It’s hard to hate the Ying Yang Twins as
much as I should, but it’s equally hard to defend them. In
the interest of full disclosure, I was ushered into puberty by the
Rolling Stones — no amount of Germaine Greer could repair the
damage those crafty über-misogynists wrought upon my tender psyche with
“Backstreet Girl,” “Stray Cat Blues,” and
“Brown Sugar.” And, like many overeducated liberals,
I’ve made countless excuses for the Twins and their crunk
brethren, contorted all the rules of logic and common sense in an
attempt to find irony and metacommentary and linguistic
appropriation in every dehumanizing slur. After all, preaching the
dangers of popular culture feels so square, so sanctimonious, so
Tipper Gore. Like the grad student who pays her tuition with the
sticky bills that she earns in the strip club, I pretend that
I’m deconstructing the dominant culture, reveling in the
dialectical bump-and-grind. Any self-righteous simpleton can waggle
her disapproving finger; it takes a thoroughly postmodern Millie to
apprehend that the aforementioned stripper isn’t just
snapping her thong and licking her pole — she’s
actually empowering herself, subverting the patriarchy, dismantling
gender roles. But sometimes, as a wise man once observed, you gotta
let a ho be a ho.
Outrage, or even simple honesty, is
unfashionable among the intellectual elite; consider recent
assessments of the Ying Yang Twins by the so-called liberal media.
Kelefa Sanneh, the usually perceptive New
York Times pop critic, can’t
bring himself to condemn the Twins’ chart-topping single
“Wait (The Whisper Song)”; instead, he mildly suggests
that lines such as “I’m-a beat that pussy up” and
“Wait ’til you see my dick, bitch” almost (but not quite!)
come off like threats. Village Voice writer Anthony Miccio even went so far as to argue that the song
is merely “a crass flirt mistaken for a date-rape anthem by
people who have no sympathy for lechers.” (Poor lechers! When
will they get a break?)
By now, almost everyone has heard the song
they’re discussing, the first (and by far the best) single
from the Dirty South duo’s newest full-length, United State of Atlanta. If you turn off your brain and your conscience,
it’s even possible to enjoy the burbly bass line, the
infectious fingersnaps, the urgent whisper that Kaine and D-Roc use
to deliver their heinous message. Until now, crunk was all about
the shouting, the hoarse imperatives, the
so-dumb-they’re-kinda-genius assertions of nihilism,
hedonism, and all those other delicious -isms that deliver us
— or at least distract us — from our existential
nausea. Just by lowering the volume, the Twins fulfill the primary
desideratum of hip-hop: to make it new. But as fresh as it might
sound, the lyrics are depressingly familiar — enough to make
you don a burqa or buy a Clay Aiken record. Even worse than
“Wait” is “Pull My Hair,” in which a sexy
cyborg coos that she really likes rough sex. Hey, forget all that
hokum about the clitoris — everyone knows that the
woman’s real pleasure center lies deep within the follicles
of her scalp.
Unfortunately, the Ying Yang Twins are at
their best when they’re being their stupid, woman-hating
selves. When they try to get serious, as on the unspeakably lame
“Live Again,” they’re somehow more offensive. If
you’re going to express sympathy for the strippers (who, it
must be noted, keep the entire crunk industry in gold teeth and
flashy rims), at least give them better lines than “My whole
life is full of sin/This world is a dead end/I want to live
again.” And for the love of God don’t let that Maroon 5
moron sing on it.
This article appears in Jul 7-13, 2005.
