Alanis Morissette speaks volumes about sex, power and YouTube with a sly spoof.
People endlessly complain that Hollywood is full of dopey, superficial films bereft of anything new to say. And they’re right. Anyone looking for art that is edgy or relevant — and inspires comment — is turning to Internet video, which has become the true engine driving our pop culture.
Nothing demonstrates this better than the tsunami-like viral success of Morissette’s “My Humps,” which surfaced three weeks ago on YouTube and quickly became the most popular video on the channel, attracting 5.5 million views, easily outdistancing such rivals as “Otters Holding Hands.”
At first glance, it simply looks like another pass-along parody, a takeoff on the original “My Humps” hit by the Black Eyed Peas. But Morissette’s video is armed with a provocative subtext that has people abuzz with debate. It’s a fascinating piece of video art, an inspired combination of satire, social criticism and career reinvention that is a signature artifact of today’s viral Web culture.
Hip-hop booty porn
On one level, “My Humps” is a commentary on dim-bulb pop. The Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps,” though a huge smash, was widely mocked for its vapid, suggestive lyrics. (Sample: “The boys they wanna sex me, they always standing next to me, always dancing next to me, tryin’ a feel my hump, hump.”) The video, featuring Fergie, the group’s lead singer, was, if possible, even tawdrier. Full of non-stop teasing and thrusting, it’s the kind of hip-hop booty porn that would make great torture material for Muslim prisoners at our Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
Looking the part
Dressing herself Fergie-style, with baubles and bling, surrounded by black-clad male dancers, Morissette retained the original’s visual sluttiness but replaced the Peas’ thumping rhythm track with a pensive solo piano. By removing the intoxicating bass line and clearly enunciating the crass lyrics, she gave the song’s sexpot swagger a new tone of sadness and desperation while simultaneously parodying her own artistic tendencies toward self-absorbed angst.
It’s a striking performance, functioning as both social criticism and self-criticism. It also has given an instant shot of street cred to Morissette, whose career had slid downhill after her incandescent debut in 1995 with “Jagged Little Pill.” Stereotyped as an earnest navel gazer — one blogger recently dismissed her as an “emo-feminist” — she suddenly has fans seeing her through fresh eyes.
As Mark Blankenship put it in his ITotallyHearThat blog, “Remember when I was saying Pink didn’t manage to criticize the objectification of female sexuality in ‘Stupid Girls’ without becoming the very thing she supposedly opposed? Well, Alanis found a way. If that kind of wit, intelligence and humility is in her next album, I’m buying it.”
This is what gives YouTube its real power. It is a forum not just for amateur pranks but also for career reinvention. For Morissette, this video — made at her home on digital video for roughly $2,000 — may transform her persona as much as taking a part in “Pulp Fiction” did for John Travolta.
“It absolutely helps her career,” says Bob Lefsetz, whose Lefsetz Letter is one of the leading blogs in the music business. “What’s so cool is that she did this all by herself. There was no capitalization of it — it wasn’t geared to help a new record or movie project. So it gives her credibility. It felt like the old days when Led Zeppelin would come to your town, do a show that blew the roof off and then — they were gone. No one knew how they did it. There was no explanation, no interviews, no nothing.”
It’s the quintessential definition of mystique: less is more.
Living in today’s always-on-duty media culture, it’s almost impossible to remember that there was a time — before TMZ, before MTV, before People magazine — when pop culture had an air of ineffable mystery. Today, everything is overanalyzed, endlessly debated and all-too-glibly explained, which essentially reduces even the most thoughtful art to trivia and effluence. Morissette has followed the model once practiced by Bob Dylan, who in his ’60s heyday refused to explicate anything, bobbing and weaving in interviews, baffling the mainstream media of the day with a fog of evasions, sly jokes and put-ons.
Not looking for attention
Unlike Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and Fergie, who can’t stop blabbing, Morissette has greeted all “My Humps” interview requests with a vow of silence.
According to manager Martin Kirkup, she turned down everyone, including late-night TV chat shows, a Styles reporter from the New York Times who wanted to ask about her fashion choices and someone who wanted to start a music parody Web site. In an era when everyone talks, her silence has been golden.
As Lefsetz put it: “The less she does, the bigger the story is.” By refusing to explain her intent, Morissette invested her clip with an irresistible layer of inscrutability, something that packs extra punch at a time when all too many found objects turn out to be a marketing come-on for a Web site or movie project.
