You can only listen to so much Top 40 radio before country music starts sounding pretty good. Don’t get me wrong, I hate both genres, but when you hear Hinder’s “Lips of an Angel” for months on end, or that Ludacris song about “Go Bots and robots”, Taylor Swift’s “Our Song” is bound to sound like Mozart.
This is actually my long-winded exposition for how I found myself on my couch on a fine Saturday afternoon, listening freely and of my own will to Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats”, a song about a woman detailing her destruction of her cheating boyfriend’s car.
“I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped up 4 wheel drive,
carved my name into his leather seats…
I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights,
slashed a hole in all 4 tires…
Maybe next time he’ll think before he cheats.”
The song has a good ear for melody, and Underwood’s voice is well fitted for such angry lyrics. It’s like “You Oughta Know” meets the imagery from Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video, except I don’t think she transforms into a black panther at the end. And, while it was no surprise to me to find out that Underwood didn’t actually write the song (songwriters did), it did surprise me to read that the song was originally written as “Before She Cheats”, with reversed gender roles so that it was a man destroying his unfaithful girlfriend’s car. While the car destruction imagery was not changed, “Before She Cheats” was never recorded, as it was deemed to disturbing.
Now, I’m as guilty as the next person when it comes to this, because my instinct tells me that a song about a guy destroying his girlfriend’s car is a lot more disturbing than the same song with the gender reversed, even if the circumstances leading up to the destruction are exactly the same. Why is this? Women are statistically as likely to cheat as men are, so it doesn’t really make the song any more or less believable, and if anything given popular culture’s image of men and their cars, the image of a woman destroying her boyfriend’s car seems extra malicious.
Of course, doing damage to a car is simply a surrogate for doing damage to the owner, so “Before She Cheats” carries connotations of domestic abuse, but in reality, a song about an abusive wife isn’t really any more comforting than a song about an abusive husband, even if abusive men are more prevalent. But would “She Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)” really be more marketable than “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)”? The answer is “probably”, but it’s a sad answer because this proves to be one of those weird places where feminism and anti-feminism come uncomfortably close.
On the one hand, any song about a man taking his angry at a woman out on her car is not going to sit well with a post-feminism audience, because that sort of behavior hits us as unacceptable. But what does it say about our culture that simply reversing the gender roles makes the song enjoyable? My fear is that it shows a society that expects a certain degree of civility from men, while continuing to think of women as irrational creatures, prone to fits and passions. After all, you can’t be truly hysterical without a hystera (or uterus, for those of you who don’t speak Greek). The right of a woman to destroy her cheating boyfriend’s car is not the type of right you’ll see feminists marching for, because it perpetuates the myth that women are too driven by hormones to control their actions.
So the difference between “Before He Cheats” and “Before She Cheats” might end up being the difference between the soft misogyny of low expectations and open misogyny. Or maybe it’s just a song about destroying a car. Country does suck like that.
2 Comments
January 14, 2008 at 6:40 am
“Two-Seater” by Bowling For Soup is about the only song I know where a guy vandalizes his ex-girlfriend’s car. It manages to stay away from creepy, I think, because it’s so upbeat and apologetic. And perhaps because it’s “revenge” as opposed to “teaching her a lesson,” as it would be in the Carrie Underwood song.
January 16, 2008 at 4:13 am
There are quite a few songs written about the cuckold boyfriend that I neglected to include in this post. The two best known would be “Gimme Three Steps” by Lynyrd Skynyrd and “Come a Little Bit Closer” by Jay and the Americans. They’re essentially the same song; a guy meets a girl in a bar, they hit it off and are having a great time when the girl’s cheated boyfriend arrives. The key difference between these songs and “Before He Cheats” is that the cheated party’s rage is exclusively directed at the other man. “Judy’s Turn to Cry” takes a more subtle angle on this same theme, complete with the man-on-man violence. These songs are all about revenge, like you pointed out; the “teaching her a lesson” theme evident in “Before S/He Cheats” would bring in an even creepier, patriarchal, “that’ll learn her” feel to the song if the target were a woman.