Frisky - Tinie Tempah ft Labrinth

CONTRIBUTED BY SOPHIE BRYCE

Okay, let me get the small rant out of the way. Am I the only one that read 'Tinie' as tin-e. Like tin, with a 'e' on the end? I won't even go into how he's spelt 'temper', you're smart people, I'm sure you've noticed the (intentional) error. So his name is, Tiny Temper. Does this mean he's really laid back? Laid back about spelling? Possibly? His friend 'Labrinth' is also a fan of this whole laid back spelling approach.

You can check out the song here >> Tinie Tempah - Frisky (Ft. Labrinth) YouTube won't let me embed it :(

Frisky is Tinie Tempah's second single, it has pretty much the same beat as his début 'Pass Out', and has achieved just as much airplay (yet charted higher, which when you’ve read this will shock you to your core a little). It's quite catchy, mainly because of the 'ooh la la la laa' bit, the lyrics are rather ridiculous though, especially 'she likes to talk a lot that's why I call her Trisha' (possibly a reference to Trisha Goddard? Still, what an odd lyric).

I'm quite a believer of the 'you will like a song if you're forced to listen to it enough times' idea. I'm sat here with it on repeat, so we'll see...(Edit: Not happening, 3 times and my brain was rotting away.)

The song opens with Tinie explaining how his feelings for something (presumably a woman, although with the intense feelings he has, I wouldn’t put it past him for that something to be ‘anything’) are insatiable and purely physical. He politely explains that he doesn’t want anything too committed and just fancies a bit of rough ‘n’ tumble in many places around the house. It will take a special kind of woman to satisfy Mr. Tempah’s needs, obviously.

Tempah finds this woman and she is most definitely a ‘winner’. She’s clearly many things that chivalrous Mr. Tempah finds simply spine-tingling. Conditioned hair, a manicure, she talks lots and of course, she looks like a bit of sinner, which is just a nicer way of saying ‘she’s probably up for it’. It's hard to gather whether this song is about a one night stand or Tempah just having sex with a girl that likes him, but he doesn’t really care about that. Although, judging by these lyrics, he doesn't sound too pleasant about whatever it is he feels.

“Girl you better keep your distance I just wanna have eh eh,

I'm on a mission I don't even wanna kiss her,

Honey I won't even miss ya when I'm done with ya”

We all know that ‘eh eh’ is sex, but this song has to be played everywhere, so obviously the lyrics have been edited so they don’t sound at all explicit *rolls eyes*. In the video the two men have a nice laugh after saying ‘I won’t even miss ya when I’m done with ya’, lovely chaps. The fact that he doesn’t want to kiss her shows that he really just wants sex, kissing can often conjure a sense of intimacy that involves feelings, something that Tempah isn’t really looking for (something we've kind of gathered by now.) He has no feelings towards the woman he’s pursuing he wants to ‘pick her up, and put her down’, although he does think she’d be good on television, which is nice of him to notice.

Throughout the whole song he doesn’t care about the woman’s feelings. Hear me out, I’m not trying to say he should really like this woman and that’s why he wants to get with her, we’re all aware that you can think someone is hot and really want to get with them (without any emotion involved), but to write a song about how much you don’t care about their feelings and will almost definitely satisfy your burning sexual need with that particular ‘sinner’ is a bit far really. It just makes Tempah look like an inconsiderate arse. Although, he’s had two Top 10 hits, so it’s probably not that hard for him to get laid anyway.

This song is a prime example of songs that fit in the ‘I don’t want to be in the car with my parents when this comes on’ category. ‘Frisky’ can go and join Rihanna’s ‘Rude Boy’ and Britney’s ‘Slave 4 U’ (Although Slave 4 U pales in comparison to ‘come here rude boy, boy can you get it up?’). As the country that produced Blur, Oasis, The Cure, The Smiths (and tons of other brilliant bands), you’d think we’d have better taste in music.

This song got to Number 2 in The Official Charts and features the line ‘Would you risk it for a chocolate biscuit?” Really though? Really?

Beyonce's Why Don't You Love Me : A Critique on the 'Independent' Woman?

Artists like Beyonce can feel so heavily embedded into popular culture that it feels like their work couldn't possibly be a thought-out critique. However, I reckon we should give it a chance. Let's take a look at her video for her latest single, Why Don't You Love Me, in relation to Destiny's Child's Independent Woman.



An Independent Woman's checklist
Own career? Check!
Fabulous wardrobe? Check!
Nice pad? Check!
Buzzing social life? Check!

A man who loves and needs you? erm.... not quite?!


So Beyonce's most recent song is quite a belter, full of emotion and the anger I suspect lots women have identified with. It's about doing all she can to 'make' herself 'so damn easy to love', yet feeling frustrated that these efforts seem to have no effect on her partner. So, how does she go about making herself easy to love? She asks the listener to 'check her credentials': 'beauty', 'class','style' and 'ass'. Today, realistically, these assets can be bought, and she implies this, using the word 'make', to indicate the construction involved in this version of have-it-all femininity. This, remember, is the femininity she sang about so ardently in Independent Woman eleven years ago, a song which became iconic, almost as a manifesto for my generation.

In these eleven years, I think, as a society, we're starting to see the holes in this manifesto, mainly because most of the Independent Woman identity that Destiny's Child helped construct comes through 'these diamonds that I bought', 'the shoes I'm rockin' and 'the clothes I'm wearing'. In the telephone scene for the video for Why Don't You Love Me, Beyonce wears a huge ring on every finger, OTT underwear and shoes, face overtly covered in makeup and hair stiff with hairspray. She's literally caked in consumption, almost a caricature of the personas she's adopted in previous videos. The character she plays is the probably most angry and frustrated we've ever seen of her video personas.

So the video and song both point out that the problem comes when we've got our own disposable income, we've ticked all the boxes, yet this STILL doesn't equate to fulfillment. The advertising and PR industries have thrived off the old 'you buy this and you'll be more attractive to others' concept for almost a century. Once it became common for women to have a disposable income, they became a key demographic to target, and hence this feeling that buying stuff, treatments and gym memberships etc, will make us more attractive, and more easy to love.

Cracking down deeper into what the song's getting at, it becomes apparent that the desire to buy this stuff with our new and exciting disposable incomes is all a bit flawed really. See Girard's Cycle of Mimetic Desire theory for more info... where he explains how desire comes from external forces, and that advertising exploits this. We're tricked into thinking buying stuff will make us more lovable. The anger in the song is the anger that comes when we don't get the emotional fulfillment that years of advertising, pr and media have promised us at a deep, and often subconscious level.

What we're left with is the anguish that many women have felt when efforts to reach a mythical level of perfection don't amount to real happiness we were promised.