The suicide of 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer on Sept. 18—three days before the first anniversary of the “It Gets Better” online campaign supporting bullied LGBT youth—should give our culture pause. It forces us to recognize that in this era of change, cruelty has at least kept pace with the spread of compassion. Even after Rodemeyer took his life, his older sister was tormented by guilt—deflecting bullies who reacted to hearing a song by Lady Gaga (Rodemeyer’s favorite) at a school dance with shouts of “We’re glad he’s dead!” Rodemeyer was laid to rest in his “Born This Way” T-shirt—perhaps certain notions associated with Gaga and the “It Gets Better” campaign in pop culture should now be buried as well.
In examining how pop music fits into the Rodemeyer story, I hope you won’t think I’m positing pop as a direct cause of, or cure for, anything extramusical, let alone an event so horrific as the suicide of one who had barely lived. “It Gets Better” was conceived not as a promise but as a self-fulfilling prophecy, requiring work and faith for its realization. Pop stars made songs to help the campaign along because they believed in it, no doubt, but there was also a sense of powerfully suppressed energies bursting to the surface.
Rodemeyer’s generation, after all, is the first to grow up without any openly political pop on the charts. Unable to respond directly to oppression even in the insufficient, maudlin way pop stars always used to, one star after another seized the opportunity to speak out against bullying in support of its victims. And because bullying (at recess or in the lunchroom or gym class) is how most middle-class people first encounter the basic operations of social oppression, the subject had powerful protopolitical potential.
The most dismissible “It Gets Better” products mounted a bully pulpit of their own, e.g. Taylor Swift’s “Mean” (“Someday I’ll be living in a big old city/ And all you’ll ever going to be is mean”) and the meaningless pokes at religion in P!nk’s “Raise Your Glass” video. Other pieces of pop distilled the issue to a single kid-friendly, affirmative message: You’re different and that’s good, so be yourself; love yourself. But is that enough?
Katy Perry’s song “Firework” spins this single-mindedness into a floor-filler with a chorus so genuinely rousing it’s almost unmockable. The video, however, merits derision for bumping into important political questions then faintheartedly backing away. When director Dave Meyers shows us an unskinny teen girl on the fringes of a pool party who initially shirks her MTV-conferred responsibility to strip only to liberate herself by jumping in at the end, it’s undeniable that Meyers’ firework display of freakdom bears a strong resemblance to unthinking pop-culture conformity. Even the video’s kissing gay boys are denied full originality; they draw their inspiration from a heterosexual make-out session.
More troubling, however, is the question left unanswered by all this triumphant self-realization: Does oppression come from outside oneself or is it all in the mind? A good argument could be made for either choice—or both choices—but the inconsistencies of “Firework” turn the protopolitical into the pseudopolitical.
Lady Gaga’s song “Born This Way” and its seven-minute video are no more thought through but they send uncertainty reeling from their pure showbiz. Surely Elton John sussed out Gaga’s ambitions when he claimed, prior to the single’s release, that it would “completely get rid of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive.’” Like “Firework,” “Born This Way” evinces fear of originality; the song’s liberal borrowing from Madonna’s “Express Yourself”—itself a collection of borrowed bits—might have been considered actionable if perpetrated by someone other than music-industry savior Lady Gaga. Yet Gaga means to dethrone.
The song’s ostensibly empowering message (“Just love yourself and you’re set”) is meant to overwhelm the doubts and vulnerabilities to which Gaynor’s disco anthem gave ample, danceable space. But Lady Gaga’s P.C. notion of self-love fails to distinguish between self-discovery, self-acceptance and self-esteem. Her litany of ethnic and sexual identities (“You’re black, white, beige, chola descent/ You’re Lebanese, you’re Orient”) has no more substance than a census form. “I Will Survive” has worked for generations as a charm against despair; at its most successful, “Born This Way” can only hold at bay uncomfortable questions about identity that will come back to haunt us in any case.
For pop music that holds up post-Rodemeyer we need to look across the pond, where Nicola Roberts’ debut solo album, Cinderella’s Eyes, is one of the most acclaimed electro-pop records of 2011. Cinderella’s Eyes is mainly about the tabloid bullying Roberts suffered as the youngest member of the highly successful millennial British group Girls Aloud.
Taunted endlessly in the media for her flaming red hair, pale skin and presumed rudeness unbecoming to a pop star, Roberts tells a story that proves bullying persists past graduation to lend a bitter taste to much of the common social staple. Better, she narrates her experiences in a mercurial singing voice with quirky cadences that evoke the familiar coping strategies of various social classes—from posh hauteur to council-house cussing.
More self-aware than Lady Gaga, Roberts assimilates aggression into her singing and lyrical style, cushioning it with humor as a sanity-saving gesture. The result is one of the most quotable pop albums in recent memory. “Gladiator” puts bullies on blast with brilliant poise and clarity (as well as a shout-out to Katy Perry): “I had to call a fireman, my hair was burning bridges/ I’m shooting bullets from my chest/ I’m Superwoman, bitches.” The equally cathartic “Take a Bite” features an autobiographical rap that tops the oblique references with which pop stars such as Britney Spears (who, admittedly, has a lot more to lose by full disclosure than Roberts) drop hints about their personal lives.
Cinderella’s Eyes is blessed by an exquisite, implicit sense of self and society that has long been a Britpop specialty. (Roberts’ B-side track “Disco Blisters and a Comedown” name-checks Labour MP John Prescott.) Its release in the States would do justice to the best impulses behind “It Gets Better.” Roberts’ rough, funny truths could only fortify our progressivism.
