Seeking Amy

Let’s be honest, pop music has become extremely over-sexed. It goes widely unnoticed and unpunished, as if we’re immune to it or even welcoming it. We all know that sex sells, but where do we draw the line?

As a fan of hip-hop, I am all too familiar with public figures lambasting some of my favorite artists for the usage of profanity and sexual exploitation of women. So I’m not surprised that the sexual overtones of this most explicit song on the radio today comes from a hip-hop artist. Flo Rida’s “Right Round” is a take on the 80’s song “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)”. Unless I’m as much of the problem as anyone else that I interpret everything for it sex-value, the chorus seems to be pretty clear:

You spin my head right round, right round
When you go down, when you go down

You can get away with saying that on the radio? I’m not a parent, a preacher, or a moral thermometer, but I feel slightly uncomfortable when this song comes on the radio. It is catchy, though...

Listening to a Top-40 station, the next song you might encounter is Britney Spears’ “If You Seek Amy,” which if pronounced phonetically implores the listener to forcefully have sex with her. First off, I would like to go on the record in stating that whoever wrote this is absolutely brilliant. The fact that the author could take a sexual phrase and disguise it as a meaningless one blows my uncreative mind. It took me about 2 weeks to get over this when I learned the true meaning of the song. Once you realize the meaning, you discover it’s actually quite raunchy. Check out the chorus, which is more cleverly stated than the Flo Rida song but bears similar intent:

Love me, hate me, say what you want about me
All of the boys and all of the girls are begging to If You Seek Amy

Oh yes, not just the boys—all of the boys and all of the girls. The radio folks have not been as clever, revising the name of the song and subsequently the chorus to “If You See Amy.” So now the song just makes no sense.

There’s a commonly-used phrase in sports that goes, “When you get to the end zone, act like you’ve been there before.” The way today’s pop artists sing or rap about it, you’d think sex was something only afforded to the wealthy or wildly popular. It’s just become overkill. You would also think that the people who innovate in music and creatively push the envelope would be the successful ones. Instead, we equate success with pushing the sexual envelope. Artists and radio stations are like teenagers trying to see how far they can go before their parents (the FCC) come down on them. It’s sad that the same sound and the same message have almost become an arbitrage situation for artists and radio execs alike. Another song about sex, huh? Shocker. Unfortunately, it will remain that way until we decide we’re tired of hearing it. And since sex appeals to one of our most basic needs, we’re unlikely to ever become tired of it. I'll admit, the beats are damn good, too, so it makes it even harder to keep these songs off the radio and out of the clubs. I can't even say I dislike the Britney song because it's so catchy, so I'm just feeding into the problem!

How far is too far? Girl-on-girl? Nope (see Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl”). Sexual degradation? Nope (see Soulja Boy’s “Crank Dat”). Rape? I think felonies are a good place to draw the line, but who even knows anymore. Until we find out, I’ll continue to be surprisingly unsurprised.