Dead In Your Tracks

Out at a local bar recently, Beyonce's song "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" started playing. This prompted every single woman in the establishment to whoop and leap to their feet. Pushing aside the small-hat hipsters and the tattoo-ed bouncer/empty-glass-picker-upper, they rushed to the middle of the bar to create a makeshift dancefloor. Once there, they flung their bodies around, drunkenly trying to re-enact the choreography from the video. They were generally unsuccessful, though they did get a lot of the hand gestures down.

In the moment, my friends and I had three sequential reactions. The first was to question whether this song was going to replace "I Will Survive" as the tune that galvanizes all the unattached women and gets them to stand in a cluster on the dance floor shouting along loudly. The second was to question the songs central thesis. (You should put a ring on it if you love it; if you only like it, you should just stop sleeping around with other people.)

The third was to discuss the hotness of the aforementioned (and aforelinked) video. Surely, it is a well done clip, and one that must have been successful on whatever television outlet that still plays music videos. But while Single Ladies hypnotizes you, it doesn't have the power to stop you dead, demanding you do nothing but pay attention to it.

We talked about this for twenty solid minutes. The consensus examples we came up with:


Chris Isaak - Wicked Game
(Does anyone even remember that Chris Isaak is also in this video?)


Britney Spears - ...Baby One More Time
(Remember when finding school girls attractive wasn't OK?)


Beyonce - Crazy In Love
(Back when this came out, this video not only stopped a conversation between myself and a friend of mine, but when the song was over we couldn't remember what we had been talking about.)

D'Angelo - Untitled (How Does It Feel)
(This one caused every straight woman and gay man I knew to completely lose their mind.)

Now, could we have brought up more artistic videos, or ones with a better thematic consistency, or even classic ones from our childhood days? Of course. But these have just too much raw sexual power, in a way that make you unable to be distracted even when you just hear the tracks on the radio. And that's an even stronger legacy than bringing all the adamantly unattached women together on the dance floor.

Why I Am Awesome: I suggested and pushed for the D'Angelo song, because I didn't want the conversation to be completely heteronormative and sexist. Plus, I've given you all these videos in one place, so you can enjoy them without having to do any more work.

Why I Am Not Awesome: Despite such intentions, there's no way that such a conversation can't be deemed sexist. Discussing what fits into the upper echelon of videos automatically reverts to choosing what clips best objectify people, especially women. There's something inherently demeaning in this exercise. In other words, I'm part of the problem.