Lily Allen Has The Final Word

By Jugal Mody

Ever since the Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke MTV VMA performance and the immense popularity of Thicke’s “rapist” track Blurred Lines, sexism in the mainstream pop music industry has been talked about incessantly. Blogs have dissected the meaning and subtext of all these songs, there have been internet campaigns, politically correct parodies, celebrities have had public tiffs, and some have stepped out and spoken against the sexism in the industry. While a lot of the aforementioned has been constructive and positive, none of them has seemed to nail it as Lily Allen has with her latest single (released on November 12, 2013) – Hard Out Here (For A Bitch).

The video opens with Allen lying on an operation table, with surgeons working on her while her manager and the surgeons make comments about her body and what needs work, while Allen defensively adds, “Uh… I’ve had two babies.” Something that looks like a standard pop video with girls dancing in a variety of leather outfits plays on a screen in the operation theatre. That is when the music slowly kicks in as Allen delivers her first blow: “I suppose I should tell you what this bitch is thinkin’/You’ll find me in the studio and not in the kitchen.” She follows that with a round of punches to knock slut-shaming unconscious and then rolls into the chorus, which has the line: “Forget your balls and grow a pair of tits.”

The video then moves on to mock a host of pop music video tropes with an omnipresent manager directing Allen and the girls’ moves, including showing them how to twerk and how to eat a banana. The best part: all the moves are executed perfectly with laughter or sardonic smiles instead of the usual orgasm faces that most other videos would have. Meanwhile in the audio, Allen busts open standard oppressive lines said to women all over the world – about looking pretty, finding a man, losing weight and the likes – ending the rant by taking down the “ass in two” line from Blurred Lines and concluding with: “We’ve never had it so good, uh huh, we’re out of the woods and if you can’t detect the sarcasm, we’re misunderstood.”

Then onward, in the part of a pop song where a rap artist usually “breaks it down” or a guitarist has a solo, Allen gives us multiple glitched variations of the word “bitch” while her face oozes nothing but nonchalance. This is when we cut to the frame that grabbed most eyeballs, screengrabs and social media posts: giant letter-shaped balloons spell out “Lilly Allen has a baggy pussy” (like Thicke’s “big dick” balloons) and she dances goofily in front of the balloons in what looks like a raincoat. I’m sure Allen didn’t mean for that, but it reminded me of Sridevi’s raincoat dance in Chaalbaaz.

Other songs that gained popularity as feminist numbers in the past have been Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, Beyonce’s Run The World and MIA’s Bad Girls. They were fun, but Lily Allen’s Hard Out Here delivers her point of view with satire, and a complete lack of political correctness — having us in splits while sending across a message and taking the word “bitch” back from the haters. In fact, Hard Out Here reminds us of the wickedly funny Caitlin Moran who in her book How To Be A Woman says, “Feminism is having a vagina and wanting to be in charge of it.”

For all the critics who missed the satire, here’s Lily Allen’s explanatory tweet:
https://twitter.com/lilyallen/statuses/400641952745807873