Pop Culture: Objects of Pleasure
The music industry of the US is one of the largest media industries globally, benefitting not only from tours and concerts in addition to produced material, but the online streaming world now accessible to a much larger audience. It is not surprising now to see an asian cover a new pop music hit on YouTube, or to see bollywood choreographies on hip hop songs on the internet. This also goes to show the influence that the music industry holds on the youth, nationally and globally. The music industry has not only been an emotional escape for youth but a glamorized state of being, that is ideal to most. The projection of music celebrities and their lives through their songs and music video has immense influence on the way the younger generation idealizes fashion, career, literature and lifestyles. So what is the music industry letting them drool at?
To analyze this, we can look at one of the top charting artists. The proper nomenclature in this case would be, one of the hot artists. Selena Gomez has 10 hits in the Billboard Hot 100, with her latest song Fetish, published on July 27th, 2017 with 21 million views already! Now before we start applauding her achievement, let’s see what the viewership has really ingested in this song and it’s video.
Sexy Disney Kids


Gale Wald in her article “Just a Girl? Rock Music, Feminism, and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth” clearly highlights the cultural construction and politicization of the music industry to sexualize women. The lyrics, musical compositions, videos all projected this sexualized female body with the fortunate gift of a voice that can be used for entertainment. While the Riot Grrrls played a revolutionary role in showing the feminist side of rock music, the image of woman has still been preserved through the ages. However the applaudable effort on Riot Grrrls’ part is their commitment to play against these images, to show a girl as just another being. The article really proves the value of a representation of girlhood beyond the sex symbol by the women themselves. It identifies “an innocence that was not owned or enjoyed, a grace that was denied”. However, here we see a disney star trying to prove her adult girlhood with an odd disparity of looking particularly young and innocent but displaying behaviour that objectifies her own body.

Apart from her behavior, we see this desperation in her voice, a girl who has sung seemingly strong vocals now is trying to enact a voice that is extraordinarily soft and “sexy” as she sings:
“You got a fetish for my love
I push you out and you come right back
Don’t see a point in blaming you
If I were you, I’d do me too
You got a fetish for my love”
It is an indication/ desperate attempt to prove that she too has entered the disney-free world where she can perform actions pleasurable to a very patriarchal music society. The disney child is now an object of sexual obsession.
Lollypop-Yellow and Black Objects

Continuing with objects, we can clearly see a use of subliminal messages to play into stereotypes of the music industry.Stuart Hall writes in his essay Encoding, Decoding:
“Every visual sign in advertising connotes a quality, situation, value or inference, which is present as an implication or implied meaning, depending on the connotational positioning.”
We see this citation in Gomez’ youthful, girlish yellow dress. Her action, showing her clip her tongue with a eyelash curler, eating soap/lipstick. It is a constant reinforcement of a woman needing to be a submissive, timid presence, accepting of any inflictions to please others.
Also without showing any male character upto the end, we still are accepting a heteronormative relationship because of her actions being closely associated to a masculine audience in other instances. Finally we see a male in the video, tucked in the back against a wall, absent from any shot with Gomez to show a clear disengagement. And what do we see when we see him? A black object. He is standing against a white wall, without any role to play in an otherwise very dynamically filmed video, as he raps. The video finishes with these two objects, a black male body and a youthful petite female body in different overlapping shots. As if objectification of race, body and sex just wasn’t enough in the industry.
Pop Music or Pop Stencils?

In the end, the question here is, what are we projecting to the youth in this culture? Rivera-Servera in Choreographies of Resistance celebrates utopic futurities for the queer youth, and imagines a world in the future with equality, acceptance and lack of objectification. Is that really where we are headed? In Gaga Genders, Halberstam points out the relevance of a world with new and fluid gender roles not only for philosophies in humanities but for the economical progress of this world. However we see this industry thriving on the portrayals of genders like that in this video. With this being on the Billboard Hot 100, is the future a dreary world of soap-eating Selena waiting for a man in the kitchen and water-soaked dinner table? Are we going to keep conditioning the youth to just imagine women as a sex toy, or will we give them some space of existence as a person?
Authors: Faiza Uppal and Spriha Jha.
References:
Gayle Wald , “Just a Girl? Rock Music, Feminism, and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23, no. 3 (Spring, 1998): 585–610.
Halberstam, J. (2012). Gaga feminism: Sex, gender, and the end of normal. Boston: Beacon Press.
Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. Culture, media, language, 128–138.
Rivera-Servera, R. H. (April 13, 2011) Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reade. Hames-Garcia, M. & Martinez, E. J. (eds.). Duke University Press, p. 259–280

