NY Mag: Lil Nas X, Cardi B, and the Anti-Pop Conservative Outrage Machine

As many of our readers probably remember, I was dialed out of politics in 2020. I was focused on aesthetics, culture and history. Specifically, I wanted to trace the root causes of America’s cultural degeneration to their source. How did my generation come to live in a culture of omnipresent filth?

New York Magazine:

“Pop stars are not babysitters. Pop music is not wholesome entertainment. If you play mainstream music expecting to have your values reaffirmed, you will — inevitably, eventually — be disappointed. Pop stars (at least the good ones) push against the boundaries of what’s possible and acceptable, sometimes in the noble interest of challenging the prevailing social mores, sometimes just for the devilish thrill of crossing lines, and sometimes because they just can’t help it. These people aren’t, like politicians or superheroes, paragons of justice or hometown pride. Their job is to reflect on their lives and sing about what they have learned. Sometimes those reflections align with our own experiences, and we connect with the music on a visceral level; you could argue that the best stars working in any era have a sense for what’s culturally prescient that keeps them in the conversation. The blend of aspiration and passive aggression at play in the catalog of Drake feels like a uniquely postmillennial commentary on social-media era narcissism in the same way that the loss of innocence recalled in the best early Britney Spears singles seems inextricably tethered to the late ’90s, when we all became incrementally more online and judged by more onlookers’ standards.

It takes more than visibility and cultural savvy to be a role model, though. We hand that title away too freely. We expect too much. We believe the world should accommodate our thinking. We fight fiercely against perceived threats to the median wholesome values and traditions we’re raised with. This is the story of the Beatles in 1966, when John Lennon voiced frustrations with religion and declared his band “more popular than Jesus,” sparking bans, bonfires, and protests that seemed to quell the British quartet’s interest in performing live, and it’s the story of the Rolling Stones in 1968, when “Sympathy for the Devil” drew devious insinuations. (“There are black magicians who think we are acting as unknown agents of Lucifer and others who think we are Lucifer,” Keith Richards told Rolling Stonein 1971, recalling the controversy.) It’s the story of Loretta Lynn in 1975, when she released “The Pill,” a song about a wife who’s driven by her husband’s cheating to start taking birth control, and country radio stations banned the single, seeking to curtail the success of what would ultimately become one of the singer’s biggest hits. It’s the story of Senate hearings about explicit lyrics in 1985, of Pepsi pulling an ad starring Madonna in 1989 after the singer’s “Like a Prayer” met outrage for its mix of sensual scenes and Catholic iconography, of 1990 obscenity trials over 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be and complaints from George H.W. Bush about Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” in 1992, of backlash for the sexual liberation of Britney Spears’s “Oops!… I Did It Again” in 1999, of Janet Jackson being shunned after a wardrobe malfunction in 2004, of blowback over Lady Gaga’s Luhrmann-esque “Judas” video in 2011. It’s the story again this spring as conservatives lash out at risqué performances from Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, and Lil Nas X. Times change, but the message is consistent: You have a responsibility to make art that is appropriate for young eyes. It’s naïve.

The fuss about Megan and Cardi’s “WAP” was a greatest-hits album of scare-mongering about rap music and pearl clutching about female sexuality so canned and dated that you couldn’t help but laugh at the people trying to sell it. Ben Shapiro’s reading of the lyrics to the song was instant meme gold, much like Charlton Heston’s recitations of the lyrics to “Cop Killer” in 1992. These performances both suppose that the artist is always using words literally, misunderstanding rap fundamentally as a form rich with embellishment that asks listeners to suspend their disbelief for the more extravagant and ridiculous lines as much as we are expected to believe it when it speaks to the artists’ passions and struggles. No one who heard “WAP” thinks Cardi B really likes uvula play. The point is upending power dynamics and countering the male gaze. The least interesting approach to processing deliberately transgressive art is to rate it on how well it dispenses or upholds traditional values, judging it for its success or failure to meet purposes it clearly doesn’t aspire to. It is a narcissistic framework that seats the listener at the center of the universe and values outside stimuli on how comfortable they make us, rather than on their own merits and traditions. (The question with “WAP” isn’t whether or not it should be played on the radio during the daytime or whether it’s even appropriate for late primetime, as renewed complaints around the performance of the song at this year’s Grammys seemed to suppose American children would be tuned in after 10 p.m. to see it on television. It’s how sharp the bars are and how tall it stands in the pantheon of twerk jams it evokes with its Baltimore club sample.) …”

For a long time, I associated cultural degeneration with progressive liberalism because the two are clearly so joined at the hip today, but there was something about this theory that didn’t sit right with me.

In the 19th century, American liberalism had been about political rights and economics. By today’s standards, we had a government that was almost nonexistent and an economy that was virtually unregulated. And yet, we had a Victorian culture which was far more cohesive than our own.