05 October 2009

Srs talk about pop music

There are really a lot of things about this Jesse McCartney feat. T-Pain video for Body Language that offend my sensibilities. Let me tell you about them!

First of all, repeated use of same lyric in two different songs by same artist. We already KNOW "that thing you got behind you is amazing," from Leavin'. The worst offender of this, by the way, might be The Police. How do we know it's a big enough umbrella, but it's always Sting who ends up getting weeeeeeet? Because he told us! In like twenty different songs.

Moving on... that hand gesture that young McCartney uses to describe the convexity of a posterior (0:43 in the video) strikes me as kind of tacky and lewd. I guess it's inaccurate for me to call him "young" when he is basically the same age as me, but I still think of him as this child, singing nasally about the beauty of someone's soul.

Seriously though... the fetishization of women for being "ethnic" is pretty gross. In this song, a woman is "so international" that Jesse McCartney sings to her in French and Japanese, while she may or may not be Mexican. Although, maybe he is trying to reach out to his mixed race/ethnicity fanbase by featuring a tri-ethnic woman... in which case, progressive.

Not progressive: repeated shots of a bikini-clad woman, with her face kept HIDDEN. Who cares what her face looks like, all you need to know is she's a foreign girl with fly booty!

03 October 2009

Voicefail

In case you were wondering how accurate the transcriptions courtesy of Google Voice are, here is a "shopping list" I read to C's voicemail:

Broccoli, rye bread, a sailboat, Yukon Gold potatoes, Nilla Wafers, Sammie, Beanie, Spigot, and some steaks.

And what was written in the transcription he received:

Broccoli, right. Bread the sailboat you calling gold potatoes. You know, wafers. Sammy the me take it and some steaks.

Man! I would have received a breaded sailboat when I really wanted plain, the wrong kind of potatoes, just some random wafers, and absolutely no Beanie or Spigot.