The Beyonce post

Again, I'm faced with one of those popular culture developments that makes me wonder how many layers of the onion to peel back.  I'll do what I can to keep it succinct and on point.

It's interesting to juxtapose the results of a poll Conservative HQ conducted about whether Beyonce's Super Bowl halftime show was appropriate with a post and the resultant comment thread at Acculturated, a site dedicated to pop-culture observations.   The poll participants give a big thumbs-down to the performance.  The Acculturated post author and lots of the comment-thread participants want to focus on the singer's personal value system.  I wasn't aware of this - and I ought to muster some  level of sheepishness about my ignorance, given that I get paid to be a scholar of American popular music - but apparently Beyonce never slept with a man until she got together with her husband, JayZ.

Hey, that's great.  But why does the term "glaring disconnect" loom so large in my thought process about all this?  To once again reference my level of ignorance about pop-culture developments of the last 35 years, once I saw the performance and started to pick up on conversation about it, I knew I needed to bring myself up to speed.  So I read the Wikipedia article on Destiny's Child, the "R&B" group (I'll explain the quotation marks in a bit) with which Beyonce began her career, and I went to YouTube and availed myself of some of the group's videos / songs.

She's been all about this tarted-up, fishnet-hose-bustier-writhing-pelvic-thrust persona from the launching point of her career.

Maybe in some more general post I will put on my American-music-history-adjunct-lecturer hat and more deeply examine where that whole aesthetic impulse originates.  On a particular level, we can go back to the mid-1980s, when the Detroit-area-born daughter of a Chrysler engineer who made her way to NYC and, with fierce determination, made her way into the dance-club scene - I'm speaking of the singer known as Madonna - and brought the debate about whether, how, to what degree, and for what purpose, cartoonish slutiness empowered the modern woman.

Ah, but you start into all that. and link to the requisite Camille Paglia articles, and then you have to introduce the question of yet deeper levels.

Let's introduce this, for instance, and it's not a digression.  I love Ted Nugent. He is that magnificent combination of the articulate, the principled, the knowledgeable and informed, the fierce, and the funny - and, yes, humble.  There's a video on his website in which he talks about the joys of grandfatherhood.  He says his grandchildren look at him as "Santa Claus with a machine gun."

But I hate his music.  As a guitarist, I can tell he has a working knowledge of the instrument, which leads to the question, why doesn't he use it?  Why has he chosen to make a 45-year career based on such a limited vocabulary?

And now we can begin to come back to the original point.  What bothers me so much about Nugent's music?  It's the mechanized, repetitive, slammed-home nature of it - combined with the animal-level way it treats sexuality, replacing the Great-American-Songbook awareness of the delight and magic of courtship with a notion of sex as basically an athletic undertaking.

Such is the case with the music of Beyonce, her old group Destiny's Child, and what has passed for R&B for the last 30 years.

At this point, I must prepare to be taken to task for what was clearly part of the ethos of R&B going back to its origins.  The tale of Marvin Gaye wrestling in the grass in a fit of jealous rage beside the tour bus with Titty Tassle Toni, the hoochie dancer on the R&B tour with The Moonglows, Etta James and other acts in 1959, is the stuff of legend.  Much of the greatest early R&B depends for its relevance on its raunchiness: "Keep on Churning" by Wynonie Harris, "Big Long Slidin' Thing" by Dinah Washington, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" by Big Maybelle.

Okay.  I don't have the dealt-with-once-and-for-all response to that at this moment.

I guess I would introduce one more element into the discussion to make sure we don't foreclose on the big picture as the drawing of conclusions becomes a possibility - and that would be the element of razzle-dazzle.  Wynonie Harris and Big Maybelle didn't set off fireworks and test the capacity of huge stadiums' power systems to present their artistic visions.  In fact, they wore suits and gowns respectively as they sang to their audiences.

And that's why the Acculturated consensus that the point is to defend Beyonce's personal value system falls short of a productive take on her performance.  She got up there and offered not a note of music that anyone in 60 years will find hum-worthy, and she offered up a frightfully animalistic interpretation of human intimacy to boot.

It further reduces my level of encouragement about where we're headed that the obvious aesthetic aridity of the Beyonce halftime performance goes unaddressed even in conservative forums.  That she is a once-married wife and mother who takes that role seriously is not the main point at a bizarre and terrifying juncture such as that at which we currently find ourselves.