This is a subject that has been preying on my mind for a while now, but something about Nathan Rabin’s AV Club piece on the most recent episode of Saturday Night Live has made it difficult to think about anything else (I mean that literally—I find myself waking up in the middle of the night with this going through my head). It isn’t the piece as a whole, but one particular paragraph that bothers me:
But the ultimate mark of desperation was that Lorne Michaels and the gang allowed Black Eyed Peas to perform three fucking songs. Three fucking songs! It’s bad enough that a show that once upon a time exposed audiences to Frank Zappa, Ricky Jay and Loudon Wainwright III had one of the worst, most obnoxious groups in existence as its musical guest. But to let Will.I.Am and his three fashion-victim stooges perform more songs than just about any act in Saturday Night Live’s thirty-five year history is just inexcusable.
I’m not going to spend time defending the Black Eyed Peas (at least not now, though I have a feeling I’m going to get to that sooner or later), but it seems to have become a point of pride among certain writers to not only put BEP down but to do so in the most aggressively vicious terms they can conjure up. This happens in conversation, as well—mention BEP and reactions will usually range from rolling eyes to primal screams. This isn’t a recent phenomenon, either—long before BEP took control of the number one spot on the charts, they were being attacked with a surprisingly intense virulence.
I fully understand people hating a band’s music, or their image, or even their personalities. What I don’t understand is why this band in particular generates such an incredible level of ire. I consider them harmless fun, sometimes good, sometimes bad, almost always interesting. But their detractors seem to consider them more than just bad, they think they’re evil, a symbol of everything that’s wrong with pop music.
So I’d like to put forward a simple question, maybe even a childish one: why? What is it about BEP, the music they make, the image they present, the philosophy they put forward, whatever, that makes them so hateful? Take as much space in the comments as you want, and feel free to vent your spleen in full. But also be prepared to justify you’re opinions. Comments like “Because they suck,” or “Because Fergie is a skank,” aren’t going to cut it. Even if you don’t hate them, but think you have a clue as to why they’re hated, feel free to contribute. Just be nice about it, OK? At least to each other.
TweetTags: AV Club, Nathan Rabin, The Black Eyed Peas
A great question. I can’t help, though, since I like them. They’re pretty stupid sometimes, I’ll grant that. But other times, not so stupid. And when has stupid interfered much with my enjoyment of pop music?
Because they’re dippy and shrill. The party-party-party aspect of their music sounds like a marketer’s idea of what “fun pop music” (or “fun rap”) should be. Fergie is not an effective conveyor of feeling or even mindless good times. Their occasional nifty production tricks aren’t enough to save the banal songwriting or the I-really-love-my-job-at-Chevy’s over-cheer. You know me, I like plastic and I like shrill mainstream dance music and pop-rap (I enjoy “Evacuate the Dancefloor” way more than you do), and I find them a bridge too far. Also, while I don’t despise “My Humps” the way lots of other people do (I live in a car-free zone in which I don’t hear huge pop hits constantly unless I choose to), I imagine I would if it were shoved down my throat the way it was so many other people’s. They have their moments (“L’chaim!”), and I do rather admire how unabashedly goofy they can be. But the occasional wink just isn’t enough to make up for the thinness of everything else.
I was thinking of mentioning that “L’chaim.”
Matos W.K. is right about everything, as usual. But he makes what sounds to me like an argument about not overrating the group (Christgau’s A for “The E.N.D.”), not about why they are so hateful, and hated.
Dippy and shrill sounds about right to me, too (as a description, I mean, not as music), and there’s not a single track on The E.N.D. that doesn’t cause aesthetic warning lights to flash in my head at one point or another (including that “L’chaim!”, which I consider one of their dumbest moments—and not in a good way). But I still like it.
Maybe I’m just wired differently than every one else, but it has always seemed to me that BEP’s greatest weakness wasn’t that they were dumb, but that their intelligence was too obvious, and made their music seem too stiff and calculated (and made you wonder why they were trying to act so dumb).
Their cure for that, oddly enough, would appear to be Fergie, who comes on like the kind of sexy, kind of off-putting, aggressive, obnoxious drunk girl at an otherwise great party. It’s a role she probably started playing as a joke (remember that “My Humps” was a studio goof—it was never intended as a single), and then shaped into a persona over “The Duchess”. I agree with Matos W.K. that she’s unconvincing projecting any sort of emotion, even simple enjoyment. But I also think that’s part of her appeal—any girl in a club who shouts along with Fergie is safe in the knowledge that she can’t sound much worse, and will probably sound better. It’s liberating in it’s way.
I also wonder if there’s a connection between shrillness and their popularity on the radio. The last time I listen to commercial radio (about four months ago—I can’t stand it very often) it was wall-to-wall noise, much of it fuzzy (if that’s actually a descriptive term), and every sound, including the records, was competing with the one before it for attention. Whatever else you say about her, Fergie’s voice cuts through the noise, even more so when set against the minimalist backgrounds BEP are using now. I still think the most amazing moment on the album is on “Boom Boom Pow”, when the background noise that has filled the first verse slowly dissipates when Fergie starts singing, leaving nothing but her voice and a drum machine. It’s a daring sound for modern radio, and it immediately grabs your attention.
Now I’m starting to ramble, so I’ll stop. But I do want to say I agree with Amateur Reader that we haven’t gotten at what makes the hatred of BEP so intensive. I probably just don’t have enough readers to get that conversation going. But I didn’t dare put this on ILX; I’d be eaten alive.