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If You Dress As the Internet For Halloween, Don't Forget to Wear Your Anti-Intellectual Discontent

Download: Gwen Stefani: Wind It Up

So now I'm defending her--what? Really? As you know, I'm not crazy about this chick, Stefani, so not crazy about her that my line about how "Hollaback Girl" had about as much club potential as a kid with a milk moustache made it onto the high-profile Hollaback Girl wiki entry on some told-you-so prove-you-wrong shit. Granted I'm sure a lot of the current Gwen hate is in the tradition of the internet more concerned about being first, not being right-- but as far as that's concerned, I beat all you assholes by at least two years. Inside my head, more than two years ago, were jokes about Linda Perry that I simply refused to type because I was afraid your brains would explode, pacemakers near microwaves, dogs in a bathtub made of explosions.

Is this "Wind It Up" song in the Top 200 songs of 2006? Hardly. But it's easily in the Top 500, maybe Top 450. I have enjoyed watching people pretend to know a thing about pop music by saying that Gwen is biting Fergie biting Gwen, and if you're one of those people, leave me a comment with your name and address and I'll send you a free photo of M.C. Escher giving himself a handjob. Believe it or not, more people than Fergie and Gwen have done the whole sing-rap sorta thing. People like M.I.A.. People like Nelly. Those are the only two people. But there's a whole history of this stuff you can't ignore.

Much has been made of the yodeling. I wonder how many of these people know who Jewel is. I suggest picking up her book of poetry Knight In Shining Armor and studying up.

But how about the mindnumbingly awesome, Decemberists-approved idea Gwen/Pharrell are putting out here, albeit somewhat blatantly, i.e. a pop song that a character from The Sound of Music might think would count for a pop song in 2006...?

"She's crazy, right?"

Even the way Pharrell treats her voice, it goes from the yodel sample to Gwen pretty seamlessly, i.e. The Goatherd IS the Goatherd. This isn't appropriation so much as character-acting, with some extreme dissonance/distaste in so far as it's not necessarily spelled out like that for the bloggers, no context, plus like the weird fish-out-of-water observations w/r/t this Goatherd's clubland coup: "But the girls want to know why boys like us so much." They like you because you're goatherders!

Goatherds, btw, are some slimy motherfuckers. Poeti-historically if I remember right, GHs are the most lecherous of the herders, junk all over the place, which is why to be called a goatherder was serious business in the world of the Alexandrian diss. It's like being called a vlogger. So there's some take-back-the-hoe dress-up involved in this song too, a la dressing like a slut for Halloween. Now I'm going too far. Ariel Levy wants my head on a pike. Maybe it's not my fault, the song's shifty sexual politics, etc. But there's something compelling formally at least to the idea of a (historically, culturally) misplaced goatherder, seemingly this quote unliberated wind-up doll, totally throwing other girls with this slave-is-master routine.

But sticking to sonics-as-storytelling. It'll get sweat down to specific sets of affectations, musical gestures, vocabularies, etc., but I think things could get sophisticated without losing their oomph. A pop song as conceived by Ernest circa Ernest Goes to Camp. A pop song as conceived by the "gay spider" from Arachnophobia. A pop song conceived by the "gay spider" from the set of Wild Wild West.

Top 425 of 2006.

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