I might as well get the musical analysis out of the way first. 'What Makes You Beautiful' is a punchy bit of vaguely rock-oriented kidpop; the sneaky little guitar figure that leads into the song is reminiscent of 'Summer Nights' from Grease, while the thing as a whole recalls the shouty 2000s poprock peddled by artists like Kelly Clarkson, McFly and Pink. It is catchy in a way that will either thrill or grate, employing a whole barrage of "whoa-oh-OH"s and "na-nana-na"s. This is decidedly, defiantly, POP, not a club in sight, not the merest hint of urban London creeping into the music. The song does what it is trying to do, musically, well enough; if you are happy enough with what it is trying to do, if you do not demand subtlety in your pop songs, there is plenty to enjoy about the track. I suspect the song's insistently bubbly sugar-rush would probably wear thin after a certain number of listens, even if you are the kind of listener who gets a kick out it - I haven't listened to it enough times to know for sure.
Nor do I wish to, mainly because of the song's lyrics, which are maddening to such a degree that bracketing them off in order to write that opening paragraph - trying to hear the song in abstraction from its 'message', such as it is - was a bit of a struggle. Conveniently enough, the song boils its own long story short in its titular refrain at the end of the chorus - "you don't know you're beautiful/that's what makes you beautiful".
This tells you more or less everything you need to know. One Direction, from that weird many-voices-as-one perspective of the boyband, spend the song expressing their love/lust/affection (delete as the preference of the listener dictates, presumably) towards an Other who is described as "insecure" and "shy", smiling awkwardly at the ground. She doesn't know that she's beautiful. But, One Direction tell her, that's what makes her beautiful.
As an important aside, nothing in the song says explicitly that the addressee is a 'she'; but sadly, on pain of serious naivety, we have to admit that this is obviously what the song's writers and singers intend us to assume. By the band's own reckoning, roughly "ninety-nine per cent" of their fans are teenage girls. The imagined listener is not supposed to identify themselves with the perspective the song is sung from; they are supposed to imagine themselves as the song's addressee.
That being said, what message does the record send? To pose the question of the song's title, what makes you beautiful? You are beautiful, the song seems to say, because you are insecure, shy and awkward. You are beautiful because you are weak and passive; you are beautiful because you lack power, and because you depend upon me to validate you by telling you that you are beautiful. The song seems to be trying to convince its addressee that she is beautiful, but it gives the game away in that titular admission at the end of the chorus. If you don't know you're beautiful, and that's what makes you beautiful, then what would render you beautiful no longer? The obvious answer is: knowing, or believing, that you are beautiful, whether One Direction tell you that you are or not. Or even finding self-worth and confidence in something other than 'beauty', being self-assured and confident for reasons that does not depend upon the way you 'appear' to yourself or anyone else. Confidence, self-esteem, self-respect - it's impossible to escape the implication that, for this song, these things are paradigmatically unattractive, and that you are appealing precisely insofar as you lack them, and depend upon external validation for any sense of self-worth. These ideas are, sadly, not uncommon. But they are reprehensible, and they are rarely spelled out so baldly as they are in 'What Makes You Beautiful'.
Absolutely nothing in the song goes beyond this; there isn't a shred of emotional insight, or real feeling. It's nothing but the hollow reproduction of a horrible cultural trope, the straight male perspective the song is sung from being as much of a hollow, constructed chimera as the imaginary girl that it is sung to. There isn't a real person anywhere in this song. What this basically amounts to, then, is a fetishisation of weakness and insecurity, mass-marketed at teenage girls. In other words, it's an insult to its intended audience and, in fact, to everybody. In a very real sense, I think that this is a fair representation of pop music at its very, very worst, enshrining everything that is often frustrating about pop while containing absolutely none of what is vital and compelling about it.
0 comments:
Post a Comment