"It's a CIA plot to make you think malls are good!" That was the late comedian Bill Hicks' review of Rick Astley in 1989, but 26 years later it just as easily applies to Astley's blue-eyed country-soul-pop progeny Meghan Trainor. Hicks' quote gets to the heart of the conspiratorial mindset that develops when one tries to judge the middle of the road by fringe standards. It is the conspiratorial mindset that develops when you just can't accept that art can be so inoffensive and unchallenging that millions of people can enjoy it. Conspiracies, however ludicrous, just pop up when you try to comprehend what Hicks would call a "banal incubus." I, for instance, can't shake the thought that Meghan Trainor is just the ghost of William F. Buckley in a ModCloth skirt.
I can't shake the feeling that behind every wink-and-nudge punch line of every snappy, sassy pop song is an ideology set to unwind any progress pop music has made in the past 50 years. Trainor sells a version of self-empowerment that is more like a cutesy, cuddly take on Ayn Rand than Gloria Steinem, and it worries me. I should point out that the conservative streak in these songs isn't of the Bible-thumping, gun-toting wackadoo version. No, Trainor — a native of Nantucket, Mass., who loves slathering her faux-Southern blaccent all over every song — peddles in that almost-extinct brand of polite, rational, polysyllabic brand of East Coast conservatism.
It's a conservative streak that, compared to sweaty-palmed, tin-foiled-hatted wing-nut Tea Party-ism, almost seems reasonable, but still demands a rigid form of social conformity. When you move past the novelty of Trainor's monster hit, "All About That Bass," you find a song built entirely on vilifying one body type to glorify another. Yeah sure, you are perfect just the way you are, unless you're one of them "skinny bitches." Because everyone knows that skinny women signed a deal with the devil and will eat your firstborn child just to have a thigh gap.
"Bass" is a song about self-empowerment, sure, but it's also about putting skinny bitches in their place, strictly because of their body type. That's a little too much cognitive dissonance to ignore. That's a message as muddled and garbled as, say, a pop song that's been equalized to remove all of the treble. So much of the so-called self-empowerment and so many of the "girl power" moments are focused on obtaining the approval of men.
Be they the nighttime booty-holding boys Trainor sings about in "Bass," the dads she sings of in "Walkashame" or the hypothetical groom in "Dear Future Husband," the men in the singer's songs are measuring the worth of their women with a romantic yardstick. There's just not that much sense of "self" in these stories of self-empowerment. Hell, there's not much sense of empowerment, either. Trainor's quaintly regressive stories are rife with shitty, selfish behavior from both sides of the gender binary — sometimes in the same song, as in "No Good for You," where Trainor tells her absentee best friend her boyfriend has a wandering eye, mostly to get her friend back. When paired with the singer's flagrant and weird Katharine Hepburn-does-Iggy Azalea accent when she raps, her doo-wop-to-hip-hop sonic appropriations and tendency towards approximating lower-class speech patterns by dropping to-be verbs, songs like "Bang Dem Sticks" become an archliberal record critic's worst nightmare.
Trainor's willingness to embrace these shitty behaviors and accept them as the status quo makes me so uncomfortable — that millions of people are embracing her shitty-behavior-embracing songs makes me worry about the future of pop culture. There's a fine line between insidious and innocuous. It's tough to ignore the creepy, consumerist groupthink that gives the music its broad appeal. It's also tough to not sound like conspiracy nut when you accuse a pop singer of promoting creepy consumerist groupthink.
But like William F. Buckley, Meghan Trainor isn't likely to fade away after her initial campaign. Like ol' Bill, she's a great writer and a cunning collaborator. She's hit the late-capitalism sweet spot, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist as American culture gets back to basics. While her work may be distressing to those of us who fret about things like pop songs and their socio-cultural impact, it's impossible to deny that she's really good at what she does, even if what she does might drag popular culture back to the Eisenhower Era. Also, the thought of Buckley in a skirt will never not be funny.
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