Battle of the Sexist
As a longtime purveyor of filthy music, I guess it didn’t seem all that offensive when I came up with my latest idea, part of a personal project I’ve been working on for too long. The genesis is pretty simple: a few nights ago, I ran into an ex-girlfriend, who had ballooned up in weight to a staggering degree. Now, I’m not one to talk, but I couldn’t help inflating with as much glee as she had donuts. Part of it was schadenfreude — it made me happy to see that she no longer possessed the physical attributes she once held so dear. But I won’t deny that most of it was pure egotism: I wanted to believe that I was the cause, that her dumping me had as much of an impact on her as it did on me, that it so devastated her that she started binge-eating, which is actually what I do when I’m depressed.
I’m certain this isn’t the case, although I can’t exactly figure out a better cause. When we dated, she was always body-conscious and fitness-obsessed, and I was usually the frightening, doughy albatross who made it seem like she was “dating down”). At any rate, I started to think about this as the subject for a song.
It’s kind of rare that I think of songs in serious, vaguely literal terms. I know song lyrics are poetry (really shitty poetry, in my case), and poetry is mainly about imagery and symbolism, but I almost never write what you’d call a “personal” song in a literal sense. They’re always under the guise of a third-person character (or a first-person character who is not me), so while deep down they’re rooted in something very personal, they don’t appear to be. This is also how I approach straight fiction and screenwriting — I’m a big believer in “write what you know,” but it’s also not terribly hard to merge what you know with shit you’re just making up. I know what it’s like to feel trapped and isolated; I don’t know what it’s like to have every person I’ve ever known killed, or what it’s like to be on the run from the government, but I can imagine.
So before I even got the chance to gussy this up with metaphor or obscenity-laced sexual-inadequacy diatribes, a chorus popped into my head while I was trying to fall asleep last night — fully formed and annoyingly catchy. So catchy I thought I ripped it off from another song, but I’ve spent days thinking about it and can’t come up with one. (Ironically, when I fleshed it out with a verse, I discovered that section was completely ripping off “The Ascent of Stan” by Ben Folds.) I leaped to my guitar plunked out the melody, figured out the chords and the various fills and harmonies I kept hearing, wrote it all down, and went to bed.
Once I got the chorus, I started thinking about the real meat of the songs — the true thrust of my emotions. It’s mean-spirited and bitter, obviously, but at the heart of it, the idea of the song is first about how people handle breakups in different ways. It’s also about misplaced hostility, the aforementioned egotism and schadenfreude, really portraying the first-person narrator (i.e., me) as much, much worse than the ex, whose only crime (other than breaking up with “him”) is plumping up — to the extreme!
So when I talked to Lucy and she asked what I was up to, I mentioned the song and the whole idea behind it, and she said, “That’s sexist.”
Which is 100% true. Not that it’d ever get airplay because (a) I’m nobody and (b) the chorus contains liberal use of the word “fuck,” but if it did, I’d imagine a significant chunk of the female demographic would tune out as soon as they realize the chorus also contains liberal allusions to such large, balloon-like objects as the Goodyear blimp and the Hindenburg. Beyond the general sexism, it reenforces body-image dilemmas among chicks, as they like to be called. I don’t like doing that. I wouldn’t want some chick who looks into my sunken, crooked eyes and falls in love to listen to my shitty song and say, “Huh, time to develop bulimia. Where are the empty mason jars?” Which, again, is more egotism on my part. On so many hilarious levels.
So what do I do? I could say, “Fuck political correctness,” because I know I’m doing my damnedest to portray the narrator as the bad guy. I could say, “The underlying point of the song is the sexism, and the fact that this person feels — because of their own personal quirks — that her getting fat, when fatness (or at least extreme sloth) may have contributed to her pulling the plug on the relationship, is a minor victory in his eyes.” It’s not about right or wrong; it’s about the emotion of the moment, and the reflection on the moment and realizing that, even though he knows he’s a total dick, he still feels awesome that she’s a gargantuan lardass.
And then it makes me wonder crazy shit, like, “What if Springsteen’s ‘Used Cars’ was originally about running into a fat ex-girlfriend, but he rewrote and rewrote and rewrote until it became a bittersweet, semi-nostalgic snapshot of working-class life, with the fat ex turning into a used car but both of them representing something once desired and currently rejected?” Which leads me to the obvious conclusion:
I’m overthinking it. I should just write. Let the amateur-night crowd at that hippie coffee shop separate the wheat from the chaff.
Posted by Stan on June 6, 2008 11:01 PM | Permalink | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em | Digg It
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