As Sonny says in Good Times, everyone's a critic today!
Seriously, mostly people sigh wistfully for the woebegone days of Cher’s fake-nakedness. This guy, Johnny Dee, blames Cher for the slutty stylings of today. But we all know pop culture was slutifying long before Cher came along with her navel-sequins and scandalous arm pits.
Porn meets pop: Cher has a lot to answer for
How did a basque and fishnets become the uniform of girlie pop? It all started in 1989…
Shot on the deck of the gigantic USS Missouri battleship, the video to Cher's 1989 hit If I Could Turn Back Time featured her surrounded by hundreds of panting sailors and sitting astride a gigantic cannon. Music may have died when Buddy Holly’s plane crashed in Clear Lake in 1959 but If I Could Turn Back Time marked the moment the subtle use of sexual innuendo in pop music was butchered in its prime.
What made the video even more hysterical was what the 43-year-old singer was wearing. Or rather what she wasn't. MTV briefly banned the promo because of a close-up of the butterfly she has tattooed across her buttocks. Back then tattoos on buttocks were a rarity, but Cher's see-through outfit left little to the imagination and in an unprecedented role reversal provided a nightmare scenario for teenagers across the globe: what if my Mum goes out dressed like that?
Twenty years on and once again female singers are pushing the murky boundaries of how little you can wear before you're actually naked. The difference is that today, unlike Cher, their videos aren't banned and their live performances don't cause moral outrage – it's just how pop music is.
Last week, nude photos of the R&B singer Rihanna were leaked on the internet by an ex-partner. You would imagine such an event would pique the curiosity of the online population but barely a ripple was registered by Google's almighty search engines. The reason why is clear – we've seen enough already.
Despite its adult nature Rihanna's latest album Rated R doesn't come with a Parental Advisory sticker (possibly because the music industry has given up on the notion of anyone under 18 ever buying a CD again) but it should have one for the CD booklet photos of the basque-wearing star in a variety of pornographic poses.
Unlike Cher 20 years ago, Rihanna is not alone: Lady Gaga, Fergie, Britney, Beyonce, Shakira, Pink, Katy Perry and, of course, Madonna have all chosen to blur the boundaries of pop and porn in recent videos. They're far from alone. Basques and fishnet stockings have become the pop uniform. Somewhere being a pop star and being a glamour model became the same thing – possibly on the same day that it was decided you could only look sexy if you also looked trashy. It's all a little too desperate.
A similar thing has been happening among male pop singers over the past decade: from Peter Andre to Usher, having a body rather than a voice is the number one concern. Meanwhile a boy band cannot really be classified as a boy band unless they flash their six packs once every five minutes…
What makes this undressing of pop so curious is that we live in an era of peculiar mixed messages – the wholesome fantasy of High School Musical, the growing market for mature artists like Susan Boyle and the daily dishing out of moral admonishments in the online comments of the Daily Mail at one end of the spectrum, and at the other Lady Gaga simulating masturbation while straddling a motorcycle and being admired by seven men in leather posing pouches.
The TV Show Witches of Eastwick was also canceled. Where are the White Houe protests for that?? I found this critique on the web a few days ago…but now I can't find it again. But the writer actually dug the show. Go figure!
Here's hoping that Lindsay Price, Rebecca Romijn and Jaime Ray Newman land some juicy comedic roles now that 'Eastwick' has been cancelled. It was probably the right decision to cancel Eastwick. I feel bad about saying that, because the acting in the series is downright incredible, but there's just something lame about the show. I don't know what it is — the plot? or the lack thereof? — but despite the laugh-out-loud moments, I found myself cringing too.
Eastwick, the series, is much different from that film. Plot and character were taking too long to evolve, I suspect. I'm not joking when I say that some of the best acting on television this fall came on this show. And it came consistently from the three leads, Jaime Ray Newman, Lindsay Price and Rebecca Romijn.
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