My sincere personal thanks to commentors SciVo and Concerned Citizen for this…
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… because, frankly, Cee Lo Green is happy to present himself as a WATB and, yes, a stalker. As do many of our most prominent RW politicians and their apologists among the punderati, so now I can recycle this for Glenn Beck, John Boehner, and Ross Doubthat. If only those guys had adult supervision, such as a responsible parole officer!
Yutsano
Am I the only one thinking Avenue Q here? I know it’s not from that, but still, it would fit.
Joseph Nobles
I really did think the point of the Cee Lo Green song was that an unreliable narrator was singing. It was full of mixed messages, especially the pathetic-sounding “Why” bridge. Those were all clues to me of the song’s ultimate target, the “singer himself.”
But these lyrics work as well. And the tune is still quite catchy.
Gina
The original creeps me out. Thanks for this antidote.
burnspbesq
OT message to Cleek: we DESPERATELY need a pie filter for mobile devices. It’s just too painful to read this blog on my iPad when certain commenters are spewing nonsense at the rate of 2,500 words per comment.
Any suggestions?
SciVo
Is there any way for me to point out that I linked it first in that thread without coming across as pouting? Possibly no.
asiangrrlMN
I love this hard. I am also relieved that I am not the only one who couldn’t stand the original.
Who’s up?
@SciVo: Ooooh! And you got a hat tip. Speak and ye shall be recognized!
Anne Laurie
@SciVo: Corrected, thank you!
MikeJ
@burnspbesq: Will apple let you run arbitrary javascript of your own against web pages, or is that something else you need permission from the great and powerful oz to do?
SciVo
@asiangrrlMN: @Anne Laurie: Yay, I got a hat tip! /happydance
I’m as easily pleased as I am easily bored. ;)
WereBear (itouch)
@MikeJ: I believe the iPod touch, what I have, is a single tasking device, but others are not.
stormhit
@Joseph Nobles:
Exactly.
Except that this version isn’t catchy, because it’s just mean spirited.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Jesus Christ, it’s a song about a guy pissed over a breakup. I’m not sure where you get stalker. Do kids today not get pissed about break ups?
Question. Seriously.
What if an actor takes a part in which he plays someone unpleasant? Would you say, for example “Michael C. Hall is happy to present himself as a serial killer”? Or does that sound a little … off to you.
DecidedFenceSitter
Eh, while the original song doesn’t do all that much for me, as far as themes goes it’s closer to Sk8r Boi than Every Breath You Take – from the boy’s view, guy wants girl, girl wants guy who has more money, guy gets bitter, makes it big and says “fuck you”.
Now while a case may be made for the face Cee Lo Green was overly persistent in pursuing the Heartbreaker while ignoring the women who actually seemed interested in him, well, we’ve got a societal narrative that encourages this sort of persistence that both genders play into on a frequent basis.
Now, a fair argument could be made about the “Fuck You” song supporting a bad/harmful societal narrative – you should continue to be persistent in the face of rejection, women only care about wealth, etc; and I’d fully agree with it – but a song about stalking? Not really.
Rereading, damn I over analyze stuff.
Steve M.
All this does is remind me that Cee-Lo can sing.
kommrade reproductive vigor
And not to be excessively bitchy, but people who base their dislike of the song on the second video … I mean come on, think about it. Isn’t that like conflating the movie adaption of a novel with the original content of the novel?
adolphus
I didn’t see the original about a stalker at all, but as DecidedFenceSitter and kommrade took it. More a barbaric yawp at being ditched. He just sees them downtown, he doesn’t go out looking for them. He is certainly no more a stalker, and in my opinion a lot less, than Alanis Morrisette’s “character” in “You Oughta Know” and that song was rightly interpreted as the raw wound of a recently dumped adolescent. I guess these response songs just weren’t hip in the 90’s.
Slogby
Okay, I didn’t get before why some people were so upset about “Fuck You” – apparently they’re reading the “fuck you” as screamed out loud to his ex whenever he sees her in public. It is in quotes in the video, but I took it to be his internal narrative raging quietly to himself rather than actually harassing her. If he were screaming at her in public then yeah, he’s a stalker and the song’s disturbing rather than pathetic, but I think I’m still going with my internal narrative interpretation.
Interesting bit of gendered perception there, presumably some guys were going into this discussion thinking “wow, some women are oversensitive” and some women thinking “WTF? There are guys defending stalking?”.
The WATB part of the song is clearly intended to be pathetic and ridiculous though. There’s the line with “I tried to tell my mama but she told me ‘this is one for your dad'”, so even his Mom doesn’t sympathize.
harlana
Oh wow, the original song is going to be stuck in my head all day.
Alwhite
Worked in radio for a couple of years & got stuck at a C&W station for a bit. There was a song I played once – can’t remember the name or the ‘artist’ – the singer was so broken up over the ex’s impending marriage that they took a gun to the wedding & saw to it there was no happy ending.
Oddly, that particular record (we still used vinyl in those days) got seriously broken as I took it off the turntable so I never got to hear it again.
cintibud
@Alwhite: Lyle Lovett? LA County? I like his songs in general but despise that song
Hugin & Munin
Huh. I felt the same way about the stupid Alanis Morrisette song (no, not the really stupid Alanis Morrisette song, just the stupid break-up one), but then I thought “Whatev, it’s just a song.”
adolphus
I also don’t get the WATB attack.
Aren’t the majority of pop/C&W/blues/Opera aria, whether male/female/gay/straight, basically from the WATB perspective? And even when they are empowering like “I Will Survive” the singer is usually coming back from being a WATB (he dumped you and you let him keep the key to your apartment?? really?Were you expecting him to surprise you lounging on a rose petal strewn bed with a bottle of dom?And you are shocked he uses the key for a bootie call?), so it is more a question of stages in a break up than inherent disposition.
Other than the F-bomb I am not certain why this song is different than a kajillion other my-sweetheart-done-me-wrong songs. Why is this one being singled out?
Adam
@kommrade reproductive vigor Because women can make entire careers writing songs about men being complete dicks, but Allah forbid a man calls out a woman for having golddiggerish tendencies – then we have to hear the other side of the story.
300baud
What I heard in the Cee Lo Green’s song was mockery leavened by a little sympathy, an understanding that hormones make fools of young men in love. It’s that gradual shift from “I remember feeling like that” to the “oh, this guy’s a whiny asshole” that makes it such an effective piece of art for me, because it made me say, “yes, I was surely a whiny asshole back then.”
Writers are not their characters in their books. Actors are not their characters in their movies. Singers? Sometimes, not their characters either.
300baud
@stormhit:
Yeah, that’s how I felt, too. I too Cee Lo Green’s song as a thoughtful condemnation of young male idiocy, so I took this response as a) missing the whole point, and b) incredibly ungenerous.
forked tongue
Frankly, once you start looking for pop songs that could be read as narrated by a stalker, you’ll be busy for a while. Some people actually noticed that about “Every Step You Take,” but Google the lyrics to the Beatles’ “No Reply,” to take one just off the top of my head.
forked tongue
Also, note the bridge in the Cee Lo song where he goes WATB-ing to his mother hoping she’ll make him feel better and instead she just makes him more depressed by saying “That’s one for your dad.” It’s very hard for me to see this song as an unironic assertion of male entitlement.
Of course, I’m male, but my girlfriend loves the fuck out of the song
asiangrrlMN
@kommrade reproductive vigor: It’s from the video. And, I’m sorry, but that’s how I heard the song, so the two are intertwined for me. If I had heard the song without seeing the video, maybe I wouldn’t feel that way. But I do. And, apparently I am not the only female who does, too. So, while it may not have been the intent, and certainly, not every female sees it as a stalker song, realize that there is a tenor there (in the video, anyway) that can be seen as stalkerish. You don’t have to agree or like it, obviously. So am I critiquing the video rather than the song? Probably. However, the video was enough to make me shut it off when he reached high school and not listen to the rest of the song. So, I will amend and say, “Fuck you” to the video. Better?
P.S. Even if it’s just a WATB song, I should want to listen to it why?
Lawnguylander
@300baud:
I would say more like a good natured nudge from someone who’s now matured enough to be embarrassed by his past behavior and attitudes. Like, “young dudes, this is how you sound when you’re whining over a breakup.” That’s how it hit me anyway so I get an uncomfortable inner laugh out of it. It’s also a lot easier to interpret the song this way if you’re familiar with Cee Lo’s work all the way back to the Goodie Mob days and when he was collaborating with Outkast. He’s always created characters for his songs that allow him more room to be creative. Just like Dylan, Springsteen, etc.
And I was going to say that the creator of the response song is just mean spirited and lacking in empathy but maybe she also intentionally created an immature, character to get a point across herself.
Dr. Squid
This more like the hoosier that came up with, “Hey Girls! It’s Earl!. Didn’t Die!”
JC
I would agree. The gender bias is interesting, I think. Guys think, “dude, I’ve been there”, and recognize that expressing, while at the same time having a bit of fun, with the experience of being dumped by a goldigger.
While the female response comes back with this whole straw man stalker thing, which the song isn’t about. (Of course, that exists too, just a different song.
Someone brought up the Alanis Morissette song though. A bunch of girls I knew in high school LOVED that song, loved Alanis.
But then, I saw this guy metal version of the same song, done pretty straight, hewing to basically the same material and line of the song.
and yes, damn if that didn’t come off as stalkerish! An angry guy singing-screaming ‘You oughta know!!!”
So it’s interesting what’s acceptable out of women, as opposed to what is acceptable out of men.
Concerned Citizen
@SciVo:
I know I’d be annoyed if someone had ripped off my comment…. Sorry about that.
John Bird
Hey, it’s a decent counterpoint, but really I think it’s contained in the Cee Lo song itself.
Cee Lo’s narrators have never been unrepentant self-boosters. Much more often, they’re very much SUPPOSED to be troubled people, trying hard to escape from layers of self-loathing. (Try “El Dorado Sunrise”, still my fave of his, to get it in pure form.) They’re not meant to express the best of us, or the parts of us that we want other people to see.
The song reads as the first-hand, angrily subjective testimony of a guy with self-esteem troubles who is swearing to himself because his woman left him for another man, or just left him and ended up with another man, and it’s pretty unclear whether she really is more concerned with money than love, or he’s just hung up on the woman to his own detriment.
That’s clear to me from how he juxtaposes a pleading “I still love you” with a really upbeat “fuck you, and fuck her too”. As in, maybe the narrator is internally conflicted and just needs to get over it, and the songwriter knows it.
What’s more, the song is also a cathartic piece describing a cathartic act. It’s kind of a stretch for the counterpoint to present the “Fuck You” in the original as the narrator outright shouting it at the new couple or even saying it audibly or aloud.
Take that away, and the whole ‘stalker’ thing falls apart, which is a lot of the venom in the counterpoint. Someone comes by with your ex, there is a part of you that says, “fuck you”, and comes up with disparaging sour-grapes reasons, all in your head, no stalking necessary.
I mean, the very basis of this song, or the appeal of Alanis Morissette, for that matter, is that you never get to say this gut-reaction, irrational stuff out loud after a relationship unless you want to come off as totally crazy. You just steam silently about it, and maybe listen to a song about it and feel a little better.
The gold-digger crap is problematic in a way that the rest isn’t, but then again, it’s a callback to the decades of soul that birthed Cee Lo. Everyone who heard that song could likely name or hum a couple of soul songs off the top of his or her head about how it sucks to be poor and if I had that money, I’d still have that woman, damn her and that man who has made something of himself. Doesn’t make it okay, but it’s one of the go-to laments of this genre.
Very interesting nevertheless.
sooziec
Wow, Chill mf’s! This is high-larious and you can’t take it too seriously. Pleez.