Thursday, May 9, 2013

Caught out there with Kelis and Jodi Arias

There's a Kelis song I can't stop listening to called "Caught Out There" about when she catches her man cheating on her with a lady in a red coat who doesn't dress well despite her wealth. The video showcases Kelis' anger, and the narrative is supposedly that she kills him.

She says she took care of him while he was sick and throwing the fuck up (an alcoholic? sexy) and he still cheated on her with a girl who has gaudy-to-no personal style.



The opening scene of the video is her little horrible dude on the operating table with doctors trying to bring him back to life and Kelis behind the glass being awesome.


This song is for all the women out there
That've been lied to by their men
And I know you all've been lied to
Over and over again
This is for y'all
Yo, maybe you didn't break the way you should've broke, yo
But I break


WTF Kelis' man? Seriously? If Kelis' man betrays her at the peak of her career, I think I literally stand 0 chances at finding everlasting love.

It's pretty clear in the song that she either wants to or does shoot her man and his other lady (there's a gunshot sound effect in the last verse leading up to the chorus.) Which is KIND OF an overreaction, AMIRITE Jodi Arias?

But because it's my jam when Kelis screams:

"I HATE YOU SO MUCH RIGHT NOW! I HATE YOU SO MUCH RIGHT NOW! AHHHHHHH! I HATE YOU SO MUCH RIGHT NOW!"

I want to get up and fucking dance.

Also the chorus is just her screaming. Just wanted to reiterate that.

(side note: wikipedia says this yell was sampled and used in a Calvin Klein ad for CK One in 2011 lol)

I want to celebrate her killing him, does a catchy bass line make me want to do that?

Jodi, your live tweeting didn't assemble enough fans, next time produce a jam with The Neptunes.

But in all seriousness, why do I dance and not cringe? Is it because the song's narrative isn't life but merely art reflecting how livid Kelis is? Is it because she was in her neon afro phase where her afro was perfectly neon and perfect?

Is it because we as a society are fascinated with women being angry? Is it because I'm angry? Is it because men have all been shitty variations of Don-cheating-lying-pieces-of-shit-Drapers since monogamy entered our collective consciousness?



My whole Kelis thing right now is timely considering how much Americans are fucking obsessed with this Jodi Arias trial (although the verdict happened so maybe we'll all lay off a bit), the case of a woman who was so mad she needed to see her boyfriend die 30 times 'cause supposedly she was jealous or obsessed or evil or a witch or Amanda Bynes' most avid follower on twitter.



But we can't stop watching it and offering our own theories about it and hiring beautiful actresses to play her in a giant movie on Oxygen about it. She looked better when she was blonde, right? She's not hotter than Casey Anthony so she totally did it, right? That bitch deserves to get locked up, right?

Because of Casey Anthony and Jodi Arias, there are a lot of ideas floating around right now in the media about women and anger.

A lot of them are antiquated but disguised as trash so we don't have time to realize that our feminism is slowly dying along with our brain cells.

Of course what Arias was found guilty of was disgusting and horrible. But historically people have legitimized chauvinism by linking women to irrational feelings, and Jodi is such an easy way to revert back to those outdated misogynistic mental pathways by making them new again.

Sometimes all this equality takes its toll on a media, whose every un-PC move is being outed all the time. It must be nice for them to finally be able to gawk at an unstable broad with a penchant for live tweeting her own court case!

In journalism it's rare and difficult to get a great, quality story so it's easy to join the ratings orgy instead.

As for Kelis, it's all fiction. She'll never talk shit about Nas.