Introduction
“You can’t touch me there, you can’t touch my body” is a line sung by Ava Max on her most popular track, Not your Barbie girl, by which she supports women’s rights (Ava Max, 2018, 00:10-00:14). I support fighting for gender justice and equality, but this phrase and the whole song also disappoints me. This track is not only a manifestation of the feminist movement in popular culture. It is an indication that global society, at least the Western one, is losing some subtlety on the meta-level of existence. Social movements, political demands and campaigns, cultural tendencies, and entertainment has simple titles and clear goals that are easily understandable and do not require significant contextual awareness. My idea is that the world needs more subtext to create memorable and unique artwork, slogans, events, and things.
Culture of Simplicity and Politics Centered On Easy Understandability
The thesis that global humanity needs to return to the subtext and subtlety implies that it has become more simplified. Contemporary art and culture prove it; it is an objective truth that all their aspects are inclusive and contain many simplistic structures and elements. There were much more subtext, irony, and allegory in the original song by Aqua, Barbie girl, and it is this what made it an iconic piece of music of the 90s. The fact that sociologists identify specific subareas of culture and art phenomena and title them as popular or pop proves this. Like politics, Building Back Better or Make America Great Again requires Americans to have less knowledge of current domestic policy matters than the comparably more abstract New Deal to understand its meaning from the title. One should not take this statement as saying that simplicity is the wrong direction in which these and other institutions are moving. The critical point is that subtext has become less present in these fundamental areas of humankind.
Impatient World of Less Time
To know and understand why the subtext disappears, one needs to understand what are the drivers for a person to want to develop and understand it. These things are available time, an external factor, and an individual’s capacity for patience, an internal factor for creators and consumers alike. These existential resources have become scarcer and less accessible than they were in the past. Evidence that people now have less time is, for example, the sheer number of views under summary videos and the very structure of social media that promotes the provision and acceptance of information through short posts. Evidence that people now have less time is, for example, a large number of views under summary videos and the very structure of social media that promotes the provision and receiving of information through short posts. Increased social responsiveness, which includes call-out culture and false accusations, is evidence that people have become less tolerant. Time and patience have become more limited in the Western hemisphere due to people changed collective character and novel technologies.
Conclusion
Ava Max’s Not your Barbie girl is a demonstrative and explanatory element of contemporary global civilization. It shows the dominance of simplicity over complexity among two fundamental societal groups, creators and consumers. This track illustrates in a meta-sense the historical disappearance of subtext in favor of an easily understandable meaning and message in politics, culture, and social areas.
Reference
Ava Max. (2018). Ava Max – Not your Barbie girl [official audio] [Video]. YouTube. Web.