Anthem for Losers
The Sexy Genius Consortium DOES hook up!.

The first time I heard it, I couldn’t believe that those were actually the words.  Then I found out it was by Kelly Clarkson, at which point it became obvious.  Yes, the new single from the porcine popstrix who rolled over and crushed the dreams of Justin Guarini is actually called "I Do Not Hook Up."  That sound you hear is every guy who makes a habit of stumbling into chocolate shops wearing Level-5 beergoggles breathing a collective sigh of relief.

    The song on its own may be juvenile, but is at least logically consistent.  Analyzing it side-by side with its video, however, launches the proceedings into uncharted regions of emotional incoherence.

    The storyboarding is familiar enough territory by video standards: the main character is shown in boring "typical" situations that segue into "sexy parts" representing her fantasy life.  This being a Kelly Clarkson video, "sexy parts" of course means close-ups of her eyes and of her hair being blown around, because all attempts to film a "sexy part" where you can to any extent see her actual body would be hilarious and/or nauseating.  

    According to the lyrics, the speaker is not hooking up because she’s an old-fashioned girl who doesn’t play that way—she’s genuinely not down with it, despite the apparent insistence of any number of guys who are all over her.  But in the video, Clarkson is kinda sorta thinking about maybe making eye contact with a series of guys who aren’t the slightest bit interested, then retreating into her fantasy world where she’s fucking them raw — no wait, she’s rejecting them — no, she’s fucking them — rejecting them — fucking — rejecting…  You know, it’s kind of hard to tell, actually. 

    Granted, someone had their work cut out for them in terms of dovetailing the words and the visuals (the line "put that bottle down," which in the song clearly means "quit drinkin’," is transformed by the video into a commandment to, um…  stop being a waiter?!).  But even so, one’s fantasies should be a bit more direct.  Just examine the initial imagined encounter with the waiter: Kelly Clarkson’s daydream life, apparently, is characterized by her suddenly and violently body-checking men who had theretofore been completely unaware of her and imperiously demanding that they leave her alone.  It’s a rape fantasy minus both the rape and the rapist. 

    Clarkson didn’t write the song, of course.  It was recorded a few years ago—simply as "Hook Up"—by Katy Perry, before someone realized that, sung by someone who is actually sexy, it wouldn’t work.  Still, in Perry’s version, with slightly different lyrics and very different intonation, it was clear that the addressee is a specific guy whom the speaker is trying to help get his life on track, and with whom she has a history; more desperate plea than giggly ultimatum.  In Clarkson’s hands—and plus the significant title change, so as not to keep any prospective frigid record-buyers in suspense about the track’s stance on the given activity—it is a finger-wagging proclamation to all in earshot, and a wholly unnecessary one to boot.  Thankful Baptist Kell-Kell’s normal-girl-normal-body brand greases the tune up to slide down easy as a magic pill helping all the other "normal" gals out there convince themselves that they’re not getting any by choice.  It’s an anthem for losers—an equation by which the team that just got schooled still gets to sing "We Are the Champions" on the long bus ride home.

    Pointing this out hardly constitutes an indictment of feminism, because this song is not feminist.  And neither is it anti-feminist.  Or post-feminist.  Feminism and this song are non-overlapping magisteria.  It is simply loserist, copping a squat in a wholly distinct dialectic.

    The second sequence gives us Kelly hanging in a pub with some much hotter girls who are obviously keeping her around to make themselves look like nice people, and to have someone to pawn off on loser guys who mistakenly think that talking to her for an acceptable period of time will make them look like nice people too.  (The subtitle of this "I Do Not Hook Up" segment is presumably "Sure, Whatever—But Do Your Friends?")  Clarkson is dressed in a frilly pink tablecloth that Wardrobe evidently didn’t realize was surplus from a scene in a Bridget Jones movie where she is supposed to look pathetic, and mooning over an extra from a movie about the ’50s that was made in the ’80s who is shooting pool with a werewolf that used to play bass for the Faces.

    You have to pause the video at 2:43 to get that joke, but it’s worth it.

    It’s not that I don’t like any music about not getting laid.  There is a ton of inarguably great music about not getting laid.  But at least when Morrissey does it, he has the courtesy to admit it’s his own fault, eschew too-neat moralistic lines in the sand, and render the whole business appropriately depressing.  There is a major difference between issuing haunting Schopenhauerean manifestos of existential doom from a phantom zone of immutable loneliness, and smugly doodling "Tha populer girlz R skanx!!!" on the inside flap of a unicorn hologram trapper keeper with one of those pens that has the clicky things on top you can use to make every letter a different color.

    And the fact that all these caveats are predicated on an "If you want me" is just too sad.  So, this is the terms-and-strictures powerpoint I have to sit through and sign off on if I "want" Kelly Clarkson…?!  LET ME SAVE YOU SOME TIME.

    The chorus’s subsequent "I fall deep" line, by the way, sounds for all the world like "I’m fourteen," which would surely have resonated more deeply with the only people who could conceivably like this record unironically.

    The PR sights are set so squarely on the emotionally retarded and sensually arrested here that the video’s comic centerpiece is a falling down in heels joke.  It’s too bad Clarkson’s career didn’t start in middle school—she could’ve made a video where she gets her period and doesn’t know what to do but then has a talk with the school nurse who gives her a big hug.

    And what’s with the extended opening sequence making fun of rich people—do rich people hook up more than everyone else?  Or is this just another creamy-middled ego-stroke for the masses about how everyone who’s better off than you in any way is obviously a terrible person?  Rich, sexy, physically coordinated, it doesn’t matter—it’s all the same thing, and it’s not you, which means it’s not "normal," which means it’s bad.  Except for the waiter, who’s poor and hot at the same time.  But nevertheless deserves to be rejected.  Or fucked.  Or both at the same time.  Or something. 

    Kelly Clarkson is the embodiment of aggressively unremarkable mainstream OMG-cat-calendar femaleness; the musical equivalent of a Sandra Bullock movie from 1998.  The fact that Camille Paglia actually expressed admiration for her in a recent Salon column is the best proof yet that the real Paglia has been abducted and replaced with a batshit dyke clone of Larry King.    

    Even as the lyrics to "I Do Not Hook Up" delineate what Clarkson’s speaker will not do for supposedly moral reasons, the video demonstrates that she actually wants to, but is just a wuss.  And not even solely in sex terms: The first verse reads as a condemnation of drunkenness, but in the video sequence for the second verse, Clarkson fantasizes about getting blitzed.  The hypocrisy extends literally from head to foot: both fantasy sequences feature pointed close-ups of her character’s shoes, both pair of which are formidable fuck-me pumps that any Kelly Clarkson fan would in real life instantaneously condemn with an eye roll and gas face.  The whole affair is a doublethink masterwork of having your cake and eating it too.

    …Which shouldn’t surprise anyone because, clearly, if there’s one thing Kelly Clarkson knows about, it’s eating cake.