BIG POP GIRLS 2024

Mushroom

Mushroom

He / Him / His
I keep a safe distance from musical theatre (no, I’m not making this my entire personality, it’s just not my thing!) and quite frankly wouldn’t have gone near Wicked in some alternate timeline where anybody but Ariana was attached to the project. But fuck if ‘Popular’ didn’t have me living out some wretched Kurt Hummel fantasy for about three weeks when I left that theatre.

Songs like that are stories that Mushroom can i-den-ti-fy with. Mushroom was singing that song… in the shower, at the supermarket, at the gym, on the morning commute.
 
Mushroom

Mushroom

He / Him / His
This was kind of also me in the theatre when it hit that sublime “Don’t make me laugh, they were popular… RIGHT!” delivery and I was forced to confront my fave’s talents perhaps lending themselves even more naturally* towards a future of preppy show tunes than Max Martin anthems about getting her back blown out.

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*I know another stan group whose fave has spent the past decade doing her best Michigan J. Frog impression can’t relate.
 
Sleepycat

Sleepycat

I still don't really understand why people take Jolene completely at face value when it seems obvious to me that there's a reason it sits next to Daughter on the tracklist. It's criticised for being anti-woman or blindly defensive of a man's failings but surely the point is that the audience is meant to question both the narrator - and her man. That seems to me like the central dramatic irony of the piece. The fact that it segues into a murder ballad straight afterwards seals the deal.

But eh, I can't defend it as being particularly musically interesting compared to the rest of the record and lowkey view it as a bit of an interlude, so it is what it is...
 
Solenciennes

Solenciennes

Staff member
There’s a lot I want to say about Jolene, citation Dolly Parton TM. I think what has made that song such an enduring classic is the sheer anonymity of Mr Dolly Parton. Gun to my head, I know his surname isn’t Parton and they don’t have kids together but I have no idea what his name is or what he looks like. The absolute enigma of this man to the public allows the listener to just focus on the plaintive, desperate appeal from woman to woman about a situation that may or may not be in her imagination. Dolly’s agency is her own, and if you were getting particularly abstract, you could project ideas like her being paranoid her man might leave her for Jolene because she’s not conformed to society’s expectations of her as a wife, making this woman a threat to the idea that she could have it all in ways that so many women don’t. It’s such a fascinating microcosm of a situation that really gets to the heights it does because the listener has nothing on Mr Carl Dean (just looked it up again).

Beyoncé has built a Mrs Carter identity, even in this album’s title, and her husband is never 5 minutes away from a camera, an award show, a lawsuit, her career. You cannot listen to her version of Jolene without recalling Crazy In Love, Bonnie & Clyde 03, the Lemonade album. She had to have known that would be the case, I don’t think she does anything accidentally, but it has become such a misfire with the legal quagmire around Diddy sucking Jay’s name in. You want us to think this man is worth all of this? The world at large is making value judgments against her for still being with this man, so the original song’s power is completely sucked out and is replaced with Carter Family dramas of Jay’s making, as always.

Musically… it’s fine. I just got the ick with all the personal context. My rating for it dropped while listening in real time, if we’re scoffing at Taylor rehashing tepid love life quibbles, Beyoncé earns the same on this one song for me.
 
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