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PaperclipPerfector
1yr ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
My wife asked one of her typical "Long drive stuck in traffic" questions the other day, and I want to pose it to theMotte: What pop song written this century would you propose as the new national anthem for the United States of America?
I settled on Taylor Swift's You Belong With Me. It perfectly captures the modern American middle-class self-conceit. It's got a little twang to it without being Morgan Wallen, a dash of country but not too much, reflecting a people that still thinks of themselves as descendants of frontier farmers but really drive a lawn tractor around a suburban three-quarters of an acre; a driving rock beat but not heavy metal, a cultural artifact that honors rock music's past but neither pushes it forward into avant garde strangeness nor slavishly imitates what went before.
The femcel narrator's view of herself as the putative underdog ("She wears short-skirts I wear T Shirts, she's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers") is the kind of self-view every American takes of themselves. We Americans all think of ourselves like that, we're all middle-class or working class underdogs striving against the "system" and its head honchos. We think that about ourselves, even when we're billionaires who have been elected president, superstar athletes who pushed other superstar athletes out of the sport that we already dominated, or the literal richest man in the world. Americans picture themselves as the underdog when they fight wars against impoverished tribesmen across the globe, when they play sports we barely care about against tiny countries. How better to capture that than a song by a thin, young, rich blonde about how she just can't get a guy to notice her. The video presentation adds to the hilarity: she's the only one who really understands the (checks notes) star wide receiver on the football team, they're the most conventionally attractive high school couple imaginable, but they're so unique because she unlike his current girlfriend "listen[s] to the kind of music she doesn't like, And she'll never know your story like I do."
The conclusion of the song ("Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find, That what you're looking for has been here the whole time, If you could see that I'm the one, Who understands you, Been here all along, So, why can't you see?, You belong with me") reflects America's inherent hopefulness and future-orientation. We all think that one day the world will wake up and realize what we have. If we just stay in Iraq long enough, if we just really make the case for democracy in China, if we get antidiscrimination right this time, if we create a path to good jobs for the working class...Americans believe in so many impossible plans it is hard to keep track.
What's your pick and your justification?
A lot of people here apparently don’t know what a “pop song” is! I’ll go with “Fuckin’ Perfect” by P!nk. It has a few things going for it that make it extremely appropriate for this moment in American history.
This is a country which is just now starting to really come to grips with what the last twenty-plus years of catastrophic foreign policy mistakes have meant for the prestige of the country and the plummeting levels of trust between the government and its people. The once-unstoppable giant, the shining city on the hill, has lost a lot of its former luster - first with the misadventure in Vietnam, and then with Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya… “Blood and fire”, indeed!
That doesn’t mean we need to sit around and feel regretful about it, though! Who among us hasn’t destabilized a country or two?! Everyone makes mistakes, and the important thing is to always look forward and step over the past. Frankly, it’s good that we made a couple mistakes, because it humanized us in the eyes of the world and showed that we’re just silly old humans like the rest of them!
Yup, there’s that cherished scrappy-underdog mentality you talked about.
And the chorus:
And here’s where the song is truly fuckin’ perfect for our particular cultural moment. The single overriding theme of our hyper-feminized cultural zeitgeist is “there is nothing wrong with you at all - you just think there’s something wrong with you because they have filled your head with oppressive and hurtful perfectionist standards designed to make you ignore the fact that you’re absolutely perfect and blameless exactly the way you are.” Any sort of objective standard which would identify some people as better than others, or some qualities and behaviors as better than others, is inherently unjust and immoral, because that makes some people feel bad about themselves. And the only people who are supposed to feel bad about themselves are people with privilege - relics of the OLD America - and not us marginalized folx that represent the NEW America. (This new anthem also has a swear word in it, and that’s great, because the new America is sassy and uses salty language because it’s rebellious and challenges previous hegemonic norms of decorum.)
There’s a second verse, equally as you-go-girl as the first, in which P!nk admonishes the addressee that if she ever feels any doubts or shame or guilt or regret, that’s stinkin’ thinkin’, and you need to banish those negative thoughts. But also embrace them? But in like, a defiant way that’s projected outward instead of inward. Very, very appropriate for our cultural moment, in which masses of people who are failing to live up to the standards set by the Old America rebel violently against those standards and tear down the totems of that order in order to scrub away anything that would challenge the mantra, “Nothing is wrong with me, and everything bad in my life is someone else’s fault.”
And then, absolutely perfectly, we have a rap break! In the New America, black/hip-hop culture is ascendant and must be represented, but in a sanitized way that sands off all the rough edges of most of the lyrical themes of actual hip-hop.
Consumerism, bread-and-circuses, drowning self-doubt in hedonistic alcoholism, etc. Imagine as the anthem singer bleats out this line before a whole stadium of sports fans just before the game, as the arena erupts with the cheers of people downing their beers in sync with the line.
Another commenter complained that “You Belong With Me” lacks a defined moment where the fighter jet fly-over or the pyrotechnic blast or the fireworks explosion can happen. Well, this is the moment in “Fuckin’ Perfect” that’s tailor-made for precisely such a moment. The music actually drops out completely for a brief moment, then comes soaring back with a high vocal note. Very anthemic.
I think this song has many things going for it which make it a more appropriate national anthem in general, and for 21st-century America specifically, than “You Belong With Me” - both on a purely musical level, and also in terms of lyrical and meta-cultural content.
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Valhallleluja. Consumerism always wins.
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Pop music is not compatible with a national anthem in the same way that a hip-hop artist will never be appointed US poet laureate. It doesn't matter how fitting or incisive the content; the tone is off. An anthem is supposed to symbolize unadulterated national pride! It is ingroup incarnate, and adding bitter irony is missing the whole point. Even the Soviets weren't cynical enough to make their anthem sarcastic.
More importantly, your choice is completely unsuitable for practical reasons. How are you going to schedule a flyover? We're already struggling to recruit fresh-faced farmboys into the military, and you need something that will appeal to the pro gamer in all of them. In all of us.
That's right, there's one obvious choice.
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Its not American, but the song 'We throw parties you throw knives' by Los Campesinos mainly for the lyrics.
"We throw parties, you throw knives, its all the same if the fizzy drinks are nice"
"There's red stains all over the place, it's not blood it's cherryaid"
Mainly I feel it captures how charmed American life is and unconcerned with problems that don't immediately affect us, with a superiority complex towards outsiders.
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Party in the USA seems like an obvious choice.
That was my wife's pick. Similar underdog vibes, very Americana. I went with early Swift because it ought to be at least a little country.
Notably in the Swift video she plays both the current brunette-presumably-selfish girlfriend as well as the protagonist/singer blonde version pining misunderstood friend. That poor footballer.
Man, can you imagine the psychological torture inflicted by having to have sex with Two Taylor Swifts?. Few men will know such horrors, and fewer could hope to endure them.
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Optimistically, Air Traffic Controller's Blame. We had great plans, great hopes, and great dreams; put our future on the line, and instead:
It's not just misfortune or bad luck or our moral faults, as much as pride plays a repeated place: the song isn't a Tragedy. Our choices were bad, our plans faulty, our hard work not enough. Our 'home' wasn't our place, our lessons wasted. The rules we followed brought us to this.
And in the process:
The shallow read for the title is "Don't Blame" yourself for your own failures, and as selfish as that seems it's a useful rejoinder to depressive tendencies, but I think that misses the deeper answer:
That is, there's more to this country than The Politics of Grievance; picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and trying again matters more than pointing fingers at who is at fault. You're not dead yet. It's not the best description of the current politics of this country, but then again I'm not sure the Star-Spangled Banner was a great description of the politics of 1812.
As what the country wants to be, should be, though... there's a reason that this theme's been resonant in a lot of recent works: I point to FFXIV or Chuubo's for doing it especially well, but they're far from unusual in touching it.
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It's that nature of Americans to strive and struggle even when everything is handed to them that makes them such a force to be reckoned with. Isn't that amazing? The ability to never be happy, to be so totally indifferent to success AND failure, to possess such an invincible armor of narcissism.
As Gone Girl (a contender for National Book of 21st Century America) put it - what's the point of being together if you're not the happiest?
Lmao this is beautifully put. Never been more simultaneously proud of and disgusted with my own country. We truly are a rare breed.
Agree, it’s a great summation. No people on earth care as much, as individuals, about being ‘the best’. Others may have collective ambitions of greatness, but only in America is collective ambition really just individual ambition added together, unmoderated and unbolstered by any communal identity. It’s why Obama really was the most European American president in a very long time: “you didn’t build that” was both completely true and absolutely, stunningly, fundamentally un-American in a total sense.
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Just to be clear, I like Americans a lot.
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I don't have a well thought out justification, but I have to put in the inevitable vote for Rich Men North of Richmond. It's blatantly political!
It certainly captures the down on your luck rural underdog vibe you mention, but is admittedly less optimistic.
Very La Marseillaise. "We will water our fields with an impure blood."
Hah you're way over my head with your fancy talk bud. Gonna have to break that one down for me.
if you've seen Casablanca (and if you haven't, you should) you've heard it.
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The bitter protest song as anthem might seem odd, but it's very much in the vein of one of the single most famous national anthems.
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"Such that impure blood
waters our fields!"
It's the French national anthem, and the inspiration for countless others.
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