Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa’s “Young, Wild, and Free”
celebrates the hedonism of youth. Its pace is so mellow—which corresponds to
its stoner ethos—that you can’t quite call it an anthem. Nonetheless it
contains a distinctly anthemic quality: this is a song that will be sung out
loud by buzzed young people and embarrassingly drunk older people at parties
for some time, I imagine. But even as it celebrates irresponsible celebrating,
the song is weighed down by a sad undercurrent that it can’t quite smoke away.
Inconsistency in popular music, as in any art, is not a
problem. We live in a contradictory world so we should expect our
representational forms, if they are going to be faithful to life, to embody its
contradictoriness. Art is not identical with politics or philosophy. We should
not expect ideological purity or logical consistency from it. Indeed, what
makes art so compelling sometimes are its contradictions.
Take Black Sabbath’s “Lord of this World,” for example. The
song is supposed to make you repent
your evil ways and rethink your relationship to God. “Your world was made for
you by someone above/But you choose evil ways instead of love,” the song warns
us. But of course the song has the exact opposite effect. Its menacing and abstract
heaviness and Ozzy’s almost demonic voice make most listeners want to embrace
the darkness that the song ostensibly rejects. The song, like Black Sabbath as
a whole, aestheticizes darkness, makes it desirable in its sinister beauty.
Thus rather than turning its listeners more godly, “Lord of this World” has instead
created legions of Satanists.
There are similar contradictions in “Young, Wild, and Free.”
The song’s philosophy as a whole is contained in its chorus: “So what we get
drunk/So what we smoke weed/We’re just having fun/We don’t care who sees.” Snoop
Dogg and Wiz Khalifa then take turns delivering verses that deal mostly with
different manner of getting high and enjoying being high. The song revels in
the spontaneity and liberty of youth. Youthful dissipation is transformed by it
into the only product of a good life. But everything is not so simple. First of
all, Snoop Dogg is older than I am. So his take on youth is delivered in the key
of nostalgia. “It’s like I’m 17 again,” he raps. But as William S. Burroughs
once observed, “in order to feel something, you have to be there. You have to be
18.” Snoop Dogg might be wild and free, who knows, but he is certainly not
young so there is something insincere about his lauding of youth. And as for
Wiz Khalifa, he sings repeatedly in quieter voice near the end of the song
“When you live like this you’re supposed to party.” So instead of the
affirmation of freedom, partying becomes at the song’s conclusion a necessary convention.
That is, he parties not because he wants to party but because he is supposed to party. So this joyful song
about spontaneous youthful excess is also about old men missing their youth and
about young men who feel obligated to party. Enjoy!
Interesting, but it seems like you may have simplified this somewhat. First of all, asserting that Snoop Dogg is older than you doesn't really say anything, does it? Snoop doesn't strike me as someone who revels in nostalgia. Also, your reference to Burroughs is telling since he spent most of his life in a drugged out alternate plane of existence. Indeed, drug use and the nightmare world it sometimes creates became an aesthetic for Burroughs, a way of subverting Puritan morality. I think that Snoop's proclamation that he and Khalifa are the new Cheech and Chong might be telling and I think complicates your reading. Perhaps the song is self-conscious about the hedonism it promotes?
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