As Clarke Gail Baines pointed out in her recent post, there are certainly times when our favorite songs give us reason to pause.
In her case it was Miguel’s “How Many Drinks.” In my case that song has always been Aaron Hall’s “Don’t Be Afraid” (Nasty Man Groove), which includes such questionable narration as this:
“No need to run and no need to hide / All the doors are locked baby and I have you inside / You can yell and you can hit me / It just makes me more horny”
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Yeah, somebody needs to get detectives Stabler and Benson up in here because we might have a predator on the loose. Seriously, I do not want this song following me down a dark alley. But at one time in my past, I remember this being one of my favorite Hall songs. Just goes to show you how contradictory our culture is about the message of the wrongness of sexual assault.
As defined by this anti-rape culture website:
“Rape culture includes jokes, TV, music, advertising, legal jargon, laws, words and imagery, that make violence against women and sexual coercion seem so normal that people believe that rape is inevitable. Rather than viewing the culture of rape as a problem to change, people in a rape culture think about the persistence of rape as ‘just the way things are.’”
Sort of how we indoctrinate women (since birth) on how not to get raped (including erroneous advice, which in some cases can run dangerously counterproductive to the realities of sexual assault) yet neglect to reinforce with the same level of tenacity the concept of “do not rape.” You know, like teaching folks that certain behavior, say like holding a yelling and screaming woman against her will, a la Hall in this song, is likely not an indication that this anonymous woman is looking for a little sexay time. In fact, as the song title suggests, she actually sounds pretty afraid.
We can say that it was just a sign of the times, that folks didn’t know better, however folks have been having this same conversation since Bing Crosby put a little something extra in Doris Day’s cocktail, while trying to convince her to stay the night because, Baby It’s Cold Outside. And that’s a damn holiday song that our grand folks were singing as they toasted egg nog around Christmas trees. Point is, sexual violence against women has long been normalized in society. And it is not just reflective in music. The website Racialious did an excellent job breaking down how we routinely paint problematic behavior in all forms of popular culture as okay, and even laudable or romantic. Basically in the world of popular culture, the accepted idea is that consent is erroneous. And that women, in particular, can always be convinced to say yes. You just have to be persistent and inventive.
For all intents and purposes, “Don’t Be Afraid” was a catchy little rape ditty you could dance to. Matter of fact,
in the video for the song, we see Hall, dressed mostly in a suit, tie and a pinky ring, serenading us with tales of Class A felonies in front of a metropolitan landscape (possibly Manhattan; possibly Rapeville. Who knows?) while four Cross Color-bearing women dance around him, killing it in that late 80s/early 90s, bouncy hip-hop sort of way. The song was very reflective of the New Jack Swing era, which began to merge traditional R&B soul singing with the more grittier Hip Hop sampling and aesthetic. Those elements together made for the perfect cover to hide such ambiguous lyrics like:
“The lights are off and I close the shades, so kiss me baby I say. So one more time for the road baby, I’m rising again. Give me a sedative baby, don’t be afraid…”
So not only are the doors locked, thus trapping this poor girl inside, but the lights are off too, which makes it impossible for our heroine in this story to see from which direction her attacker is coming from. I swear, if I had a rape whistle I would blow it every time this song came on. The crazy thing is that I didn’t notice just how predatory this song is until many years later when it happen to come the radio during one of those “throwback” hours. Suddenly the R Kelly comparisons really started to make sense. To my credit (as well as the credit of all the rest of us who were youngsters at the time), we were teens still learning to establish personal boundaries. However Hall was a grown A$$ man, old enough to know better, which makes him (at least in the song) kind of worthy of admission onto state sex offender list.
Then again maybe he didn’t know better. Maybe he too is a victim of a culture, which long believed that men were supposed to be sexually aggressive, even if it meant crossing over the line to sexual assault. And that is why it is important to point out this things out in pop culture, which remain problematic. Sure it is just a silly song with fake characters, locations and scenarios (we hope) but it is also reflective of a culture, which, despite all of our warnings and cautionary tales to women about not being rape, still has a huge rape problem. And what went down in that song will likely get most accused of a serious crime.
