“There are no letters in the mailbox/And there are no grapes upon the vine/And there are no chocolates in the boxes anymore/And there are no diamonds in the mine.” These lyrics sound portentous
and meaningful—loss, emptiness, and so forth—but they also sound completely
banal—get another box of chocolate! This is the problem with popular music. It’s
sometimes difficult to know how seriously to take it. Entertainment, art, garbage,
fantasy, and the ordering of reality, popular music can be all these things at
once.
Rae Sremmurd’s “Throw Sum Mo” is
difficult for these reasons. On one level, it is a fantasy about money and
power given a sexual language. Buying women, emasculating men through money, and
the complete indifference to prodigal spending, these things may have some
level of reality in the lives of entertainers, but they don’t reflect the
realities with which most of us are familiar. So the song serves as wish
fulfillment for its audience, pure fancy. But on another level, the fantasy is
premised on a misogynistic desire: to control the world through money means
also being able to control women, who must dance to the tune of your wealth: “Rainin’
on your body/Won’t you do what I say/Start rubbin’ on your body.” Money is the
way to get women to do what you want them to do. The wealth may be a fantasy
but the sentiment to want women compliant to men’s wishes is very real.
Nicki Minaj’s chorus complicates
that vision. In her voice, the money is not what purchases the women. Instead,
it is the fulfillment of their imperative. In other words, women don’t dance
because men throw money. Men throw money because women dance. The petulance in her voice, the way it
demands with indifference, captures the agency that she places in the dancing
woman. Sure, the situation develops from a misogynistic desire, but women use
that desire to empower themselves. That men objectify women is not news to
Minaj: “Ass fat, yeah I know.” But she turns this reality into something that
women can use for their benefit. Her chorus repeats over and over her command, “throw
some mo’.”
The competing understandings of
what’s happening in “Throw Sum Mo” bring to mind the tableaux vivants scene in Wharton’s The House of Mirth. About halfway through the novel, Lily Bart, the
protagonist, arranges herself to be shown as a painting that reveals her in
what she imagines to be her best light. She is the last of tableaux vivants (a
form of entertainment in which people dressed up as famous paintings), and the
effect of her image on the audience is startling. The audience sees Lily just
as she wants them to: all their eyes are focused on her beauty and her body.
They are mesmerized by her form. Afterwards, she considers this moment her
greatest triumph. And indeed that is the moment when everyone in her society
has to admit what an extraordinary beauty she actually is. Yet her triumph is in
exactly the terms her society has determined for her. Lily Bart is always thought
about in terms of her beauty. She is the object of many men’s desires because
she is beautiful and for no other reason, really. Thus she succeeds by
objectifying herself but that objectification was all that was ever allowed
her. The moment is her greatest triumph and it marks her absolute submission to
limits placed on women by her society. Lily has made the men “through some mo’”
but only by becoming the dancer.
