RAMBLE ON -- New feature

So here’s a thing I’m trying out – every month I’m just gonna jot down some thoughts I have about whatever song catches my fancy. If I prove to myself that I can do it consistently, I’m gonna turn it into a new Patreon tier, probably at the $4 level. In the meantime you get it for free! Also my prose has gotten rusty and I want to get back in the habit. This is just gonna be a start so if it’s a little shaky, bear with me. Here are my thoughts about Ashley O’s “On a Roll”

 https://www.youtube.com/embed/BTsW30Ur0sg 

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ASHLEY O - ON A ROLL  

“On a Roll” by Ashley O, I feel, was not intended to have fans.

Ashley O is a fictional pop star played by Miley Cyrus in “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” an episode of the sci-fi TV anthology Black Mirror; “On a Roll” is Ashley O’s signature song, or at least the only song we hear much of in the episode. Other critics have read the episode as anti-pop music (including a friend of mine at io9), but I’m not sure it is. The episode has plenty to say about the machinery of pop stardom and what it does to its performers, but not so much the music itself. We don’t exactly get the sense that Rachel, the obsessed fan in the episode, is wrong for liking Ashley O and her music; she doesn’t grow out of liking pop music or anything. When Ashley O breaks free of her image and starts making dark goth-metal, we see Rachel at one of her shows but at best she looks mildly uncomfortable. I think she’s only there to be supportive of Ashley; I don’t really get the sense that she’s repented from teen pop or that it was bad for her mental state. (I don’t get a sense of much at all from that episode because the writing is half-baked and unsatisfying, a problem it shares with about half of Black Mirror’s entire run.) 

But if you want to make the case that the episode genuinely dislikes Ashley O’s music, the best case is the song itself because the lyrics are just terrible. “On a Roll”’s big clever move is being a rewrite of Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole,” with the beat given a Gaga-ish makeover (I say Gaga-ish because it doesn’t sound much like anything Miley ever made) and the lyrics altered to sound vaguely like a sexy female-empowerment-for-the-male-gaze kind of pop song. But only vaguely, because clearly not much care was put into it. Charlie Brooker (Black Mirror’s showrunner, and this song’s lyricist) hasn’t bothered to decide whether this is a sex song or a dancing song or an empowerment anthem or what, the lyrics are jammed awkwardly into the original’s meter and every other line is a clunker. “I’m stoked on AM-bition and verve” proves that Brooker was not up to the task of finding a rhyme for “deserve”: “achieving my goals!” is so bluntly on-the-nose it may as well be a punch in the face; and the title line of the original, “Head like a hole,” is given the laziest rewrite of all. (“Hey-ey-oh-ho”? Is that really the best you could come up with, Charlie?)

This doesn’t mean the song is intentionally bad; maybe Brooker just needed something that sounded like a hit song if you heard it for five seconds in the background of a TV show. But it’s certainly not written the same way you’d write a real hit song that you wanted people to listen to because they enjoyed it. 

So naturally, it became pretty popular anyway. Not a mega-smash or anything, it wasn’t a hit. But it at least earned some kind of fandom, I heard much more talk about it than “Mother’s Daughter,” Miley’s actual release closest to the airdate of the episode; the two songs have close to the same amount of streams on Spotify. A good chunk of those streams were from me; I couldn’t get the damn song out of my head some months after I saw the episode. Even with the awful lyrics, it’s kind of perfect; Brooker’s best insight is that “Head Like a Hole” was always a fantastic, catchy-as-hell pop song, and he got a legitimate production team (The Invisible Men, the same team that brought you Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy”) to bring it to life. 

Which makes me wonder: Would this have been a hit as just a regular single, with no connection to Black Mirror? Miley has, in fact, performed it live, and it went over pretty well. And like I said, it has picked up its share of fans. I saw the same phenomenon happen last year for “Why Did You Do That,” the fake pop song Lady Gaga performs in A Star Is Born.  (There’s even a mashup of the two songs on YouTube.) Like with Black Mirror, I’m not entirely sure that A Star Is Born is anti-pop, but we’re definitely meant to sympathize at least a little with Bradley Cooper’s character when he winces at the lyrics. But again, the beat kind of rules/slaps/bops/etc., so people forgave the inane lyrics and repetitive chorus. 

Or are they forgiving it? Is the quote-unquote “badness” the point? Yes, I know that stupid lyrics have never stopped pop songs from gaining an audience, I lived through the Black-Eyed Peas era just like everyone, but these aren’t radio singles meant to be passively absorbed by the undiscerning listener. You have to seek these out, maybe even watch Black Mirror, to engage with them, and even if you don’t watch that show you probably at least know of it. Pop songs are never just songs, our knowledge of its context shapes how we listen to it – the fact that all the songs from Robin Thicke’s Paula were from an album called Paula definitely changed how I heard them. So I wonder: Are people listening to these “bad” songs ironically? Is there something transgressive about elevating intentional garbage to the level of good music? I mean, surely there’s some kind of trolling going on in turning the work of Trent Reznor into happy plastic crap, something that everyone’s aware of that lends it a level of irony that you don’t necessarily get from just the text. 

Or maybe it’s not that deep. Gaga’s early singles were “bad” also, after all –  I wanna take a ride on your disco stick, etc – and people were fine with that. Is everyone just enjoying the catchy beat in both cases and not thinking about it very hard? 

Honestly, no, I don’t think so, I think these are different things. “Why Did You Do That?” is not quote-unquote “bad” in the same way as “Lovegame.” They both raise the question of how much it is “ironic,” but the “badness” of that disco-stick line is meant to violently punch through your mental filters and force you to pay attention; there’s nothing that grabbing about “Why Did You Do That?”, there’s just a stupid jarring reference to a guy’s ass and an obnoxious repetitive chorus. Gaga has played coy on whether that song is meant to be crappy, but if it is you surely can’t tell from her delivery, which is sung with gusto and played entirely straight, without any of the winking archness that Gaga brought to her first singles. The irony all comes from the metatext, that is, the plot of the movie it’s from. Without that, I don’t think it’d have any fans; people enjoy it because it was supposed to be bad and there’s a thrill in liking something you’re not “supposed” to. (I think the relief of ironic distance might work for the performers, too: Miley performed “On a Roll” at Glastonbury in Ashley O’s pink wig, whereas she hasn’t worn her more famous blonde wig on stage in many years. It surely must feel less fraught to play the solidly fictional Ashley O than the confusingly semi-fictional Hannah Montana.)

Okay, so here’s a funny story. During the TRL craze of the late ‘90s/early ‘00s, I would’ve sworn to you that I hated all that teenybopper shit and it all sucked ass. You know what made me finally see its appeal? It wasn’t anything ‘N Sync or BSB sang; it was “Backdoor Lover,” the fake song that fake boyband DuJour sings at the beginning of the Josie and the Pussycats movie. This definitely was not meant to be good; it’s a lazy buttsex joke from a satire that was nowhere near as smart as it thought it was, but the beat, the screaming fans singing along, I finally understood the appeal of the boybands. It must have been the layer of irony (because the song itself is hardly impressive in hindsight); going from hating to liking the Backstreet Boys forces you to alter your self-perception and as a stupid teenager in the ‘90s I wasn’t ready for that baggage. But this wasn’t a “real” band, so I could just enjoy for its style and not have to worry about what it meant. Meanwhile, I don’t have any similar baggage about Migos but Donald Glover’s parody of them on SNL helped me understand the appeal a lot more than I did. I don’t know, there’s something freeing in not having to worry about whether you’re supposed to like it; sometimes these things are easier to appreciate from a distance.