern" = not very strong AT ALL, but perhaps useful for specific conversations, i.e. this one.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I am about to go to bed and will write a more thorough comment in the morning but yes, this.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I agree, kinda, in that it's not simply just raunch, but I think it's less meta-raunch than cartoon raunch. I mean, 'My Humps' works as basic satire, but there isn't much commentary going on there beyond a stoned LOL. It's only barely about submitting to male desire though - the cartooniness, the emphasis on being dolls and so on, the trend seems to be more competition to be more ridiculous (via taking one's clothes off and acting like a massive whore) than being sexy (via acknowledging what turns actual non-cartoon men on).

The knowingness is interesting because it's increasingly directed at the puritan feminists, viz. Danity Kane's 'Bad Girl' which seems to be aimed as much at tut-tutting women as horny guys ("They say I don't have no self-esteem, but it's my fashion", and the title feeds into the good woman/bad woman dichotomy reiterated by anti-raunch feminists as well as the naughty-girl male fantasy).

I think 'Dirrty' might be the start of cartoon raunch! Because what I noticed at the time, after the sheer skankiness of it all, was that Xtina seemed to be ducking under the male fantasy radar by going too far with the sluttiness, by making it - and therefore them - ridiculous, more than sexy. It was almost like an OTT parody of the similar video to 'I'm A Slave 4 U' except it wasn't straight satire cuz, you know, Xtina was as into it as she was taking the piss out of it.

The Girlicious video...you think, OK, sexy schoolgirl/Harajuku style outfits, nothing we haven't seen before, and they just TAKE THEM OFF :o Great song, mind.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think - whatever the intentions in the videos (which I haven't looked at yet, I thought last night, wow this looks interesting, must reply to this tomorrow, forgetting that today I would be in 1xOPEN PLAN OFFICE) - there's a slight danger of overestimating "what turns actual non-cartoon men on" as a way of dismissing them from the equation. Desire is trainable to a degree and there's a level of pressure* on men to desire cartoonish sexuality - not really the Girlicious/Danity kind in Britain, which has always been less blingy and more grubby about its softcore imagery (I can't really imagine this kind of power sluttery in Nuts, for instance).

*though even "pressure" is too strong a word, it implies some malign cultural force, whereas I think culture works more like gravity, the images and options most presented exerting an abstract pull rather than some conscious push to conform.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Actually I kind of assume that the grubbier, more submissive women in Nuts and Zoo etc is far closer to what straight men want - it's less cartoonish than clichéd - until you get into Jordan/Jodie Marsh territory which is entirely terrifying. Though obv lots of men out there will find Nicole Scherzinger et al hott but more because she's really gorgeous - contra the Pussycat Doll who always gets called the tranny, I have no idea which one this is - than because of what she sings about.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I disagree that the women in Nuts and Zoo are more submissive; they are dressed up as desirable, something to fantasise about. Girlicious et al are dressed up far more desperate, far more crude (and I mean 'dressed up' in a sense beyond what they're wearing) as people who suck c0ck for money. You wouldn't want any of them to be your girlfriend but you might hire them for some sleaze at a bachelor party; they're sort of sub-human.

I can see that Ho-rap and a lot of raunch as empowering, even if it's a sort of empowerment I don't agree with (in the same way holding a gun to someone's head is empowering but I don't think people should do it, etc.) but this whorepop is different, somehow. It's so much more low-rent and sleazy, like an ageing stripper.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Desire is trainable to a degree

Hence the recent success of Dita Von Teese, who is not conventionally sexy at all really.

Re: pressure of cartoonish sexuality; this is visible in most dance videos; women thrusting all over the place in a manner that's become so commonplace as to no longer titillate or shock anyone but the most innocent 12 year old. I did wonder if whorepop isn't an interesting form of perversion fatigue.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I have the Cyndi Lauper album, which I downloaded on recommendation from someone who said it sounded like Róisín Murphy, but haven't listened to it yet. ANOTHER aging pop diva comeback in 2008!

Her Name Is Nicole never got leaked or released :(

I think an important point about whore-pop, and raunch culture in general, and why it's so popular, is the empowerment angle. You know, lots of people sneer and/or wring their hands over what a morally bankrupt and undignified decision it is to make money with one's body instead of one's brain, but...not everyone has enough brain to be paid, for example, to be a cultural commentator paid to slag off other women, and some are savvy enough to realise this and make a living in other ways.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

It is v. like Roisin Murphy, although a little edgier. I reckon its a total blinder but I do lovelovelove Lauper's voice.

Bugger. I was quite curious about it, although I hated both bits I heard, just because I really like her song with Diddy. *goes to troll google for leaked tracks*

She might come home in a table cloth

[koganbot]

Just want to note that the juxtaposition within a paragraph of "and I just can't keep my clothes from falling down" and "Tila Tequila" makes me think of Joe Nichols' country hit "Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off" (video climaxes with grandma getting into it).

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

In continued suburban sitcom "when will Tom get to see the naughty videos" fun, I have now got back from the open-plan office to discover my mother-in-law has arrived to visit the baby.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Poptimists sitcom now! Oh dear, I am worryingly tempted to write that.

[credoimprobus]

I'm going to totally sidestep the main conversation just to say: oh my god, Strip Tease, I could write about that track for A MILLION YEARS and still have things left to say about it. It's pretty much Get Naked, the Sequel, isn't it -- quite beyond the matching subject matters, it's got the same kind of woozy, disorienting (and slightly unnerving) production going. Inevitably this means I think it's COMPLETELY AMAZING. The occasional sheer gems among the lyrics cert don't hurt that, either!

(Why did we never have a thread abt Welcome to the Dollhouse, anyway? I mean other than my own complete failure to start one like I meant to when it came out, ahaha.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Never too late to start one! (I'd use the half-year excuse...WttD ended up at 2-3 on my half-year list and somewhere high-ranking on other people's.)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

We should definitely have a Danity thread - for some reason I didn't quite get into the album when I first heard it (you know, as an album: all the songs, individually, were obviously brilliant) but last week it just ~clicked~ and in particular I can't stop listening to 'Pretty Boy'.

Also, I am trying to imagine some BASSLINE REMIXES of DK into existence.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Bassline Danity would probably be the most amazing thing ever.