If music reveals the heart of a culture, ours is in cardiac arrest. Every week, there is a new dirty lyric set to a beat. Each is as profane as it is obvious. Just when you thought it couldn’t get more explicit, along comes another stupid act begging for attention. As a sign of just how low things have gotten on the music scene, here is a bit of Rihanna’s latest ditty “S&M”:
Sticks and stones may break my bones
But chains and whips excite me . . .
How a woman who is perhaps best known for having been physically abused by ex-boyfriend (and studio demolitionist) Chris Brown could sing lyrics like this defies explanation.
Justin Timberlake and Timbaland’s “Carry Out” is another beauty. This one equates the female body with a drive-through. Note: I could not find one feminist group that objected to this song or its misogynist message:
Take my order cause your body like a carry out
Let me walk into your body until it’s lights out
Step aside, Irving Berlin. I don’t know what is more gross — the lyrics or the video. Cosmetically enhanced breasts and women squatting predominate. And why is it that performers such as Timberlake, Jamie Foxx, and Usher can’t perform without grabbing their crotches? Is there a pitch-correction device down there? By the sound of things, I doubt it. So if it’s all the same to you, please either join a Major League Baseball team or sing the song without fondling yourselves, okay?
For all the ugliness in pop music, there are still real romantics like Enrique Iglesias. The Spanish moss has fallen far from the tree. His father sang “To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before.” Enrique has now given us “Tonight I’m F***ing You.”
Please excuse me I don’t mean to be rude
But tonight I’m f***ing you
Then we wonder why teens are degrading themselves on cellphones, acquiring STDs, and are more crude than ever. They are simply following the example set for them by these paragons of talent and sophistication. I liked Justin better as a Mouseketeer, when the only things he was grabbing were his plastic Mickey ears.
— Laura Ingraham is host of The Laura Ingraham Show. This is an excerpt of Of Thee I Zing: America’s Cultural Decline from Muffin Tops to Body Shots, written with Raymond Arroyo, released this week by Threshold.