What redeems it: "Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill Song)" is a typical example of its hip-pop genre: semi-rapped lyrics give way to a melodic chorus featuring a female background singer. This song falls into the category of a modern-life-fable, too -- the moral of the story being (as is also typical) that prostitutes live a hard life.
"Sweetest Girl," only the latest in a string of pobrecita-prostitute (aka "po' ho") songs, is remarkable because it's a collaboration. The first verse mentions a few of the artists given credit for singing and writing the song: Wyclef (Jean), Akon, and "Weezy." The Internet credits Lil' Wayne, Niia and Wyclef. Whatever the list and street-name-show-name-real-name combination, it's obvious that a bunch of music celebrities worked on this song.
Think of the other song collaborations you've heard of -- beyond the recent awesome Coldplay-Brian Eno partnership, think of songs where pop singers banded together to sing about some global issue. Usually "Heal the World," "Imagine," "let's end world hunger"-type stuff, right?
"Sweetest Girl" falls into this category. The melody is smooth and driven by (and intended to cultivate) sentimentality. The collaborative artists sing in turn. It's clear both that this goes beyond Jamie Foxx's cameo in "Gold Digger," and that the point of the song is to garner sympathy for a plight.
Here's the extraordinary part: By collaborating on a pobrecita-prostitute song, Wyclef, Akon, Lil' Wayne and co. have proposed that the daily-life woes of prostitutes and their pimps deserve the same sympathy as people starving, or dying in wars.
The first verse pities the prostitute:
She had a good day, bad day, sunny day, rainy day
All she wanna know is (where my money at?)
Closed legs don't get fed, go out there and make my bread
All you wanna know is (where my money at?)
The second verse, hinted at in the change from "she" in the first refrain of the first verse to "you" in the second refrain (so "you" may be the pimp), seems to be on the pimp's side, though, making this more a song of "what's this world coming to?" than pro-prostitute:
Pimpin' got harder 'cause hoes got smarterThe end of the second verse clinches the "we're all in this together" sense that comes from seeing both sides of the equation -- the Djay, "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" side and the pobrecita-prostitute side:
On the strip is something they don't wanna be a part of
Rather be up in the club shakin' for a thug
For triple times the money and spending it like they wanna
They got they mind on they money, money on they mind
See everyday they feel the struggle, but staying on they grind
And ain’t nobody takin’ from us, and that’s the bottom line
An awareness that cops can lock them up ("25 to life's no joke") comes up at the end of the section, and along with the word "us" (who nobody's takin' from), the song is form-fits-content at this point. The singers are collaborating to sing; pimps and prostitutes collaborate to make their money-gathering system work effectively.
We're supposed to be paying attention to the system -- the way, in a "feed the world" song, we'd be asked to pay attention to, if not the systemic issues that create or propagate world hunger, at least the large-scale acts of charity that could alleviate it. This song aspires to look at the system as a whole and sympathize with the people within it, more even than with any individual or role. The chorus is explicit in this, and details what appears to be the problem with the world that creates this system:
Cash rules everything around me
Singin' dollar dollar bill y'all (dollar, dollar bill y'all)
Money -- the desire and ultimate need for money -- is what created this system.
The final verse goes back to prostitute-specific sympathy, with a dig at the church for being ineffective against the system they find themselves a part of:
She used to run track back in high school
Now she tricks off the track right by school
She takes a loss cos she don't wanna see her child lose
So respect her, and pay up for the time used
And then she runs to the pastor
And he tells her there will be a new chapter
But she feels no different after
The song doesn't mention how the prostitute makes her money in this verse -- instead, it uses a passive-voice euphemism ("time used"). I think this is particularly effective, in that it not only draws our attention away from the mechanics of the prostitute's questionable calling, but it deliberately pays her the respect of modesty -- especially remarkable considering her immodest work and the other terms usually used in place of "prostitute," none of which are particularly respectful.
Unlike many "let's get together" songs, "Sweetest Girl" doesn't offer us a solution...in fact, it almost fails to offer us a problem. Because we feel sympathetic toward both prostitutes and their pimps, we have trouble identifying anyone within the system to blame for their situation, and the song is unclear on how the outside-the-system problem of always needing cash can be handled. We're left with a statement of a problem, but not a proposed solution.
Still, the song effectively portrays, in anecdotal though broad-stroke terms, a set of circumstances that leave only victims behind, and it does this regarding an issue that most Americans wouldn't think twice about, morally speaking.
I'll be interested to see what's next for Lil' Akon Jean.
4 stars out of whatever.
3 comments:
This is a pretty good example of the genre, and I agree that the way the 'Sweetest Girl' is respected is much preferable to other approaches. For example, in the song "What Would You Do," by Citi High (or City High?), the singer describes a similar reunion with a girl he used to know:
Saturday night was at this real wild party
They had the liquor overflowin' the cup, about
Five or six strippers tryin' to work for a buck
And I took one girl outside wit' me
Her name was Loni
She went to Junior High wit' me
"Why you up in there dancin' for cash?" he asks her, but she throws the question back in his face, asking:
What would you do
If your son was at home
Crying all alone on the bedroom floor
'Cause he's hungry?
She then, very appropriately reminds the singer that he is a client of hers, even perhaps a victimizer: "for you this is just a good time, but for me this is what I call life."
Initially, the singer seems to absorb neither her question nor the charge leveled against him, offering the rejoinder, "You aint the only one with a baby; that ain't no excuse to be living all crazy." But after Loni answers by looking him "straight in the eye" and declaring, "every day I wake up waiting to die," he seems to be willing to listen to her story. Unfortunately, after she once again posits the question "What would you do?", the singer/stripper patron regrettably attempts an on-the-spot answer that really reverberates - because it's totally hollow:
Then she said, What would you do if?
Get up on my feet
And let go of every excuse
What would you do if...?
'Cause I wouldn't want my baby
To go through what I went through
What would you do if...?
Get up on my feet
Stop makin' tired excuses
What would you do if...?
Girl I know if my mother can do it
Baby you can do it
This, to me, is a very regrettable climax to the song, primarily because it doesn't describe any (non-metaphorical) action that Loni could take to alleviate the difficulties of her situation. Obviously, the singer's invocation of his mother is meant to lend a feminist-flavored weight to his hackneyed answers; however, following the graphic descriptions of the youthful circumstances that preceded Loni's pregancy - obviously, for her, the straw that broke the camel's back - it's no longer a given that if singer's unknown mother could do it, so could Loni. And, in the end, we certainly have no reason to trust that our contradictory narrator (I pay for strippers, but I would never be one) has successfully let go of every excuse in his own life.
So, zero stars for "What Would You Do."
I was actually trying to think of enough of the lyrics to this song to reference it in my original post - so thanks.
I almost put this on my blog as a post of its own (a "guest post") because it's so thorough...but then I realized that you should put it on your own blog, and I can link to it!
So do that! I'll link to it!
("Get down girl, go 'head, get down.")
Oh, very well. Done. If not in the next few minutes, I'll also add you to my blog links soon.
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