Heavy is the Head that Wears the Crown on a Famously Slender Neck

Looking at the current Billboard Hot 100 this morning I see there's a new song by Ariana Grande at number one called "hate that i made you love me."

The music video's more interesting than the song. The lyrics are kind of bad. She wishes to part from a former lover but we don't get a sense of the substance of their relationship. The line about how he hates to see "women endure" seems to suggest he's sexist or a misogynist. I would guess she hates to be liked by a particular kind of male fan. The lack of any sense of intimacy in the song makes it seem more like a relationship between a star and fan(s) she's never met. Maybe she doesn't want to be liked by fans who see her as a frail little woman. But, honestly, she looks strikingly frail these days. She'd hardly be the first star with an eating disorder. If she comes to your doughnut shop, don't be precious about money, give her all the doughnuts she wants. Maybe throw in a few extras.

That's Justin Long in the video. Whoever came up with the concept for the video wisely used the vague lyrics as a prompt to create a more tangible story about a man who murdered his girlfriend. Grande's inexpressive performance works as a ghost stalking her killer.

Last night I was letting the YouTube algorithm take me through some music videos. Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" came up, her best song, in my opinion. It's her generation's and succeeding generation's anthem to celebrate being a psychotic succubus. A lot of songs from women about emotionally dominating men, like Billie Eilish's "Bad Guy", Meg Myers' "Lemon Eyes", or Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso", have been popular over the past twenty years. How many songs like that were there before 2010? Grande is an outlier for hating that she makes men love her. Though I don't agree with the current definition of love as obsessive adoration.

I've been reading the current Norton Anthology's selections from Geoffrey Chaucer's famous 14th century work, The Canterbury Tales. It really seems like the whole thing should be included. The Knight's Tale certainly. Anyway, a lot of the introductory texts in Norton have a very clear political perspective. The introduction to The Wife of Bath's Tale says Chaucer "drew upon a centuries old tradition of misogynist writing." The Wife of Bath's famous revelation is that woman's ultimate desire is for dominance. Perhaps the Norton editors would say Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift draw from the same tradition of misogyny but surely that's a highly disputable opinion that doesn't belong in a general introduction. After all, as Tears for Fears told us, everybody wants to rule the world. On the other hand, people are complaining about the strikingly submissive imagery Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo have indulged in. Ultimately, these are games and, outside of academia, most people intuitively understand that this role play isn't meant to impugn the essential humanity of men or women any more than Chaucer was saying that carpenters and reeves were all pathetic cuckolds.