Number Ones - Black Eyed Peas 'The Time - Dirty Bit'

The ninth installment of a recurring feature where we listen to and analyse the latest number one Australian single so you don't have to.

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Black Eyed Peas
'The Time (Dirty Bit)'
(Universal)

First reaction: No. Just no.


Black Eyed Peas - 'The Time (Dirty Bit)'

Second reaction, once I'd cleaned up the vomit: Imagine you were in a band that had a hit called 'I Gotta Feeling' in which most of the lyrics were “I've gotta feeling that tonight's gonna be a good night”. And let's assume that, being in this band, you had to come up with a new single. A sequel, perhaps. Your fans, you have discovered, really want to think that their night will be a good one...maybe they will also want to think that their night has been a good one, that they have had the time of their life.

“Wait!”, you say (assuming you're Will.I.Am) “There's a song about that already!” And indeed, there is a song about that already, called '(I've Had) The Time Of My Life', sung by those old warhorses Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes on the soundtrack to the 1987 flick Dirty Dancing. Now, if you're Will.I.Am, the existence of a previous song is no impediment; all you have to do is just pull the hook out of it and start a new song! If 'The Time (Dirty Bit)' was a cake, its recipe would go like this:

- Take a chorus of 'I've Had The Time Of My Life'.
- Put a synth line and a synth-pop beat underneath – a song called 'I've Had The Time Of My Life' needs to be fun and upbeat, not a power ballad!
- Repeat with Fergie singing instead!
- Okay, once you're bored of repeating the chorus, add into the mix a new, unmelodic section, vaguely reminiscent of Benny Benassi's 'Satisfaction', which has nothing whatsoever to do with the first bit of the song, and which sounds completely out of place.
- Mix into this section some awful rhymes (e.g., “hot in HURRR” with “temperatURRR”) which have been autotuned for no good reason.
- Repeat!
- Stir!
- Go back to step 1.
- Voila! It's ready! A #1 single!

This is more urinal cake rather than Pavlova; The Black Eyed Peas have made a career out of being tasteless. They're not the only band to make a career out of tastelessness: there is a grand tradition of Australian bands who excel at such a thing: take the Melbourne band named John Butler Fucks Kidz, TISM's EP Australia The Lucky Cunt, or The Twits' song 'Haemorrhoids On My Behind'. But the Black Eyed Peas' tastelessness is of a different vintage. TISM aimed to be tasteless to the mainstream. The Black Eyed Peas aim to be tasteless for the mainstream. Where TISM wanted to horrify the 'moral majority' of people who mostly watch Channel 9 and mostly listen to Delta Goodrem, the Black Eyed Peas want to horrify people who mostly watch ABC2 and mostly listen to Joanna Newsom (me, in other words).

So what does 'musical taste' even mean? To me, music taste is a set of rules about what sounds you like and what sounds you don't. It is an almost instinctual, emotional thing. I mean, if you ask most people what the difference between an A7sus4 chord and a Abmaj9 chord is, they're going to shrug and look lost. However, while most people may not be able to tell the difference consciously, there is an intricate machinery of cognitive wheels behind the scenes which can tell the difference.

And so, based on an implicit knowledge of A7sus4 and Mellotrons and bossa nova rhythms and melody shapes (and so on), you set up a set of rules by which you judge music. You might apply different rules based on what you know about the music or what situation you're in (e.g., you may want to judge mashup king Girl Talk by a different criteria to how you judge skilled harpist Joanna Newsom). But these rules are there, in you. You like some music and not others.

And if you are someone who considers themselves to have good music taste, your barriers, your rules are basically going to forbid you from liking anything that seems too easy, too manipulative or judged to be appealing to the lowest common denominator. Now, to say you have music taste is implicitly comparing it to your food taste, so, well, let's talk about McDonalds. It's cheap, has big dumb tastes – lots of sugar, lots of umami, lots of fat – it's easy to acquire (you just give someone money for it, rather than stirring a pot for 2 hours). A diet of McDonalds is also not very nutritious or good for you in the long run (at least, judging by Supersize Me). And if you know some foodies, they'll most probably pooh-pooh the taste of a Big Mac – they like subtle flavours, they don't mind bitter and sour flavours, they like strong spices and the taste of herbs.

If you feel like you have some music taste, you might be a bit like those foodies. And, for you, The Black Eyed Peas are a lot like McDonalds. Everything they do is calculated to be big and dumb – there's a lot of auditory sugar and fat, there's not much in the way of herbs and spices, and it's all pretty processed and packed with flavour-enhancers. If you have music taste enough to find the Black Eyed Peas offensive, you probably want your music to be fresh and organic, to use natural ingredients, to have reduced fat and sugar, to have interesting ethnic flavours, to be somewhat unique. Or at least, true.

Hear that autotune on the vocals of “The Time (Dirty Bit)”? Musically, it's a flavour-enhancer – if the original vocal isn't interesting enough, the autotune can provide a speck of “oh, that's weird, that's not what voices sound like in real life”. It's a big dumb flavour – the cheesiest of plastic cheese slices - but it works. Hear that 1980s movie soundtrack ballad chorus? It's like the bread roll that's been in a freezer for two years and has been recently reheated – it only tastes OK because it's full of preservatives and sugar. Hear how loud the song is? How it seems like it's up at 11 for the entire song? That's like those extra dollops of fat in the tomato sauce that McDonalds is hoping you don't consciously notice but unconsciously want to gobble.

The thing is, though, that the food taste/music taste analogy here only works to an extent. Listening to the Black Eyed Peas is not literally bad for you in the same way that eating a burger with four patties of meat and a slice of bacon on it might literally be bad for you. Too much Black Eyed Peas is most likely not going to cause you to have a heart attack, or cause you to get diabetes. A Boom Pow burger is not gonna make you pack on the kilos.

What listening to the Black Eyed Peas will do to you is make you look like a bogan. Australia, for all our convict and immigrant origins, is still a pretty class-sensitive place, it's just that we use the word 'bogan' instead of 'working class'. And a lot of Australian comedy - The Castle, We Can Be Heroes, Kath & Kim - explores class, and this stuff resonates because people worry about their inner boganity. Many people want to avoid being a bogan, and not listening to the Black Eyed Peas is one way you can tell yourself, 'Hey, at least I'm not a bogan!'

The Canadian music critic Carl Wilson recently wrote an excellent book, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste, about the 1997 Celine Dion album Let's Talk About Love. Wilson wasn't a fan of Dion, but he was interested in why she is both so loved by her fans and hated by pretty much everyone else. In the end, Wilson pretty convincingly adapts a theory of Pierre Bourdieu's about 'cultural capital' to explain Celine. Bourdieu argues that there are different centers of power in society, and one of them is cultural power - to have cultural capital is to have your tastes matter more than someone else's. In music, the tastes of successful, articulate heterosexual thirty- or forty-something urban white males are often given more credence than those of thirteen year old girls from the suburbs. It's the older set that run the record companies, produce the music, write the reviews and decide whether it gets played on radio. And it does turn out that Celine Dion's fans are surprisingly often middle-aged ethnic widows, women who want their music to be sentimental and schmaltzy because they've already had enough complicated emotions to deal with for one lifetime.

So when it comes to the Black Eyed Peas, all the things that irritate me are exactly the things that attract the more undiscerning music consumer, the ones who don't listen too hard, who just want party music. It's an expensive, time-consuming thing to be a music nerd - if you own 300 CDs that you've bought at $30 a pop, you've made an investment of almost $10k on your music taste. But if you're working class, or just not that obsessed with music, you might not have the money or time to spend on trying out a new band like Deerhunter or Janelle Monae that you may or may not end up liking. The local top 40 station might just be what's on at work. To the extent that you pay attention to music, the stuff that strikes me as tasteless or obvious is just what music sounds like these days to you.

I know this. I know I'm being a cultural imperialist in hating the Black Eyed Peas. But still, I am literally nauseated by this band and their awful music.

Tim Byron