WEEKEND COLUMNISTS One of the most popular music videos of the past few months, already watched by millions on YouTube, has been Beyoncé’s latest hit, “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”. It features a pulsating dance routine by the singer and two backing dancers that is full of sharp moves and sexual allure. It is curiously old-fashioned in its directness and the song itself has a lyric, repeated over and over again, that, like the best pop songs, delivers its message in a few choice words: “If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it.”
Beyoncé Knowles, a formidable singer and dancer, is probably the leading member of the post-Madonna generation of women in pop who, instead of talking about female empowerment, choose to thrust its central tenets in our faces. That it is a form of propagandising that happens to be very appealing to men is of no concern; indeed, it forms part of the deal. We need only look at the rest of those lyrics, which constitute a crude story of taunting and revenge: “Up in the club, we just broke up, I’m doing my own little thing. Decided to dip and now you wanna trip, cause another brother noticed me.” And then later: “I need no permission, did I mention, don’t pay him any attention. Cause you had your turn and now you gonna learn what it really feels like to miss me.” All this, remember, sung breathlessly amid much pumping and grinding. It is not a subtle message.
And then, the kernel of the terpsichorean lecture: if you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it. You should have married me. You had your chance, and you blew it. Don’t think I will sit at home lamenting. Look at my moves. I am off to practise them. Good night and good luck.
Here is a crude and highly effective distillation of a very specific form of female power over men. If you are a man, it is both arousing and frightening. We are where she wants us. It is an awkward place to be. As a strategy, Beyoncé’s bouncy boasts are both more threatening and more nuanced than, say, Lily Allen’s chippy doggerel about premature ejaculation.
By coincidence, I found myself comparing and contrasting “Single Ladies” with another song about a wedding ring, from what seems like a long time back. The estimable Freda Payne made a guest appearance on American Idol recently, on a disco special, singing her sublime 1970 hit “Band of Gold” (a category error, by the way: disco was a later and cruder genre).
Mistakenly taken for a Motown classic (it actually appeared on the Invictus label), “Band of Gold” is a song delivered by a prima donna of the pre-Madonna world. Nostalgia is the melancholy keynote: “Now that you’ve gone, all that’s left is a band of gold, All that’s left of the dream I hold, is a band of gold ... ”
Payne, who never had a bigger hit, nearly turned down “Band of Gold”. Still in her 20s, she instinctively recoiled from the song’s sense of desperation. She would have wanted to hook up with Beyoncé and all the other single ladies out there but 1970 was not the time for them, or at least not the time to be singing of their liberation in such celebratory fashion.
On one level, the four-decade journey from one wedding ring song to another, a ring cycle no less, tells the story of the flowering and consolidation of feminism. One woman stares simperingly at her band of gold and dreams helplessly of what might have been; the other tells her errant boyfriend that he could have lived a lifetime of hot nights if he had bothered to commit but now she is taking her hot nights elsewhere.
Yet it is more complicated than that. “If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it,” is also a deeply regressive sentiment. The ring here is a clear token of possession. The very use of the word “it”, veering promiscuously as a signifier between the woman’s finger and her sexual prowess, is depressingly objectifying. Despite its bravado, “Single Ladies” describes a perfunctory and soulless pact.
Freda Payne, on the other hand, is one of the original queens of soul. The genre was well-named. It is a common mistake, when talking about popular music, to pay too much attention to lyrics and neglect the musical context in which they appear (qv any discussion of Dylan and Keats). The opening bars of “Band of Gold” – driving bass, thumping drums, an improbable sitar picking out the melody – are a portent of the emotional storm to come. This is a song about real feelings, richly textured with swooping vocals and lush orchestration.
By comparison, the dance beat of “Single Ladies” drives relentlessly forward. It lacks texture, variation, finesse. The song talks of complex arrangements of the human spirit, yet we never believe any of it. We know that the infernally tricky manoeuvres of coupling and decoupling are rarely resolved with a bump and a grind. Not meaningfully anyway.
Payne gave a rocky old performance of her classic on American Idol but survived on the audience’s respect for her. Beyoncé is one of the few things on the cultural planet bigger than American Idol and, like her music, drives relentlessly forward to further power, fame and fortune. Progress or decline? You decide.
peter.aspden@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/aspden
