Tearria Mari's "Sponsor": Under the Ghetto Values, A Black Woman's Desire for Economic Security in Relationships?

Tearria Mari. Cute Girl.  My wife is much better looking though

My wife, the Hot Little Number, blames me for destroying her enjoyment of what passes for R&B music these days. This charge goes all the way back to our dating days.  I listened to NPR then, as I do now, a practice the Hot Little Number enjoyed cracking on.  She liked R&B and was always bopping her head to this or that tune. One day, innocently enough, I pointed out the foulness of the lyrics in the song she was bopping her head to on the radio (Blue's Too Close).  I remarked that the song was fun and made your head bounce, but that the lyrics were bankrupt of morals and an example of whats wrong with our young people. This auditory swill is being poured into their brains all the time and we wonder why they can't think straight.

The Hot Little Number didn't really pay attention to lyrics then, she just liked the music.  After that though, she started listening to the lyrics and thinking about the meaning in them.  Because the Love of My Life is to her core a naturally ethical woman, at the point at which she actually recognized the low moral quality of MOST R&B lyrics in songs that get radio air play, she recoiled from it.  She hasn't been able to enjoy most R&B since then, a condition she laments and blame for which she places squarely at my doorstep.

Now, when something foul comes on, she turns the station to NPR, a listening habit she got from me and which she considers the province of the nerdy.  She finds the situation all the more infuriating because I, being a much more base, unrefined and corrupt moral being than my wife, still enjoy R&B music just fine, even as I recognize its valueless lyrics. Which brings me to Teairra Mari's  tune, Sponsor:

 

 Today's R&B lyrics are mostly devoid of redeeming qualities and "Sponsor" doesn't depart from that script. However, sometimes I find something else going on in a song, another element beyond the appeal to the ghetto.  If you ignore for a moment the juvenile focus on material things in the lyrics, you hear a suggestion not of a mercenary golddigging woman out to take advantage of a man, but of a woman desiring to be taken care of, to be cherished and even pampered by the man in her life:

Yeah yeah he put the low profiles on my car, he treat me to a pedi plus manicure. Anything that I ask for from my sponsor he go to buy buy buy(ha ha ha). A baby blue medallion I just got, my feet they speak italian walk so high. I told you baby thanks a lot my sponsor he go and buy buy buy

He treats....she asks, she tells him thank you. Its not about taking advantage or juicing a loser for his money because his nose is wide open.  This isn't a predatory relationship:

He ain't no square, he just like to share. In love with a tipper throwing hundreds in the air, throw some over here. Lui, and dropping lui, dropping lui in my lap(damn)

He's not a sucker. There is respect.  He's generous...What's he doing for her?

I got myself a sponsor . Say hey (yeah) to fill up a drink for me (yeah) to fill up my tank for me (yeah) to put something in the bank for me. I got myself a sponsor.

Gets her a drink, fills up the gas tank, puts aside some resources for her.  What woman doesn't want that kind of treatment from her man?  What man doesn't want to be this guy? And notice, she's not concerned about the status attached to how he earns his ends, she's all about how he is treating her..

He must be a rapper,baller, doctor, dentist, corner boy ,cook/chef, chemist (yeah). I don't even care just as long as he don't say bye bye bye.

Yes, its superficial on the surface, but underneath the skin of the lyrics, its a fantasy of economic security, and perhaps not all that fantastical in its articulated needs.  The video has the billionaire presentation, but the lyrics talk about gas, hair, nails, car and money in the bank, the most prosaic of economic components. Don't think the Hot Little Number wants to call me sponsor? Don't think I want her singing that song about me? Think again.


Exit thoughts: In watching the video, I had two thoughts. 1: those dance moves made me think of Amerie's excellent video for "One Thing ", done far less well.  Ameri remains for me the poster girl for what it means to "sell the video" (in a good way) with her totally committed dance moves. Tearria's moves here don't rise to that standard, which brings me to my second observation, hardly original, that the music industry attempts to bust out young women, black and white, as sexual commodities for sale. Tearria is young and sometimes looks in this video like she's doing what people told her was sexy, what people told her was how to sell it. But its not necessarily about what she the artist would have done.  I'm not convinced this is the artist she wants to be.  She is barely 23 and is made to look older in this video.  Contrast her performer persona in the video with the young woman in this 2008 interview talking about being dropped from the Def Jam label in 2006.

Check her reference to the way she was marketed at young girls with adult content that got a parental advisory label  which  meant she couldn't legally buy the album she headlined when she was still a minor. That's a commentary on the industry right there. As for her, she comes off here as young, vivacious, pleasant.....a nice girl. Contrast that with the artistic persona in the video and the uncommitted dance moves and the impression it left me with was of an artist that's simply been packaged for domestic sexual consumption and is not entirely comfortable in the skin they put her in. I'm not familiar with any of her other music video's, it's quite possible a review of them would convince me that she's already had the full bust out treatment  ala "Spectacular".  The music industry modus operandi is packaging young female artists for maximum pimping out potential to sell them as video vixen sexpots.  Its why my kids don't watch or listen to R&B.

Epic Fail: The "Spectacular" Bust Out of Kiely Williams

Former Cheetah Girl Kiely Williams is a beautiful young lady who not so long ago was a regular face in the Disney lineup of young starlets.  She was part of a relatively recent history of young black women (Raven Simone, Kiki Palmer) who found success with wholesome shows aimed at young people from media giants like Disney and Nickelodeon.

She also appears to be a recent albeit willing casualty of the music industry's drive to literally and artistically whore out young girls. Kiely recently put out (pun intended) a video for her single "Spectacular", a sordid tale glorifying a drunken one night stand.  I'm not sure I've heard or seen something quite so worthless from someone who could have done so much better. Neither the song nor the trashy video are worthy of the adjective.




I was both saddened and disgusted to see this latest attempt by a young starlet with a prior body of work I was totally comfortable with letting my daughter watch try to run away from it.  This video and song are such a huge mistake in terms of artistic merit and business sense that its almost incomprehensible why anyone who gave a damn about her career didn't stop it.  The song itself is juvenile in its lyrics and its arrangement. It sounds like an x-rated Disney tune designed for teens overheating on their raging hormones.  The video is a train wreck.  It has the look of someone trying to be trashy but doesn't really know how, which I actually hope is the truth about the young lady herself.  She can't dance and they used a guy in the video who isn't particularly attractive.  As an exercise in provocation marketing, the entire video fails "spectacularly"  in its intended purpose, namely reintroducing Kiely Williams as a sexy hot adult starlet.  How the people responsible for directing her career believed this to be the right business move is simply beyond me.  How do you take a built in market of young people that have watched her for years and simply throw them away? What data convinced her management or her that she had some audience out there that was just waiting for this trash from her?

Perhaps its not that huge a mystery.  Artists like Lady Gaga don't appeal to me and the string of forerunners before her didn't either, but they are rump shaking money makers. Predictably, this bid by Kiely Williams to remake herself in a similar mode has been a "spectacular" fail, with pushback and outrage so severe, she felt compelled to defend it on her YouTube video blog:


She is a beautiful girl and its a shame that her business and career sense are clearly not as striking as her looks. She simply doesn't get the problem here.  Its not about shooting the messenger because we don't like the message. Its about shooting down trashy material that has no redeeming value from an artist whom we've seen better from and had every right to expect better from.  There was nothing necessary or laudable in doing this song and video.  They were a craven attempt to shock and to break into the big money world of selling sex and being racy for profit. The problem for Kiely is, you can buy that product elsewhere and done better.

Kiely made a choice to go this route. She didn't have to.  You'd think she would have taken the lesson from Lisa Bonet's career disaster with the movie Angel Heart . Other stars have taken a pass on this dead end approach to showbiz fame, most notably Raven Simone and Kiki Palmer.  Both of these women have built on the platform of their prior work without whoring themselves out. In Kiki's case, she actively rebelled when  Atlantic Records was pushing to bust her out with suggestive lyrics and trashy material. So even though her label was probably gung ho for this trash, she didn't have to consent to be part of it.

The pushback and outrage Kiely has received is well deserved and we can only hope she and her label figure out this this is a dead end.   Whats your reaction to this mess? Did your kids watch Kiely as a Cheetah Girl? Why can't the music industry and artists coming out of the family fare sector manage this transition without it becoming a race to the bottom?

I'm a Hater

When it comes to Jay-Z, I'm pretty much a hater. I dislike him.  My dislike was crystallized by the song "Roc Boys" where he glorified crack dealers.  I thought it was an extremely cynical, purely commercial (in the sense that it was only for the money) song, and from a values standpoint, it was simply terrible. It didn't help that I liked the tune.  Recently he teamed up with Alicia Keyes for "Empire State of Mind".  Jay-Z combined his get the money hip with Alicia's homewrecker skeez to rock out a performance at the AMA's. But listening to the words, one could not miss Jay-Z's anti-Jesus lyrics.

Jay Z recently released a new video for the song "On to the Next One", which like "Empire State of Mind" is an ode to himself. The video has some disturbing imagery in it, with the goat's head antlers and the cross between bullets being the one that makes you think Jay-Z has a problem with God.  Which apparently turns out to be the case.  On further investigation, apparrently Jay-Z has been dropping anti-God lyrics into his music for years and engaging in the hubris of calling himself "Hov", a derivation of Jehovah.

I'm simultaneously repulsed by its values and engaged by the visuals of the On to the Next One video.  Its dark, its grim, its pregnant with the arrogance of success. The song has an inveitable forward movement rythym that I like and that repeating song being sung in the background of the song makes me think of horror flicks like "Seven".  If I read this video as Jay-Z's way of tilting at the windmill of God, its not hard to imagine the birdlike dancing woman or minor rapper Swizz Beats in the video as Jay-Z's daemonic familiars, populating his dark kindgom of flaming basketballs and money.

If the devil can qoute scripture (and he can) then even a man foolish enough to openly mock God can say something insightful, even inspiring. Jay-Z analyzes his own a success a bit with lyrics like

" I move onward, the only direction
cant be scared to fail, Searchin for perfection"

don’t be mad cos it’s all about progression,
loiterers should be arrested

World can’t hold me, too much ambition

The words are instructive, a challenge to me almost. Jay-Z values, as carried by his music, are poisonus, destructive.  Yet he's rocking the planet at the pinnacle of fame, fortune and influence with the trophy Beyonce at his side, while simultaneoulsly mocking God. Jay-Z is comfortable and confident in his arrogance, in the certainty of his money making creative purpose.  I wonder what's he doing right that I'm doing wrong that our positions aren't reversed? I listen to the lyrics again and again trying to divine his secret, stunned at his defiance of God, jealous and resenful of his success despite that. As I bounce my head and mouth the words silently yet again, I think to myself, yeah, I'm a hater.

Qoute of the Day

Make room for His love and a fire gon blaze

- Matisyahu