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5 Aug 2017

Bootylicious

Oh my gosh! Look at her butt!

Nicki Minaj sleeve photo for her smash hit single 'Anaconda
taken from the album The Pinkprint (2014)  


Curb Your Enthusiasm has taught me that for a man to comment on a woman's ass is always to invite trouble and misunderstanding. For as Cheryl points out to Larry, a woman's ass is very personal and it's simply inappropriate to make even a lighthearted reference to it. This is perhaps particularly the case when the ass in question belongs to a woman of colour.

However, at the risk of being mistaken not only for an ass man - and I'm not an ass man - but also for a middle-aged white man with a fetish for young black girls, I would like to defend and celebrate the bootyliciousness of women such as BeyoncĂ© Knowles and Nicki Minaj, particularly in the faces of those who denigrate and seek to body shame such women in a manner that often betrays underlying misogyny and racism. 

For example, I read a piece recently by a (white male) music critic in which he laments the passing of truly gifted black female singers including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, Gloria Gaynor, Gladys Knight, Diana Ross, Nina Simone, and Dinah Washington. Which is fine, if a somewhat predictable and uncontroversial list of names that no one with ears is going to seriously dispute or raise objection to. 

Unfortunately, however, he can't resist taking a dig at today's performers, including BeyoncĂ©, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj, whom, he says, have helped pornify popular culture and become famous "not for their soulful voices or beautiful faces, but for endlessly twerking and firing lasers from their grotesquely over-inflated behinds". These women, he says, "have none of the talent, none of the charm, and none of the sophisticated intelligence" of their predecessors.            

This may, perhaps, have some element of truth in it. But, it seems also to display a puritanical fear of the flesh; particularly female flesh and particularly the black female bottom. One wonders if the writer is simply scared he'll not be able to handle all that jelly or what we might term corporeal excess - the too-muchness of nature, that Camille Paglia writes of in relation to the Venus of Willendorf.   

In a sense, then, the critic is right - the performers of today are earthy in every sense of the word and they drag us down and drag us back with their crude, uninhibited, anally-fixated sexuality. Whereas the great artists mentioned earlier elevate the human spirit with their soulful voices and beautiful faces and 
represent "the triumph of Apollonian image over the humpiness and horror of mother earth".

In the end, you pays your money and you takes your choice ...



Notes

To watch the scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm (S2/E2) in which Cheryl confronts Larry about his ass fetish, click here

To listen to the track 'Bootytlicious', by Destiny's Child, taken from the album Survivor (2001), click here

This song popularised the term bootylicious as an approving neologism and it has now entered mainstream English, as has a greater appreciation for women with larger hips, thighs and buttocks (i.e., a body type culturally associated with black and Latina women, though there are plenty of European women who also pride themselves on a fuller, more Rubenesque figure). 

See: Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990), Ch. 2, 'The Birth of the Western Eye'.


4 comments:

  1. I'm not going to pretend I know anything about what the top modeling agencies will or will not book these days, but whereas Mz's Minaj, Beyonce and Rihanna all look to me like they would be desirable for their image alone. I'm not sure the same could be said for the classic singers mentioned, with the exception of Miss Ross, who also happens to be the weakest singer inn that grouping.

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  2. I'm glad to hear, private email correspondence to the contrary, Dr Alexander would also, by implication, affirm the beauty of Welsh choirs for their promixity to coal mining and the dust of mother earth . . .

    One does wonder why it's apparently politically acceptable - rather than racist and/or misandropist- to place 'white male' in scathing parentheses, when similarly highlighting 'black female', for example, would bring the wrath of Twitterdom down on one, if not worse.

    Given that the music critic under the spotlight is simply stating what's fairly obviously true, what, exactly, is the problem here? I don't think he has a racist grudge against Beyonce's over-discussed booty. He just doesn't see the need for all the lights and lasers and marketing and what not that come out of it to disguise the fact that she has not an iota of the talent of Simone, Holiday and others.

    The best singers are as 'earthy' as they are 'spiritual' - think of Edith Piaf, Liz Fraser and Lena Zavaroni for starters! As Alison Moyet once put it when misogynistically questioned on her body shape in a crass BBC interview - the difference is, I make music for people's ears rather than their eyes. Simply put, in a world of compulsive image, voice just doesn't matter so much anymore.

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  3. A reply to the comments made by Simon Solomon can be found here:

    http://torpedotheark.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/the-wisdom-of-solomon-2-on-grain-of.html?m=1

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  4. You sound like a retard

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