Pop Culture Confessional is a weekly column where our writers can divulge and indulge in their most deeply embarrassing cultural passion — and then tell you why it actually rocks. Everyone has a few dirty little secrets. Only the truth shall set us free.
As a member of the male population, I do not get regularly invited to do things like “the pretty girl rock.” When I walk in the room, all eyes are not on me. And I certainly wouldn’t call myself a perfect ten. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t singing my heart out to every word of Keri Hilson’s “Pretty Girl Rock” whenever it came on my car radio during winter break.
The song is off her sophomore record, No Boys Allowed (guess I didn’t get the memo), which came out a few days before Christmas. But I’ve been a Keri Hilson fan ever since she was a muse to megaproducer Timbaland a few years back. Her debut album came out only in 2009, but for somebody like me, who recognized her as an extra in Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous” video, it was a long-time coming. As a member of the songwriting collective The Clutch, she had been responsible for some of my favorite guilty pleasure pop songs such as Britney Spears’ “Gimme More.”
So Hilson knows how to write a hook, although I find the verses of “Pretty Girl Rock” to be pretty stupid: the brainless rhymes, the cliché derriére reference and the fact that Hilson thinks it’s a good idea to repeat the first verse twice. But the chorus is a sugar rush worth the wait, even if the song’s best line — “don’t hate me cause I’m beautiful” — comes courtesy of supermodel Kelly LeBrock, not Keri herself. The video, in which Hilson pays tribute to her musical predecessors, has its worthy moments, too, particularly the spot-on T-Boz get-up she dons in a nod to TLC. I even find the Diana Ross outfit, with those alarmingly weird-looking fake eyelashes, to be endearing.
But I have a love-hate relationship with Keri Hilson, and it’s not because she’s beautiful. It’s because she sings about it. I’m no child psychologist, but the song’s overemphasis on the superficial can’t be a good message to send to young girls out there, is it? That all your problems can be solved as long as you look good? That you should be ashamed of any time you’ve felt jealous of someone’s looks? That scores are settled only by a man’s approval? I don’t know if that is the message I want to support.
Perhaps there is a female empowerment component that’s gone completely over my head, but as one of my female friends explained when the song came on, the lyrics are just about looking beautiful, not necessarily feeling beautiful. The sentiment isn’t relatable — it’s exclusive to the pretty girls’ club. But should Keri really be the poster girl for fly and beautiful when she’s barely recognizable on her album cover? Or, at the end of the video, where the “real” Keri Hilson stands in front of black backdrop with dyed hair and presumably layers of makeup caked on? That’s the beauty standard, somebody generously made-up and retouched?
Exactly why I care this much about the video is still a mystery to me. Again, I’m a guy. This isn’t really my battle to fight. But it’s kind of hard not to think about what Hilson’s trying to convey in her music and image with all the breast-grabbing and crotch-thrusting going on in the video for the album’s most recent single, “The Way You Love Me.” There’s also an alternate, uncensored version of the song that swaps the mildly suggestive for the explicit. Hilson hands out F-bombs and P-bombs like candy on Halloween. I know it’s not the first time a pop or R&B singer has been sexually provocative, but I couldn’t help thinking it seemed a little desperate to get noticed. It worked, though: She sold 102,000 copies of her album in the first week, and it’d be silly to not take some of the attention “The Way You Love Me” brought into account.
So that’s why I sometimes feel a tiny bit guilty when I listen to Keri Hilson. I want to support the artist who gave me songs like “Knock You Down” and “Alienated,” not the recording industry forces that make a singer’s looks or appearance matter. But I also get that taking creative risks is how artists get attention. I remember how annoyed I was that Beyoncé wouldn’t even swear in the uncensored version of “Telephone.” I wondered at the time why she couldn’t have lived on the wild side. Perhaps now Keri Hilson is some sort of be-careful-what-you-wish-for pop karma?
While the jury decides, I will be in the corner shamefully attempting to figure out how to do the pretty girl rock.