Fergie - Big Girls Don't Cry (Personal)

While I am certainly a lot more likely to want to write about music that I actually like since those are the songs that I actually want to listen to enough times in order to get engaged with the meaning of the song, that doesn't mean that I have to ignore some of the particularly egregious songs that come my way. The "hits" of the summer are particularly bad in this regard, as they tend to be nearly inescapable. Take Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry (Personal)" for example. In the summer of 2007 this song played on the radio continuously, and since I spent a lot of time driving around for work that summer that meant that it was seemingly everywhere I was. Or, to characterize one waste land in terms of another: "Fergie in the morning blaring behind you, and Fergie in the evening rising to meet you, I will show you fear on the FM dial." (Not to mention the horror's of Rihanna's "Umbrella," Bon Jovi's "Making a Memory," and the Plain White T's "Hey There Delilah," among others.) Of course, one benefit of writing about things you dislike is that's it's particularly easy to find the humor in it, and there is plenty of humor to be found in the menagerie of (often contradictory) cliches fighting for airtime in this song.



Now, I realize that artists don't always have to sing from personal experience and are free to inhabit different situations, personalities, etc. in their songs, but freedom in the choice of subject matter does not equal freedom of presentation when it comes to actually writing a good song. So, this means that there need not be anything wrong with a woman in her thirties singing a song with a title like "Big Girls Don't Cry" that immediately suggests pre-adolescence. After all, there is nothing out of the ordinary about looking back at one's childhood. However, this is where the whole issue of presentation comes in, and I have to say that in this regard the song is a bit of a mess.

Without discussing the video, which (as you will soon see) would inject a whole other level of weirdness into the song, let me focus on the strange combination of sex and childhood innocence throughout the song. On the sex front, Fergie (god knows what a search for the terms "sex front Fergie" would turn up) sings things like "The smell of your skin lingers on me now," but then spends most of the song singing about things from a very (very) young girl's perspective in the chorus: "I'm gonna miss you like a child misses their blanket." The little girl in this song has an idea of romance that has nothing to do with sex: "Like a little school mate in the schoolyard / We'll play jacks and Uno cards, / I'll be your best friend and you'll be mine, / Valentine."

The real weirdness is how the song begins to merge these two, and its in the merging that things get really creepy: "Yes, you can hold my hand if you want to, / 'Cause I want to hold yours too, / We'll be playmates and lovers / And share our secret worlds." Although perhaps Playboy has ruined the term "playmates" for good, I still see a big age discrepancy between the mentalities behind being playmates and lovers (and unless "secret worlds" is just a silly euphemism straight out of bad romance novel sex scenes--"love grottos" and such--then its very out of place as well). There is definitely something very off-putting about the juxtaposition of these two perspectives, particularly if they belong to the same person at the same time. Anyone who has such a childish emotional life might want to consider refraining from sexual relationships until they grow up some more.

Of course, we could give Fergie some credit and postulate that the collision of sex and childhood is meant as some kind of critical reflection upon the increasingly early sexualization of young children (a more subtle version of Dishwalla's "Pretty Babies" perhaps?) or at least a reflection of the contradictory impulses that mark the difficult transition to adulthood. But this is the "artist" who gave us the song "My Humps," so I'm not sure how far we can go with that one; if anything, she's probably just carrying on the project of increasing the trend of sexualizing the young which makes songs like "My Humps" generate even more money by expanding the market for them.