viz.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from YouTube

As everyone reading this blog knows, I love random bits and pieces of pop culture.  Jezebel is one of the websites I visit to indulge this love, and they did not let me down last week.  I’ve been saving this since then, and though I know it may be a bit late to write on this, I couldn’t resist bringing this to everyone’s attention as a kind of alternative archive in its own right.

Marisa Meltzer, in a blog post called “Video Vixens: Spice Boys and Barbie Men,” groups together several YouTube clips that feature young men lip-synching to songs made by women.  Meltzer wrote a book called Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, which claims that bands like the Spice Girls helped popularize the empowering message of riot grrrls for both men and women.  Speaking of clips that include covers of artists like Shakira, Taylor Swift, and Aqua, she writes:

There's something very joyous and celebratory about girlhood in all of these songs. They can express, in a kind of candy-colored way, excitement, heartache, and pride of being a girl. I don't think boys who film themselves lipsynching are making fun of us girls, though. I think this is a way of expressing some kind of homage to us and our music. I'm not sure there's an equivalent for boys—that is, music marketed to boys expressly about the state of being a teen boy, which is perhaps why so many guys are so happy to post themselves singing along.

Watching the clip of the young men lip-synching to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” does make me feel quite a bit of joy:

However, I’m not sure I can totally accept Meltzer’s reading here.  Homage may be a part of the Taylor Swift cover, for example, but this version isn’t acknowledging Lauper’s popular song (and its own memorable video) so much as re-envisioning it.  The shirtless male bodies rolling around in the bed enact a kind of queer performance of which the gay icon Lauper would probably approve.  We as an audience see the singer hump a car and a friend put a whole banana in his mouth to perform a sexuality that the song insists is for “girls,” but which the male performers co-opt for themselves.  The men here look manly, but not manly in the heterosexual way of the Abercrombie-attired boys who lipsync and dance their way through Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.”

The same queer aesthetic seems to be part of the semi-famous lip-synch cover of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA,” which Meltzer did not include in her post:

These men here lay on the beach here in their highly colored bathing trunks to purposefully camp up their performance of the Disney teen’s song.  As they try to surf in their blow-up swimming pool while wearing colorful Ray-Bans, I can’t help but want to take part in their fun.  The fact that they tag it as “Party in the FIP” makes the queer connection explicit (as Fire Island is a notorious gay vacation spot) as well as its intent to be a transformative performance.

The homemade aesthetic that these videos share, whether filmed on Flip cameras or in front of iMacs, incorporates a call for authenticity of a particular kind.  Each of these artists attempts to construct himself for his YouTube audiences by following the common models of other viral videos, but in these works each works to condition that performance through girl’s pop music.  This isn’t to say that this qualifies the kind of masculinity, but draws our attention to the process of its construction in lo-fi and high-fi ways.

I can agree with Meltzer that this is all in good fun, but this seems to be more than just tribute.  There may not be “music marketed to boys expressly about the state of being a teen boy,” but it’s not like popular culture lacks an attention to teen boys (see:  Harry Potter).  These clips instead seem to be doing another kind of cultural work, hopefully one in which we can all join in.