It's worth revisiting Cher Lloyd's initial audition for last year's X Factor. Then just 16, Lloyd is clearly frantic with nerves; but her performance has the quality of an invocation about it, some sort of pseudo-magical rite, a channelling of energies. When she comes in over the beat, it feels early - she doesn't even allow the conventional four-beat set up to count her in, furiously spitting out Keri Hilson's "dime divas, give it to me!" ad lib before the main melody begins. It feels sudden, unexpected, disruptive. And then, immediately, there's that transformation, that invocation - "hopped up out the bed, turned my swag on". The performance is obviously brilliant, and filled with powerful inflections and details - the sheer force of "round my hooood", the on-a-dime attitude flip from "I look good" to "I get money". But nothing beats Lloyd's delivery on the Carly Simon-quoting passage: "if you be hatin', just be mad at yourself/I bet you think this song is about you, don't you?/yeah, but this ain't about you". She's utterly in earnest, and the wry, knowing paradox of 'You're So Vain' is fully ironed out here - this song really isn't about anybody other than the singer herself.
This sort of transformation, from ordinary person to magnetic star, with the power of song itself as a transforming force, is a standard part of reality show cliché, and a narrative that the X Factor is keen to sell us. But Cher Lloyd's performance differs radically from the standard narrative. It is not in any sense an attempt to ingratiate; Lloyd's transformation is emphatically not dependent upon external approval, nor does it seek to solicit such approval. Quite the opposite - it stands as a declaration of independence and self-sufficiency. The message is, in short - I don't care what you think about me. It is openly confrontational.
Lloyd's choice of audition song was significant for a number of reasons. 'Turn My Swag On' is a late-2008/early-2009 single by Soulja Boy, a fascinatingly symbolic figure himself - with the success of his 2007 debut single, 'Crank That (Soulja Boy)', he became a poster boy for 'ringtone rap' at the height of Nas' 'Hip-Hop Is Dead' sloganeering, and in the centre of a nasty and difficult generation gap in US hip-hop that is still resolving itself, slowly and with difficulty, in 2011. Soulja Boy was presumed to be a one-hit wonder, but he has managed to carve out a successful ongoing career; he is emblematic, perhaps more than any other rapper, of a new set of values which is gradually supplanting the old in US hip-hop, a more-or-less complete aesthetic rejection of old-school boom-bap beats and technically complex lyrics. Soulja Boy was born in 1990, and Cher Lloyd in 1993; they are both part of an emergent generation of urban musicians; a good way of telling what side of this symbolic generational divide any given rapper stands is probably whether or not they are willing to take Soulja Boy seriously.
For her audition, Cher Lloyd performed a Keri Hilson 'remix' of 'Turn My Swag On', on which R&B singer Hilson does exactly what Lloyd had been doing from her Worcestershire home - improvises her own lyrics over an appropriated hip-hop beat. The Keri Hilson version of 'Turn My Swag On' is only quasi-legal, and has not been officially released. After Lloyd's performance, a version of 'Turn My Swag On' patched together by an obscure Atlanta hip-hop producer, Greg Street, which mixed a few different versions of the track and included part of the Keri Hilson version alongside Soulja Boy's original, reached number 17 in the UK charts. It was the only version available for legal download which featured Keri Hilson. So Cher Lloyd's choice of audition song did not even exist within the world of popular-music-as-commodity. In the corporate, Saturday-teatime entertainment world of the X Factor, this counts as some kind of invasion from outside pop music itself. American hip-hop and R&B music signifies 'mainstream' in lazy thinking; but actually, Cher Lloyd and her audition song summon this music as a kind of paradoxical pop/not-pop, a music that seems to exist largely outside of mainstream distribution networks, in semi-official 'remixes', freestyles and mixtapes. Hence the derisive term 'ringtone rap' which was being thrown around at Soulja Boy and his ilk around 2007 - it seems to get at the hard-to-shake notion that this music exists in digital space, designed to sound good through mobile phones or tinny laptop speakers. (As an anecdotal aside, having spent some time working in secondary schools over the last couple of years, it's my experience that the British teenagers who are most intensely interested in music are interested in this music - American hip-hop and R&B, and its British analogues, including grime.)
Two important concepts run through from 'Turn My Swag On' into Cher Lloyd's debut single, 'Swagger Jagger'. The first is the obvious one, "swag(ger)", an increasingly common trope of urban music. 'Swag' or 'swagger' means something like self-belief or self-regard, interpenetrating with demeanour and style. The other is the figure of the 'hater'. It's very easy to see what both of these concepts might have to do with a lack of privilege. In Lloyd's audition performance, her swagger is something that must be actively turned on, summoned up as if through magical invocation by the music itself, a reclaiming of a sense of self-worth that has been denied one. For all the exhortations about "getting money", Keri Hilson's 'Turn My Swag On' eventually arrives at a conclusion that Cher Lloyd didn't get to in her truncated version - "swag ain't somethin' you can wear on your neck/you can buy a chain, but you can't buy respect". Meanwhile, for those on the receiving end of hatred and vilification, the concept of the 'hater' is an endlessly useful rhetorical gesture. If you hate me, this gesture says, then it's because you are a hater - in other words, it's because of what you are, not because of what I am. Thus is the self-loathing of the underprivileged displaced through a grammatical manoeuvre - I am not the hated, it is you who are a hater. This sense of taking back power, of summoning a sense of self-worth, of rhetorically dismissing those who would tell you that you are worthless, is an enormous part - perhaps, in fact, the single most decisive part - of this music's appeal for much of its audience. This is the animating spirit of the music, and both 'Turn My Swag On' and 'Swagger Jagger' are permeated absolutely to the core with this spirit.
And so to Cher Lloyd's lack of privilege, a pretty important thing to understand if we are to unpick the significance of 'Swagger Jagger'. The Guardian has called the single "white girl rap", but whiteness is a tricky category, and an artificial construction designed to distinguish between those with and without racial privilege - there was a time, for instance, when Irish and Jewish people in the United States were not considered 'white'. Lloyd is, in fact, of Romani ancestry - a group which, some studies have claimed, experience more racism in the UK today than any other. Lloyd is also frequently on the receiving end of some disturbing class-based hatred; scan through any internet comments thread about her and ugly classist slurs like 'chav', 'chavvy' and 'pikey' (the last of which combines class connotations with racist, anti-Romani undertones) are never far away, and articles disturbingly mention "suggestions" that her parents may be, or have been, benefits claimants - as though this were something shameful in and of itself. To this matrix of interpenetrative prejudice we might as well add misogyny and ageism. In pop music, there are, after all, few figures derided and mocked more routinely than the teenage girl, whose tastes in music are repeatedly presented as shallow and hormonal in nature. The two recent pop stars who have been on the receiving end of more irrational vitriol than any other are probably 14-year-old Rebecca Black and 17-year-old Justin Bieber (the latter is stereotyped as being music for teenage girls, an association which tends to be stressed by his detractors, as though that in itself were a reason enough not to take Bieber seriously). Blur's Alex James has been quoted as characterising with pride the band's turn away from mainstream pop, and embracing of more noisy art-rock elements, as a rejection of the "screaming 15-year-old girls" who supposedly made up the first few rows of their shows during the height of Britpop. This is the typical voice of the serious male music fan: teenage girls are not wanted in music.
Given all of this, it is not surprising, even if it is still depressing, that Cher Lloyd and 'Swagger Jagger' have been on the receiving end of so much hate and nastiness. Like Rebecca Black and Justin Bieber, 'Swagger Jagger' has already become a snide shorthand in some quarters for 'obviously shit'. The song's YouTube video has accrued a lot more 'dislikes' than 'likes' (at the time of writing, the ratio is about 2:1). Of course, a lot of people probably do genuinely dislike the song; but it's pretty obvious that 'Swagger Jagger' hasn't become such an object of scorn just because people think that it's a bad record. For any given song in the top 40, there will be plenty of people who don't like it; but people don't flock to YouTube to click the 'dislike' button. It's not remotely notable or interesting that there are people who dislike 'Swagger Jagger' - what's striking is how strongly people feel compelled to enact how much they dislike it. Cher Lloyd is an easy target, and the gleeful, snide savaging of her and 'Swagger Jagger' has the structure of bullying, a safety-in-numbers attack in which ugly misogyny, ageism, classism and racism are never far away; the urge to attack Cher Lloyd is the defensive urge to reaffirm one's alignment with a dominant group by pouring scorn on an outsider. Lloyd herself is canny enough to realise that the 'divisive' nature of the record has more to do with her than the record itself.
I'd be remiss if I didn't at least take note of the fact that 'Swagger Jagger' has been number one during a politically and historically significant week in the UK, with civil disorder and rioting taking place in London and other major cities. It has already been noted on this blog that we are living through tense, turbulent times, soundtracked in our pop charts - for the most part - by materialistic, escapist, socially blinkered party music. The rioting has drawn parallels between 2011 and 1981; but is 'Swagger Jagger' more 'Ghost Town' or more Duran Duran, a reflection of confrontation and disaffection or a high-gloss celebration of capitalism and hedonism? It's tempting, and not too difficult, to identify the song with the latter category. Lloyd's roars of "get on the floor!", and the song's musical affinity with post-Black Eyed Peas ravepop, certainly aligns it with the current 'in-the-club' zeitgeist. (Surely this is the only time in history that two consecutive number one singles have featured lyrics about counting money.)
But this is only half of the story. 'Swagger Jagger' is infinitely more confrontational and provocative than anything that has occupied the number one spot for some time. As I've already argued, its musical DNA - the language of 'swagger' and 'haters' - contains a confrontational stance, and an underprivileged perspective, within it by implication. One thing that 'Swagger Jagger' achieves is an act of reclamation, turning this pop from a music passively consumed by working-class teenage girls into a music made by them. The music mirrors this - the music of 'Swagger Jagger' is not the spacey, druggy swoon favoured by most recent club-pop, a sonic smoothing out of harsh edges, the sound of unity rather than division. Rather, the beats are hard, brash and defiant - as of course, is Lloyd's vocal performance, rapping her verses in a harsh, provocative bark. The Jekyll-and-Hyde switch-up between the verses and the chorus is an ingenuous touch; the abrasive verses seem designed to provoke and goad Lloyd's 'haters' into an outrage, before dropping away into a soft, melodic nursery-rhyme of a chorus, chiding the listener for getting so worked up. The record pre-empts, and thereby wilfully intensifies, its own negative reception. Personally, I think it's fantastic.Source URL: http://modernlovewalksonby.blogspot.com/2011/10/cher-lloyd.html
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This sort of transformation, from ordinary person to magnetic star, with the power of song itself as a transforming force, is a standard part of reality show cliché, and a narrative that the X Factor is keen to sell us. But Cher Lloyd's performance differs radically from the standard narrative. It is not in any sense an attempt to ingratiate; Lloyd's transformation is emphatically not dependent upon external approval, nor does it seek to solicit such approval. Quite the opposite - it stands as a declaration of independence and self-sufficiency. The message is, in short - I don't care what you think about me. It is openly confrontational.
Lloyd's choice of audition song was significant for a number of reasons. 'Turn My Swag On' is a late-2008/early-2009 single by Soulja Boy, a fascinatingly symbolic figure himself - with the success of his 2007 debut single, 'Crank That (Soulja Boy)', he became a poster boy for 'ringtone rap' at the height of Nas' 'Hip-Hop Is Dead' sloganeering, and in the centre of a nasty and difficult generation gap in US hip-hop that is still resolving itself, slowly and with difficulty, in 2011. Soulja Boy was presumed to be a one-hit wonder, but he has managed to carve out a successful ongoing career; he is emblematic, perhaps more than any other rapper, of a new set of values which is gradually supplanting the old in US hip-hop, a more-or-less complete aesthetic rejection of old-school boom-bap beats and technically complex lyrics. Soulja Boy was born in 1990, and Cher Lloyd in 1993; they are both part of an emergent generation of urban musicians; a good way of telling what side of this symbolic generational divide any given rapper stands is probably whether or not they are willing to take Soulja Boy seriously.
For her audition, Cher Lloyd performed a Keri Hilson 'remix' of 'Turn My Swag On', on which R&B singer Hilson does exactly what Lloyd had been doing from her Worcestershire home - improvises her own lyrics over an appropriated hip-hop beat. The Keri Hilson version of 'Turn My Swag On' is only quasi-legal, and has not been officially released. After Lloyd's performance, a version of 'Turn My Swag On' patched together by an obscure Atlanta hip-hop producer, Greg Street, which mixed a few different versions of the track and included part of the Keri Hilson version alongside Soulja Boy's original, reached number 17 in the UK charts. It was the only version available for legal download which featured Keri Hilson. So Cher Lloyd's choice of audition song did not even exist within the world of popular-music-as-commodity. In the corporate, Saturday-teatime entertainment world of the X Factor, this counts as some kind of invasion from outside pop music itself. American hip-hop and R&B music signifies 'mainstream' in lazy thinking; but actually, Cher Lloyd and her audition song summon this music as a kind of paradoxical pop/not-pop, a music that seems to exist largely outside of mainstream distribution networks, in semi-official 'remixes', freestyles and mixtapes. Hence the derisive term 'ringtone rap' which was being thrown around at Soulja Boy and his ilk around 2007 - it seems to get at the hard-to-shake notion that this music exists in digital space, designed to sound good through mobile phones or tinny laptop speakers. (As an anecdotal aside, having spent some time working in secondary schools over the last couple of years, it's my experience that the British teenagers who are most intensely interested in music are interested in this music - American hip-hop and R&B, and its British analogues, including grime.)
Two important concepts run through from 'Turn My Swag On' into Cher Lloyd's debut single, 'Swagger Jagger'. The first is the obvious one, "swag(ger)", an increasingly common trope of urban music. 'Swag' or 'swagger' means something like self-belief or self-regard, interpenetrating with demeanour and style. The other is the figure of the 'hater'. It's very easy to see what both of these concepts might have to do with a lack of privilege. In Lloyd's audition performance, her swagger is something that must be actively turned on, summoned up as if through magical invocation by the music itself, a reclaiming of a sense of self-worth that has been denied one. For all the exhortations about "getting money", Keri Hilson's 'Turn My Swag On' eventually arrives at a conclusion that Cher Lloyd didn't get to in her truncated version - "swag ain't somethin' you can wear on your neck/you can buy a chain, but you can't buy respect". Meanwhile, for those on the receiving end of hatred and vilification, the concept of the 'hater' is an endlessly useful rhetorical gesture. If you hate me, this gesture says, then it's because you are a hater - in other words, it's because of what you are, not because of what I am. Thus is the self-loathing of the underprivileged displaced through a grammatical manoeuvre - I am not the hated, it is you who are a hater. This sense of taking back power, of summoning a sense of self-worth, of rhetorically dismissing those who would tell you that you are worthless, is an enormous part - perhaps, in fact, the single most decisive part - of this music's appeal for much of its audience. This is the animating spirit of the music, and both 'Turn My Swag On' and 'Swagger Jagger' are permeated absolutely to the core with this spirit.
And so to Cher Lloyd's lack of privilege, a pretty important thing to understand if we are to unpick the significance of 'Swagger Jagger'. The Guardian has called the single "white girl rap", but whiteness is a tricky category, and an artificial construction designed to distinguish between those with and without racial privilege - there was a time, for instance, when Irish and Jewish people in the United States were not considered 'white'. Lloyd is, in fact, of Romani ancestry - a group which, some studies have claimed, experience more racism in the UK today than any other. Lloyd is also frequently on the receiving end of some disturbing class-based hatred; scan through any internet comments thread about her and ugly classist slurs like 'chav', 'chavvy' and 'pikey' (the last of which combines class connotations with racist, anti-Romani undertones) are never far away, and articles disturbingly mention "suggestions" that her parents may be, or have been, benefits claimants - as though this were something shameful in and of itself. To this matrix of interpenetrative prejudice we might as well add misogyny and ageism. In pop music, there are, after all, few figures derided and mocked more routinely than the teenage girl, whose tastes in music are repeatedly presented as shallow and hormonal in nature. The two recent pop stars who have been on the receiving end of more irrational vitriol than any other are probably 14-year-old Rebecca Black and 17-year-old Justin Bieber (the latter is stereotyped as being music for teenage girls, an association which tends to be stressed by his detractors, as though that in itself were a reason enough not to take Bieber seriously). Blur's Alex James has been quoted as characterising with pride the band's turn away from mainstream pop, and embracing of more noisy art-rock elements, as a rejection of the "screaming 15-year-old girls" who supposedly made up the first few rows of their shows during the height of Britpop. This is the typical voice of the serious male music fan: teenage girls are not wanted in music.
Given all of this, it is not surprising, even if it is still depressing, that Cher Lloyd and 'Swagger Jagger' have been on the receiving end of so much hate and nastiness. Like Rebecca Black and Justin Bieber, 'Swagger Jagger' has already become a snide shorthand in some quarters for 'obviously shit'. The song's YouTube video has accrued a lot more 'dislikes' than 'likes' (at the time of writing, the ratio is about 2:1). Of course, a lot of people probably do genuinely dislike the song; but it's pretty obvious that 'Swagger Jagger' hasn't become such an object of scorn just because people think that it's a bad record. For any given song in the top 40, there will be plenty of people who don't like it; but people don't flock to YouTube to click the 'dislike' button. It's not remotely notable or interesting that there are people who dislike 'Swagger Jagger' - what's striking is how strongly people feel compelled to enact how much they dislike it. Cher Lloyd is an easy target, and the gleeful, snide savaging of her and 'Swagger Jagger' has the structure of bullying, a safety-in-numbers attack in which ugly misogyny, ageism, classism and racism are never far away; the urge to attack Cher Lloyd is the defensive urge to reaffirm one's alignment with a dominant group by pouring scorn on an outsider. Lloyd herself is canny enough to realise that the 'divisive' nature of the record has more to do with her than the record itself.
I'd be remiss if I didn't at least take note of the fact that 'Swagger Jagger' has been number one during a politically and historically significant week in the UK, with civil disorder and rioting taking place in London and other major cities. It has already been noted on this blog that we are living through tense, turbulent times, soundtracked in our pop charts - for the most part - by materialistic, escapist, socially blinkered party music. The rioting has drawn parallels between 2011 and 1981; but is 'Swagger Jagger' more 'Ghost Town' or more Duran Duran, a reflection of confrontation and disaffection or a high-gloss celebration of capitalism and hedonism? It's tempting, and not too difficult, to identify the song with the latter category. Lloyd's roars of "get on the floor!", and the song's musical affinity with post-Black Eyed Peas ravepop, certainly aligns it with the current 'in-the-club' zeitgeist. (Surely this is the only time in history that two consecutive number one singles have featured lyrics about counting money.)
But this is only half of the story. 'Swagger Jagger' is infinitely more confrontational and provocative than anything that has occupied the number one spot for some time. As I've already argued, its musical DNA - the language of 'swagger' and 'haters' - contains a confrontational stance, and an underprivileged perspective, within it by implication. One thing that 'Swagger Jagger' achieves is an act of reclamation, turning this pop from a music passively consumed by working-class teenage girls into a music made by them. The music mirrors this - the music of 'Swagger Jagger' is not the spacey, druggy swoon favoured by most recent club-pop, a sonic smoothing out of harsh edges, the sound of unity rather than division. Rather, the beats are hard, brash and defiant - as of course, is Lloyd's vocal performance, rapping her verses in a harsh, provocative bark. The Jekyll-and-Hyde switch-up between the verses and the chorus is an ingenuous touch; the abrasive verses seem designed to provoke and goad Lloyd's 'haters' into an outrage, before dropping away into a soft, melodic nursery-rhyme of a chorus, chiding the listener for getting so worked up. The record pre-empts, and thereby wilfully intensifies, its own negative reception. Personally, I think it's fantastic.Source URL: http://modernlovewalksonby.blogspot.com/2011/10/cher-lloyd.html
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