u can look but you can’t touch it
if you touch it i'ma start some drama
you don’t want no drama
no, no drama, no, no, no, no drama
I've delayed linking to this video, not the least of which is because of the vituperative reaction to it. I haven't heard such ridicule since I showed up for the high-school prom with my blow-up date.
But part of being a blogger is having the courage to defend unpopular views, or at least to ban dissenters from the comments section.
It's essentially a novelty song, the sort of thing that gets cooked up when you've got a couple of unbooked studio hours and a wee dram of Drambuie or three.
Besides, has there ever been a more perfect evocation of the sing-songy essence of female passive-aggressive behavior as in the lyrics above? I mean, since Al Gore's last speech?
Having said that -- yes, it is annoying. As a video, though, it's terrific. I was originally going to compare it to a Kabuki dance; mulling it over, I thought this was a more apt comparison:
Noh is a chanted drama, and for that reason, some people have dubbed it Japanese opera. However, the singing in Noh involves a limited tonal range, with lengthy, repetitive passages in a narrow dynamic range. Clearly, melody is not at the center of Noh singing.
That would explain the rather monochromatic focus of the song. I haven't figured out what they did with the masks, though.
Mind you, the Black Eyed Peas usually have interesting things going on musically, and can't help but invest some artistry into even this trifle. Fergie's lovely portamento slide into the male chorus "She's got me spending . . ." I can't replicate the timing in clumsy old HTML, but that slightly off beat "Oooohhh!" sends shivers up my spine. In gratitude for that, Fergie is welcome to come sit on my sofa anytime. Though I might want to lay down some towels beforehand.
Sheesh. You see what's come to pass? You see the efforts I'm going to here to attempt to give this piece of fluff some intellectual heft? Kabuki? No -- Noh! Portamento. It's starting to remind me of an infamous review done when people started to figure out that these Beatles fellows just might be for real:
In December 1963, William Mann, the regular classical music critic of the London Times, wrote Lennon’s “slow, sad song about 'This Boy'... is expressively unusual for its lugubrious music, but harmonically it is one of their most intriguing, with its chains of pandiationic clusters... But harmonic interest is typical of their quicker songs, too, and one gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural [in] the Aeolian cadence at the end of 'Not a second time' (the chord progression which ends Mahler's Song of the Earth).“
Now that's some heavy lifting.
The Beatles, when they heard about it, more or less said: "Huh?"
Any "Aeolian cadence," real or imagined, was more than likely the work of George Martin, their brilliant producer, who was well-grounded in classical theory. You don't imagine that a scrappy Liverpool bar band conjured up the string sections of "Yesterday" or the sweeping orchestration of "She's Leaving Home" out of thin air, do you? (They initially disliked Martin's arrangement of "Yesterday," McCartney in particular complaining that he didn't want it to "end up like Mantovani.")
So to sum up: You think the song sucks. I do too, but I think that the video works splendidly. (Whatever their other merits, the Black Eyed Peas are pretty good comic actors.) Let's agree to disagree and move on to focus our hatred on a band that truly deserves it: Fall Out Boy. Andrew Mathas put together an, er, interpretation of their hit, "Sugar, We're Going Down." (The actual lyrics are here.)
Warning: NSFW. And you might want to lay down a few towels beforehand.