Power, Truth, and Relativism in Popular Music

I must confess that I do not watch the Grammy Awards show on television anymore, even though I am a voting member of the Recording Academy and have served several times in Los Angeles on the screening committee for the classical music categories. A friend of mine sent me a link to this year’s winner of both “Record of the Year” (individual song) and “Album of the Year”. I must confess that I am already turning in my grave, though I am not even dead yet. 

The performer in both categories is one Billie Eilish, at 17 replacing Taylor Swift as the youngest performer ever to win Album of the Year. Her winning song, “Bad Guy”, can be described, instrumentally, as a thumping bass drum with a continually repeated bass guitar riff in a minor key. She appears on the video with near catatonic eyes and a trickle of blood from her nose that eventually gets wiped over her whole lower face. She does not, technically, “sing” most of the time but raps in a whispering voice throughout. The lyrics describe her boyfriend as a self-proclaimed “bad guy”.  She explains to him that she can be a bad guy, too, with her only sung line being “I’m only good at being bad.” I don’t know where she derived her sets and video images, but it is easy to relate them to Surrealism and Dada in art, à la Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp.

There has been no shortage in recent times of fringe and cult music and art, presenting macabre scenes, outfits or nihilistic attitudes for their shock value, all the way up through the goth rock movement. However, those of you as out of touch as I am may be surprised to learn that this is no fringe movement. It has exploded into the mainstream of pop music, enjoying sales and download streaming of three billion – that’s with a B. To my knowledge, none of these previous iterations seem likely to have been admired by three billion fans, and that is a troubling statistic, to be sure. What are we to make of it? The expected response might be to opine about a growing demonic influence on a post-Christian culture, or upon human voyeurism and curiosity toward a sensational display, but those seem self-evident. This video is honestly not nearly as creepy, nor as artfully skillful by any means, as Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Opus 21 of 1912. This girl’s whisper-rap is very much in the spirit of Schoenberg’s “Sprechstimme” (speech-song) in that work.

There is actually another aspect of this song that I wish to focus upon here, namely the idea of power, or rather, “empowerment.” In regard to just about any film, children’s book, or work of art, the word “empowerment” now commands instant respect. If a book or movie or song is said to be about “empowering” someone, heads nod in reverence and understanding that it must, automatically, be very good and a great contribution to society. However, Christianity teaches that all true power resides in God, and that we are only the vessels through which He sometimes exercises it, according to His will and absolute standards, not our flawed ones. However, secular culture, apart from God, sees power, or potential power, ideally residing in the individual, as the serpent told Adam and Eve that they could “be like God.” But the desire for human power may often take the more benign form of desiring to “empower” someone else who is seen as a victim. This makes one feel like a noble champion on behalf of the poor victim, and therefore a person of heroic intention. Lacking faith in the one true Redeemer, and crusading under one’s own banner, each self-imagined champion can become a kind of substitute Christ figure in his own mind, setting the captives free. Sometimes the quest is actually in a good cause, if for flawed motives, and sometimes it is sadly misguided.

In an emotion-based society, these “champions” can further affirm their own imagined munificence by banding together and marching in the streets with torches and pitchforks, as it were, crying out for justice. Of course, we have no shortage of self-proclaimed victims now to fill the demand, as well as the legitimate victims. And for every victim, real or imagined, there is an oppressor, a “bad guy”, real or imagined. In a relativistic culture with no absolute right and wrong, one wonders if it is the act of championing, itself, that matters more to the champion than the thing being championed, or more than whether that cause is objectively worth championing. It sometimes seems enough to champion a victim whose feelings have been hurt by someone who merely has a different opinion but has done them no actual harm. I can even imagine now, say, a bank robber who feels like a victim when he is apprehended. 

In the “Bad Guy” song, however, we do have a true victim, a young woman who, judging from her bloody nose, has been physically abused by her boyfriend. We have a kind of verismo opera here in miniature, dealing with the heart-breaking “realism” of an all-too-common situation. Realism may be called accuracy, in that it actually portrays something that does happen, but accuracy does not always represent truth, and this seems to me an important distinction in art, perhaps one for another day. The girl’s response in the video is to become a “bad guy” herself, in order to counter his badness – problem solved? Her get-tough response is presented, I think, as a kind of role model of what girls should do in this situation. In truth, however, where physical abuse is involved and they are only dating, not married, she would be better advised to break off from this fellow altogether, get a restraining order, and find a boyfriend who will treat her with the dignity she deserves. If she had done that in this video, then her neo-Expressionist first part of the video (albeit juvenile and poorly done, from a musical standpoint) might even be artistically justifiable. But would that happy ending of truth, genuine love, and goodness have garnered three billion customers?