Post by Admin on Jan 27, 2015 23:48:38 GMT
Since Title dropped, Meghan Trainor has moved over 250,000 units of her album, thereby supplanting Taylor Swift atop the Billboard 200 chart. Two of her singles – “Lips Are Movin” and “All About That Bass” – occupy the top ten on the Billboard 100 chart, having gone platinum many times over. It is the job of this column to figure out why, and in a previous post, we discussed how her journey has been abetted by a budding trend: celebrating the oldies because they feel so different from the pop music of today (which sounds, for all the world, as if you’re listening to it from within the confines of a rather noisy pinball machine).
We left off with some observations from a Slant review, namely that “it’s unclear how Trainor’s otherwise retro shtick is sustainable, as evidenced by similar artists like Duffy seeing their careers quickly wane.” There is, of course, another aspect of her success worth examinaning: Trainor’s rise to fame was catapulted, in part, by a relentless discussion of her “body positive” single. While the internet was buzzing away over whether or not “All About That Bass” constituted a pro- or anti-feminist rallying cry, Trainor rode on the controversy to the top of the charts, leading at least one critic to observe that “Meghan Trainor is exploiting body image, just like everybody else.”
If the chart positions and sales figures are any indication, the formula seems to be paying off. However, there are now the beginnings of a backlash from those who see Trainor as objectifying herself throughout this album, and it’s not hard to see why. Trainor often makes strange sexual barters throughout the record: “Baby don’t call me your friend. If I hear that word again, you might never get a chance to see me naked in your bed.”
Let’s fully unpack the narrative of that statement: don’t refer to our narrator as you might refer to anyone else in the nascent stages of a relationship, or else “these sweet like sugar Gucci lips” will be withheld. Well no, not exactly. These materialistically objectified “Gucci lips” won’t be withheld—they “might” be withheld, suggesting further room to waffle as our narrator makes up her mind. Likewise, it won’t be her bed in which you “might never get a chance to see [her] naked. ” No. Rest assured, it’ll be your bed: you’ll always get the home-turf advantage, in other words—and the skeevy power that comes with it.