One thing I have observed in the aftermath of the repeal of Roe v. Wade that I did not expect to see is that I constantly see women who choose to not have children judge women who do so. Just today my good ol’ TikTok feed supplied me a video about the phenomenon of microchimerism, where fetal stem cells can migrate to the mother’s brain. The science is fascinating and strangely beautiful, and it is a very complex phenomenon still being researched, with its assorted ups and downs. But I had to venture outside of the video’s context to learn about the intricacies of that science, because all the video and its commenters served to do was cement pregnancy as something horrific and undesirable by skewing the facts of the science at face value. The video as a microcosm pushed the message that pregnancy is subjecting yourself to some undesirable body horror, and the women abstaining from that are somehow more righteous than those who do.
Because going about life the way you see fit is obviously a constant war of comparison between who is “better” at “sticking it to the man” and being a perfect agent of self indulgence.
I think that, because abortion rights have been so under attack and undermined, these people are associating having children as something one is forced to do. If you have a kid, now it is automatically assumed that you had no control over your decision, as opposed to choosing to use birth control. Even though it is zero business of other people how a family starts or what other people choose to do with their bodies. It is a misguided form of self reassurance where we create hierarchies based on extremely personal choices and judge others accordingly, with our own choices always being at the top of the ladder. We instinctively attack and attempt to undermine what we don’t understand or what makes us feel uncomfortable due to that lack of understanding.
It is also telling that women are being criticized by other women by doing something so strongly associated with feminine gender roles.
But what’s the difference between a woman who decides to have a kid/start a family, and a woman who doesn’t want to do that in her life? Literally nothing. You have no right to judge someone on their life decisions if it is literally harming no one, and you have no right to make assumptions about someone for simply going about a process of life as they see fit. And we should fight for the right for bodily autonomy in all of its forms, because true choice means permitting all of the options regarding starting or not starting a family. All of them.
A few days ago, my boyfriend sent me a link to Lil Pump’s recent smash hit “Pump Rock x Heavy Metal” saying, and I quote, “DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS.” But it’s hard to not forcefully contaminate myself to music that is atrocious to make the good music all the more worthwhile. That’s how dedicated I am to my love of music.
Besides, I was meaning to explore this on my own anyways after hearing Lil Pump’s glorious, glorious weird scream-grunt noise on an Instagram story. Let’s review whether or not Mr. Gucci Gang is able to elevate two of rock’s most iconic subgenres to the modern age.
“Bob” help us.
The intro is, fittingly, the most stereotypical take on punk rock possible, and is probably most similar to what disconnected old farts think all punk rock sounds like. Mediocre Generica was the title of a (much more sonically interesting, if guilty pleasurable) Leftöver Crack album, and it fits here. Upon further reserach, last.fm tagged this song as rock, metal, nu metal, rap metal, drone metal avant-garde, beatdown hardcore, AND crossover thrash, so maybe my aural analysis is subpar. Maybe all this time I was actually the musical equivalent of one of those people who gets repulsed by eating anything better than McDonald’s and I had no idea. If so, I feel ashamed.
In this striking vein, I’ll give the rest of the song some credit: the production is actually interesting! Sonically, it’s more interesting and attention-grabbing than a lot of the more recent music I’ve heard, with an intense throbbing bass line that I particularly like. Too bad it’s got Lil Pump singing over it. I love having to hear scrawny men with awful hair sing about emo bitches and having a dagger dick, which is extremely disturbing. He calls himself a narcissist in this song, which makes sense with how self-indulgent and oblivious to common sense the lyrics are. As a complete outsider to the whole “emo rap” or whatever scene, I’m kind of fascinated by the repeated motif of wrist-slitting throughout the song – if this song is declaring itself “heavy metal,” does this mean that all those sensational news reports from the eighties about how those poor teens were beckoned to kill themselves because a Judas Priest song told them to, were actually true? It’s hard to overlook lyrical content when someone has such an awful voice.
This song seems to have been created for people who enjoy the concept of punk rock and heavy metal, but don’t have much knowledge in anything beyond the sloganeering and looking like you have street cred. I doubt Lil Pump has much knowledge past that regard either, or has any interest in going beyond it in his music.
I had been meaning to write this post for a short while, but I kept getting busy. But yesterday morning, the Instagram algorithm similarly offered me another current music faux pas that my masochistic brain just had to subject myself to, and I just had to get something about it out there. This time, it was a paragraph Melanie Martinez had written explaining one of the songs on her new album, because her fans are apparently too dumb to be able to come to their own conclusions about the meaning of her songs. She says:
This is obviously the best thing to be reading while you’re preparing breakfast. Funnily enough, Lil Pump also alludes to period sex in his previously mentioned song.
I read the lyrics, which I refuse to link because they’re stupid, and I listened to as much of the song I could stand, which wasn’t very much. It sucked. You know when you only read the lyrics to a song and you come up with your own musical accompaniment in your head? I knew it wasn’t going to be as good as my brain’s assumptions, but I was stunned. You would think that an artist who is supposedly going through some radical image change would make music that similarly pushes boundaries, not just something created solely to be covered on a ukulele. It was one of the most mild mannered, unoffensive sounding songs I’d ever heard.
As for the lyrical content, it is sad to me how Melanie could not even come up with a basic metaphor to convey her idea. Like Little Pumperton, who uses the usual guns-and-cars flexing to communicate masculine hood prowess, Mel resorts to the most basic, blatant concepts to get across her point of being…a woman who exists and does things, I guess. As a cisgender young female, I technically should be on this song’s side, but it only comes off as condescending. I don’t need something that is completely natural and familiar to me explained to me in such, er, explicit terms. (“Womb shedding.” Gag.)
If I’m somewhere near the target audience for Melanie’s music in terms of my age and sex, then I’d say we deserve better. Young women can think for themselves and don’t need to be spoon-fed a fourteen year old’s concept of lyrical depth in order to feel “empowered.” Neither do young men need watered down portrayals of material wealth, hoe-wrangling, and glorified self harm. In today’s world, everyone fears being misunderstood. But the answer to that should not be undermining people’s intelligence and spoon-feeding them lowest common denominator nonsense. People should be allowed to bring their own interpretations to the songs they listen to and not have everything spelled out to them. Nuance and complexity are good things, and they should be present in what we see, read, and listen to. We should be encouraged to think critically about what we consume.
If we don’t, then…well, I guess we let songs like these take the world by storm.
A Roundtable Discussion on Heavy Metal (and Melanie)
Thursday, April 6th, 2023A few days ago, my boyfriend sent me a link to Lil Pump’s recent smash hit “Pump Rock x Heavy Metal” saying, and I quote, “DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS.” But it’s hard to not forcefully contaminate myself to music that is atrocious to make the good music all the more worthwhile. That’s how dedicated I am to my love of music.
Besides, I was meaning to explore this on my own anyways after hearing Lil Pump’s glorious, glorious weird scream-grunt noise on an Instagram story. Let’s review whether or not Mr. Gucci Gang is able to elevate two of rock’s most iconic subgenres to the modern age.
“Bob” help us.
The intro is, fittingly, the most stereotypical take on punk rock possible, and is probably most similar to what disconnected old farts think all punk rock sounds like. Mediocre Generica was the title of a (much more sonically interesting, if guilty pleasurable) Leftöver Crack album, and it fits here. Upon further reserach, last.fm tagged this song as rock, metal, nu metal, rap metal, drone metal avant-garde, beatdown hardcore, AND crossover thrash, so maybe my aural analysis is subpar. Maybe all this time I was actually the musical equivalent of one of those people who gets repulsed by eating anything better than McDonald’s and I had no idea. If so, I feel ashamed.
In this striking vein, I’ll give the rest of the song some credit: the production is actually interesting! Sonically, it’s more interesting and attention-grabbing than a lot of the more recent music I’ve heard, with an intense throbbing bass line that I particularly like. Too bad it’s got Lil Pump singing over it. I love having to hear scrawny men with awful hair sing about emo bitches and having a dagger dick, which is extremely disturbing. He calls himself a narcissist in this song, which makes sense with how self-indulgent and oblivious to common sense the lyrics are. As a complete outsider to the whole “emo rap” or whatever scene, I’m kind of fascinated by the repeated motif of wrist-slitting throughout the song – if this song is declaring itself “heavy metal,” does this mean that all those sensational news reports from the eighties about how those poor teens were beckoned to kill themselves because a Judas Priest song told them to, were actually true? It’s hard to overlook lyrical content when someone has such an awful voice.
This song seems to have been created for people who enjoy the concept of punk rock and heavy metal, but don’t have much knowledge in anything beyond the sloganeering and looking like you have street cred. I doubt Lil Pump has much knowledge past that regard either, or has any interest in going beyond it in his music.
I had been meaning to write this post for a short while, but I kept getting busy. But yesterday morning, the Instagram algorithm similarly offered me another current music faux pas that my masochistic brain just had to subject myself to, and I just had to get something about it out there. This time, it was a paragraph Melanie Martinez had written explaining one of the songs on her new album, because her fans are apparently too dumb to be able to come to their own conclusions about the meaning of her songs. She says:
This is obviously the best thing to be reading while you’re preparing breakfast. Funnily enough, Lil Pump also alludes to period sex in his previously mentioned song.
I read the lyrics, which I refuse to link because they’re stupid, and I listened to as much of the song I could stand, which wasn’t very much. It sucked. You know when you only read the lyrics to a song and you come up with your own musical accompaniment in your head? I knew it wasn’t going to be as good as my brain’s assumptions, but I was stunned. You would think that an artist who is supposedly going through some radical image change would make music that similarly pushes boundaries, not just something created solely to be covered on a ukulele. It was one of the most mild mannered, unoffensive sounding songs I’d ever heard.
As for the lyrical content, it is sad to me how Melanie could not even come up with a basic metaphor to convey her idea. Like Little Pumperton, who uses the usual guns-and-cars flexing to communicate masculine hood prowess, Mel resorts to the most basic, blatant concepts to get across her point of being…a woman who exists and does things, I guess. As a cisgender young female, I technically should be on this song’s side, but it only comes off as condescending. I don’t need something that is completely natural and familiar to me explained to me in such, er, explicit terms. (“Womb shedding.” Gag.)
If I’m somewhere near the target audience for Melanie’s music in terms of my age and sex, then I’d say we deserve better. Young women can think for themselves and don’t need to be spoon-fed a fourteen year old’s concept of lyrical depth in order to feel “empowered.” Neither do young men need watered down portrayals of material wealth, hoe-wrangling, and glorified self harm. In today’s world, everyone fears being misunderstood. But the answer to that should not be undermining people’s intelligence and spoon-feeding them lowest common denominator nonsense. People should be allowed to bring their own interpretations to the songs they listen to and not have everything spelled out to them. Nuance and complexity are good things, and they should be present in what we see, read, and listen to. We should be encouraged to think critically about what we consume.
If we don’t, then…well, I guess we let songs like these take the world by storm.
Tags:bad music, Lil Pump, Melanie Martinez, music, things I don't enjoy, womb shedding
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