How Today’s Young Women Learned to Sing the Truth About Hookup Culture
After Hanna Rosin’s glowing praise for promiscuity in her new book The End of Men, articles about the hookup culture are popping up all over the web. Is it really good for women? Do they actually like it? Is replacing forward men with on-the-prowl women really progress?
Intentional or not, many of this summer’s pop rock music releases offer songs about the truth and consequences of the hookup culture. Three of these artists in particular boldly sing about love; as products of their generations, their songs can teach us about the hookup culture. The early songs of Alanis Morissette, P!nk, and Katy Perry provide a window into how these ideas progressed from Gen X women to Millennial women. The rockers’ latest works (Alanis’ havoc and bright lights, P!nk’s The Truth About Love, and Perry’s “Wide Awake”) are about how they are coping, or not, with marriage and, in the case of Alanis and P!nk, motherhood. What truths about love and happiness do their songs tell us?
The results are counterintuitive for the Rosin types who think that the hookup culture empowers women. Surely the eyes-wide-open, independent Millennial Perry is the one who has it all together? According to her songs, she is not. The truth-teller P!nk, perhaps? She is holding together if only because she hates goodbyes. No, it is angry Alanis who seems to have found peace in spite of all the havoc and bright lights. And her relative lack of experience with the hookup culture can explain why.
Whooo!
what a tour!
Thanks!
A masterpiece, congratulations!
I just don’t listen to music much anymore, and even when I was a kid I figured these people were just singing about hooking up and breaking up or really about nothing at all–just inserting vague words into a catchy tune. For instance, I was amazed when I read that one of my old favorites, the Pretenders “Kid” was actually about a single mom confessing the truth to her angry young son who has just found out she’s a prostitute?!? What the hell, one can only make out half the lyrics at the best of times…
So it’s come to this, various aspects of which many had predicted as it unfolded over four decades. I had just recently assimilated the Cosmo Girl/Sex in the City formula–build your sh**t-hot career and have krazy sex in glamorous settings until sometime around age thirty, when Prince Charming will ride in and sweep you off your feet to domestic bliss. Be that as it may, I’ve noticed in my own so-called life that the happy couples tend to be those who did NOT conform to the prevailing cultural zeitgeist and just followed the old formula.
Again, congratulations on doing all that dubious reading and listening through all that music.
As a sometime lyricist I can tell you that it’s extremely unfair to assume you know anything about these women’s lives based on their lyrics. Lyric writing is a complicated process but it’s hardly fact based.
They’re talented women and many of their songs speak to me and I am certainly not of their generations. Go ahead and enjoy their music but base your cultural judgements on actual interviews with women who aren’t living in the spotlight.
this article contains different elements: 1)observations on modern culture 2)lyric interpretation and 3)application of that interpretation to known facts about the artists life, thus analyzing the artist’s possible motivations.
weird to call that “extremely unfair.” The author never said “this is all fact I just know it.” It’s written as subjective analysis, and open to debate. So, debate it if you want–perhaps your real beef here is that you disagree with the author’s “cultural judgements [sic]?”
cheers
Leslie here, on public computer (long story) so can’t log in as myself.
Like the guy who heard American Pie and realized that the references made sense to him, these songs about love and marriage are familiar. Conversations–with women not living in the spotlight–sound much like these songs, just less poetic. Furthermore, I did not base my assessments only on the songs. I find interviews with the artists. The videos often are another source of info, often confirming or shedding light upon an interpertation.
I grant that it isn’t wise to read too much detail into the lyrics. For instance, I would not assume that P!nk’s husband has problems in bed due to excessive drinking. She might have used the sick, whiskey dick line as a provocative and lyrical reference to the common, for my generation, sexless marriage post children. Usually it is women are too tired and focused on infants to be interested in sex and that has ripple effects in a marriage until the couple finds they aren’t having much sex at all. Sometimes it is the men who give up on sex, but that usually involves online porn and perhaps a Madonna Complex. Just a guess, but P!nk doesn’t strike me as the kind of woman who would stick around for that mess. I’ve had a few friends deal with these problems, and they are far more difficult to overcome than mere too tired for sex complications.
I also grant that not all songs are subject to interpertation. For instance, Coldplay songs seem to be whatever Martin was thinking about at the time. It is rare that his songs have a consistent theme, at least not that I can recognize. From interviews it seems he does this on purpose, which frankly annoys me. Sure songs might say something different to different people or take on new meaning with new events, but writing rambles for the sake of is just a bunch of self serving navel gazing. Personal preference, but it is far more interesting to listen and realize, ‘Did Brandon Flowers write a pop song about Catholic dogma? Oh my, he did.”
Regardless of the personal details, the trend exists. Women have moved from anger to resignation to blame the other. Even without the rock stars’ life details, we can hear that in the lyrics.
Great article, Leslie. Liz Phair’s lyrics in Why Can’t I are another good example of the hook up culture’s false bill of goods: “Isn’t this the best part of breakin’ up Finding someone else you can’t get enough of Someone who wants to be with you too It’s an itch we know we are gonna scratch.”
I really liked that song, so catchy, and I was sorry the day I paid attention to the lyrics, which thoroughly ruin it.
The recent hit by Gotye is interesting, too. The lyrics sound like the next stage in hookup culture: where it’s wrong to have an expectation of monogamy and security. If I understand the lyrics right, the guy got hung up on his old girlfriend. So his current gal leaves him. And the guy sounds truly puzzled: “but you didn’t have to cut me off.” “you said we could still be friends.” “I don’t even need your love but you treat me like a stranger and it feels so rough.”
What a lost lost world, in the hookup culture. Sad.
Best
Lin
The song that begins this whole cycle (for me) is “Passionate Kisses,” written by Lucinda Williams and given its most famous performance by Mary Chapin Carpenter back in ’93. The singer spins out a long list of demands, obviously to be met without conditions, for everything from the basic necessities (“food to fill me up”) to the downright silly (“I want a full house and a rock-and-roll band”), always ending with “Shouldn’t I have all of this AND passionate kisses from you?” No, my dear; life just isn’t like that and never will be. A wonderful, jaunty tune, but the words ruin it every time.
Spot on. “Passionate Kisses” works here, as does much of that album, think “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her.” I used to love that song. I was in a Shawn Colvin phase then too. At 25 I thought “Sonny Came Home” was so insightful. Now, I just see the women in The Atlantic article drinking wine and complaining about lightbulbs. (I still respect Shawn Colvin though for “I Want It Back” about her disillusion with Bill Clinton. She deserves credit for not pulling the ‘but he’s our womanizer’ or whatever it is that Gloria Steinem said.)
It’s the pill, ref 1960.
You’re welcome.
A couple both having their sexual and emotional needs fulfilled happens all the time, but it happens when the couple makes it happen.
Great essay!
I understood that there was something wrong with my music (alt gen X, I guess) when me and DH were getting married. We could not find songs for our wedding. We ended up with “Fly Me to the Moon” as our first dance. We both love Sinatra, and we loved the piece mark Steyn wrote about the song ages ago in The Atlantic. Much of our wedding music was from the 40s and 50s. Gen X doesn’t know how to do romance.
We can’t do romance because we saw the death of romance. But have you noticed that as we’ve moved farther from romance, romantic songs have gotten more fairy tale-ish? Someone here mentioned Taylor Swift. Perfect example.
I haven’t listened to her latest breakup stuff because I have to admit, her voice grates to me. I just don’t like it.
Yasha and I danced to an oldy too.
A little older song that also relates to this issue is “F***k and run” by Liz Phair http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6iYQB6nVwI&feature=related
where she sings “I want a boyfriend/the kind of guy who wins you over”.
So much for “hooking up”…..