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PaperclipPerfector
1yr ago
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Notes -
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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