Her short Salon piece analyzed some of the tweets from fans of the Postal Service following the admittedly bizarre choice of choosing Big Freedia to open for one of their shows. People were apparently put off by the twerking. I don't really know how to explain twerking in writing except to say that it is a gyration of the buttocks in a particular way and that it is performed quite often by strippers, or at least I have a hazy recollection of strippers doing it when I used to frequent strip clubs. (Actually I never frequented strip clubs. They were too expensive. But I did visit them on occasion, and I definitely saw some twerking.) Postal Service fans were offended, and several of them complained.
Big Freedia's recent act wasn't all twerking, but rather in the "Bounce" style. It is a purely performance based rap style. Ryder explains it thus:
For the uninitiated, bounce is New Orleans-flavored rap, around since the early 1990s. It’s based on samples — often from a 1986 recording called “Drag Rap” or 1991’s “Where Dey At,” the song that solidified bounce as a distinctive local style — high-tempo beats; repetitive lyrics, chants, and call and response. It’s also all about dancing, and a performer like Big Freedia is usually accompanied by seriously skilled movers, working below the waist in ways many can only aspire to in dreams. Raps are heavily inflected with dance directions like “shake,” “twerk,” “pop,” “wobble” and “bounce.” Dancers — men and women — get real low, real bent over, and lyrics can be super-sexual. One of Freedia’s hits is called “Azz Everywhere” and that’s where you’re moving from when you bounce to it.
Postal Service fans were not amused. The pairing of The Postal Service's angsty suburban love songs with twerking Big Freedia might be odd (I admit to never having seen or heard Big Freedia), but so what? I've seen some pretty weird opening acts in my day. Who hasn't? So it should not shock anyone that a segment of the fans found it weird, off-putting, tongue-in-cheek, or *gasp* offensive.
But Ryder is not having any of it. She points out that no one has reacted this vehemently to Miley Cyrus's recent twerking. Actually, Miley Cyrus is a great stooge for Ryder because she illustrates the age-old theme of white appropriation of black art. Miley's most recent album was written to "sound black," claims Ryder. I cannot verify or dispute this because I have not heard it. I did watch one of Cyrus's videos with the sound off, and she was indeed twerking. It was a pathetic attempt (Ryder notes this). But that is not the point. Cyrus's venture into aural and visual blackface should surprise no one. White musicians have been doing this for decades.
Second, she's not letting the Postal Service fans off the hook. She found their tweets "strangely aggressive." Behind it, she suggests, lies something sinister:
Within the context of the white twerk trend, the Postal Service fan reaction seems disturbing: We’d like our booty shaking, but when we ask for it, and also when we do it ourselves. An uninvited performance by a raw, aggressive MC like Big Freedia, on white music-goers’ home turf, and not on their own terms, was received as a whole different game: a confrontation.Ryder's analysis then turns to the differences between Miley Cyrus's genre tourism and Big Freedia's transgressive style, essentially concluding that the negative reaction by Postal Service fans indicates just how much people don't want to be pushed past their safe little boundaries.
Well, okay. But this analysis is fatuous. First of all, its evidentiary base is severely flawed. Twitter lends itself to abbreviated and facile commentary. Given that the youth use this technology with reflexive ease, it is not surprising to find troll-like responses. To anything. I stopped being shocked by this a long time ago, and eventually have gotten over my dismay. Everyone has opinions and always has. Social media has suddenly given us a window into their quotidian expression. Not surprisingly, some of them are quite inappropriate. This cannot be the basis for a one-off analysis of cultural trends. It could describe any group of people in any era. There is no sense of historical change or representative sample. There is no there, there.
Nor can one necessarily conclude that fans who posted negative comments about twerking were inadvertently pulling back their mental curtains to reveal inner racists. Or, as I believe I understand Ryder, that they are trapped in a racist discourse that forces them to see the "other" (Big Freedia) as ugly, awful, or worse. If Big Freedia's style is deliberately transgressive, then part of her performance art should be eliciting shock from the squares. That becomes the basis for a dialectical conversation about aesthetics, gender, sex, and race. One of the reasons that Miley Cyrus will not start these conversations is apparent in the video I watched (with the sound off). Miley is not doing anything differently from any of the exploited female entertainers of the last few decades. She shows off her gym-sculpted body, makes suggestive motions, and invites young boys to fantasize about what it would be like to be in a grainy black-and-white video with her. Parents and social conservatives may grumble, but that has been a common refrain since Madonna. The rest of us (including the squares who aren't that square) chuckle.
The end result is that we treat performers like Miley Cyrus and Big Freedia differently. Cyrus is a product of corporate marketing and self-promotion. She has never been asked to be taken seriously (at least not to my knowledge), and she has not earned any right to be taken seriously. When she twerks, we all laugh. Big Freedia speaks to fans of Bounce, which is not mainstream. To put Bounce where it doesn't fit is to encourage a spectrum of reactions from bemusement to stimulation to horror and from acceptance to indifference to repugnance. One cannot then self-select the disgusted reactions and claim that the thin curtain of social equality has been peeled back to reveal the dark, racist core of American identity. Rather, Big Freedia has done exactly what she set out to do.
But there is still another reason why Ryder's kind of cultural analysis misses the mark. She compares Bounce to polyphonic New Orleans jazz of the early twentieth century. Both broached issues like sex and race, she points out. And white audiences recoiled from both. And so this brings us to a rough kind of equivalency, or at least a historical trajectory. Jazz leads to Bounce. Ryder is able to achieve this because her cultural analysis--postmodern at least on its surface, focusing on social discursive techniques which marginalize mythic, frightening "others"--lacks any appreciation of aesthetics whatsoever. In fact there is no real aesthetic for Ryder. Bounce, a repetitive pastiche of samples and commands to dancers, is essentially the same as five technically-fluent musicians working from charts and spontaneously improvising music. There is no question for Ryder of the difference implicit in musical skill or creativity across genres. Anything creative is inherently equal to something else creative. Artists are judged not by their substance but by their proximity to the marginalized. I find this a pernicious form of cultural criticism. And not to mention aesthetically bankrupt.
At which point doubtless many are wondering what this has to do with Constitutional Studies. Well, social equality and racism are two fundamental subjects of study in constitutional history. And so too is postmodern theory, with which I have become quite familiar through examination of critical legal studies. There are at least six other reasons I could cite. And, well, these ten(uous) reasons ... connect twerking and the Constitution. (Due apologies to the profession.)
