Button It – Who run this mother?
Cast your mind back to the pre Olympic weeks if you can. I know it is tough, but stick with me. Remember the apocalyptic opening of the skies and the biblical floods that accompanied the opening action? I sure do for two distinct reasons. Firstly, I got caught in a very sudden downpour that soaked me from head to toe and I only narrowly escaped a watery grave. Secondly, I heard a song for the very first time and the lyrics have stuck with me ever since. Festering with their poetic intricacy.
An interesting new look
The song that has been haunting me, Who Run The World by Beyonce. I honestly wish I had drowned.
- Who run the world? Girls (Girls)
- Who run this mother? Girls
Now repeat those lines more than 40 times (wish I made that number up), mix in some more grammatical savagery such as “What we run?! The world!” and “I think I need a barber, none of these n*****s can fade me” and you have all you need to know about this clusterfuck of a song.
This is coming from the independent woman who rightly argues for women’s rights while rather confusedly objectifying women as being easy swayed by “putting a ring on it”.
I have no problem with equal rights and strong women do need to stand up and make themselves heard. But having heard this song, Beyonce needs to sit herself back down.
But my main problem here is not with the worthy fight for women’s rights, my problem is with the painfully slow death of music. Be it Justin Bieber, as Russell Howard aptly puts it, acting like an autistic child in a maternity ward (Baby. Baby. Baby. Ohhh!) or Beyonce aggressively raping the English language with a devastating skill for repetition.
The key fact that really made me descend on this rant was when I found out that six people wrote this ingenious song. Count them. Six. That is six more than I think it needed. If only they had hired a seventh who had an English degree to help them construct sentences. Then again, you don’t need an English degree for this; you can find primary school children who are more capable writers.
But to be fair, I should have been prepared for the quality of the lyrics when I saw the names of the writers. Terius “The-Dream” Nash, Knowles (I assume of the Beyonce variety), Nick “Afrojack” van de Wall, Wesley “Diplo” Pentz, David “Switch” Taylor, and Adidja Palmer. You never expect much from a man who calls himself The Dream. I have a few other suggested names for him, but I’d have to heavily censor them. But must say I am disappointed in Diplo and Switch, aren’t they children’s cartoon characters?
Now there is a song that you may know written a while back called Bohemian Rhapsody. This was a song written by a superstar team consisting of Freddie Mercury and a pen. I know this argument may sound a little tired. Every generation has shit music. But I grow more convinced that with every Rhianna release, with every Justin Bieber release, with every Chris Brown release, that “popular” music now is shitter than it has ever been. Yet people buy this dirge.
There are good, talented artists out there. This much I know. But I also know that listening to the top 40 “hits” as I used to enjoy on a weekly basis when I was younger, is now a favoured method of torture in Guantanamo bay.
I will leave you with a line from the song at the core of this rant that really struck a chord with me. “Make your cheque come at they neck. Disrespect us no they won’t”. I’m sure you all agree with that poignant message.
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I’ve become enraged about this before, especially after reading that 6 people wrote it. This is even more mind-blowing when you take into account that the backing riff (the only good part of the song in my opinion, but then I do like MIA-esque music) is actually a Major Lazer track… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxD_7S7bl8k (apologies if this isn’t the correct one, I have no sound to check).
I hadn’t even considered that the actual music of the song was taken from elsewhere. To take the classic lightbulb joke, I think we need to be asking “How many lyricists does it take to write a beyonce song?”