mitchco a go go!

One of my favorite figures of speech is describing something as being like “the love child of ___ and ___.” As in, “Have you seen Pan’s Labyrinth? It’s like the love child of The Pianist and the actual Labyrinth!” Or “Hey! Look at that guy over there! He looks like the love child of David Bowie and Bob Barker!” (How terrifying would that be? Actually, how terrifying was Pan’s Labyrinth?)

What would happen if two songs had a baby?

Freddie Mercury & Morrissey

If songs look anything like their singers, it would look like this:

Mika

After that post about “We Are Golden,”, I started listening to Mika’s 2007 release Life in Cartoon Motion more carefully, and was amazed by the track “Big Girl (You Are Beautiful),” which was a single that went to #5 in Belgium, Estonia, Finland, and Lebanon.* It also charted in other countries, but, uh, not as highly.**

*”Muffin Top”, anyone?
**Okay fine, #9 in the UK.

This is definitely a hot cover for the single, and I’m always excited to see a pop musician take a stab at saying something political. “Big Girl” starts off with the sound of someone slurping on a straw, and the first verse is

Walks into the room
Feels like a big balloon
I said, ‘Hey girls you are beautiful’
Diet coke and a pizza please
Diet coke I’m on my knees
Screaming ‘Big girl you are beautiful’

Oh, Mika. I’m so glad we got this out of the way early. Do you know what big girls do? That’s right! Eat! How else do you think they get so B-I-G? Not to say that it’s ridiculous that they eat, they also just do a fuck of a lot of other things, too. If Mika took all of the time to write a song about how great they are, you would think he might mention some of them. He also rhapsodizes about the Butterfly Lounge, which is a plus-sized club in Orange County (“Get yourself to the Butterfly Lounge, find yourself a big lady!”). Which is kind of neat, especially in a soulless void like Orange County, but why can’t larger women go to… regular clubs? I suspect this says more about the OC than it does anything else.

I must admit that I kind of love this video. Mika prancing around in his “braces” (i.e., suspenders), and lots and lots of actually plus-sized women looking fabulous and shaking their respective groove things. And really, props to Mika for including at least a few people who are plus-sized, or of color, or just generally outside of the cookie cutter in almost all of his videos.  Sadly, the song still has a few other glaring flaws.  There’s a verse where he disparages “skinny girls” and reinforces heteronormativity in one fell swoop:

You take your skinny girls
Feel like I’m gonna die
‘Cause a real woman
Needs a real man here’s why

Aren’t all women beautiful, Mika? (Aren’t all women real, Mika?!) And I thought a woman needed a man like a fish needs an… ambiguously gay male pop star? Though I suppose that those ambiguously gay male pop stars need to tell someone that they’re beautiful, and Mika has at least two great precedents: Freddie Mercury and Morrissey.

If you have any cultural knowledge of the English-speaking world and/or have ever operated a radio, then I bet you know this song:

Freddie Mercury is one of the great gay icons of rock music, so what the fuck is he doing singing about fat-bottomed girls? This song was actually written by Brian May, by all accounts straight as an arrow, but that becomes a moot point when Mercury opens his mouth in those pants. From Queen we learn that “fat bottomed girls make the rocking world go round,” which is actually a pretty sweet compliment. Fat girls rock! That’s something that skinny white guys would be equally pleased to have said about them. I can get behind it.

Though the question remains– why do we need Freddie to tell us this? He also refers to fat bottomed girls as “dirty ladies.” Nothing like getting dirty with a “heap big woman” who “let[s] it all hang out.”

It’s kind of great to have the sexuality of larger women acknowledged in a mostly positive way, especially back in 1978, but positive objectification is still objectification. It’s almost like women of size are some sort of coded stand-in for singing about other men:  “I don’t find women attractive in the same way that normative straight men do! (wink wink).” Mika was undoubtedly watching that video with one eye while he was writing “Big Girl” (we all know how much he loves Freddie Mercury). What he was doing with the other eye was probably watching this single from 1992:

Oh, Morrissey. You come right out and say what we’ve all been thinking.

You’re the one for me, fatty
You’re the one I really, really love
And I will stay
Promise you’ll say
If I’m ever in your way

Look! When she opens the door at 0:20, she’s eating a bag of chips! And she gets a bouquet of flowers for it! And her sweet boyfriend takes her on a picnic and feeds her! That’s what fat girls (excuse me, “fatties,”) really want. Morrissey, as we all know, can be an utter pig, but he’s often an intelligent and incisive one. Why are there all of these songs about fat women? And why is singing them evidently an important job for gay men?

I’m most likely giving him too much credit here, but I think Morrissey’s answer is that the entire premise is so patently ridiculous, he can only address it by mocking it. This isn’t a song about fat girls; it’s a song about you! Oh fatty, I’m a gay man and you’re the one for me. Just let me know if I’m ever in your way. Aside from the chorus, which I quoted above, the only other lyric is “All over Battersea,* some hope and some despair.” Like every other song about fat women sung by gay men, this one has nothing important to say, no substance to report. The ambiguously gay male pop star still needs his fatty more than she’ll ever need him.

*A neighborhood of London where Mozzer used to live. Otherwise irrelevant.

Mika is that strange product of third wave feminism, the gay man who knows that his identity and social position are somehow (however remotely or subtly) tied to that of women, and wants thusly to promote their role, but is unsure how. The facts that he has dedicated live performances of “Big Girl” to Beth Ditto of the Gossip*, and that he seems so earnest to promote “big girls” in his video, lead me to believe that he genuinely wants women of size to feel validated and affirmed by his song.

*At Oxegen 07

I can’t fault him for this, really. He is a popular musician, and the fact that he’s attempting in any way to engage popular culture with a political agenda is something of note. He’s definitely more sincere than either of his predecessors, even if his means of address reinforces negative stereotypes and fails to actually address much of anything. In fifteen years I’m sure another ambiguously gay male pop star will come out with another anthem for/about women of size, and women of size will still need that affirmation as much as, well, you know.

Tags: cat and girl, fat fatty, freddie mercury, mika, morrissey, queen, the woman question, video

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 6:30 am and is filed under music, what are these young homosexuals doing. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.