Robyn is arguably the best white, female R&B singer of the 2010s.
I know, at least, one person who would disagree: Billy Eichner with his well-known, not unwarranted adulation for, Pink.
But where Brittany and Christina made booming girl-power anthems in the 2000s, and Pink made top-of-the-charts pop, often deeper and more nuanced than she is given credit for, Robyn made the kind of bittersweet love songs you could not only dance to, but could then go home and listen to, alone, long after the bars had closed and the dance floors had emptied, cuddling a body pillow in your twin sized bed, staring into the abyss of loneliness that you both fear, and know deep down, is your true state of being.
But Robyn wasn’t always so beloved.
In fact, at first, she was hated, by the very demographic she was a part of: young swedish girls.
Robyn broke out in America in 1997 with the hit “Show Me Love”. It’s a catchy Pop/R&B single with very 1997 production.
Before then, she was an aspiring kid star in her native Sweden.
Here’s a gif of her.
And here’s how she remembers that time,
I’m not sure people remember this, but I was treated badly by young girls on my first album.
They used to stand at the front of the audience yelling profanities and threw stuff.
They said stuff like “cunt” and “whore”. It was extermely tough, almost like bullying.
The whole “Jante Law” thing was really tough for the first 6 months.
“What the fuck is Jante Law?”, I thought when I first saw this.
And also, almost like bullying Robyn?
If throwing things at someone and calling them a whore isn’t bullying, then what was my childhood bully doing all those times he threw stuff at me and called me a whore?
When I found out what Law of Jante was, my first thought was “oh, so…haters” and my second thought was, “that sounds like the opposite of America, but kind of in a good way”
Often times, when people at first have little and suddenly an excessive amount of something special – a lot of success, money or fame – they have the tendency to brag about it.
Swedes on the other hand remain relatively unnoticed when they reach something extraordinary.
They are less prone to bragging. This is because they follow a common rule called the Jantelagen, literally translated: law of Jante. Basically it says that “You are not better than anyone else“.
Source
Now, I’m definitely not pro-hater.
We just started identifying haters, and we shouldn’t stop now.
Psychologically, the knowledge of haters existence is another layer of armor we can wrap around ourselves before walking out the door.
Haters want you to stay in your comfort zone, no, their comfort zone. They want everyone around them to wear the uniform they’re comfortable with, to ensure they don’t feel worse about themselves, their egos being delicate, finicky things they can’t control.
You may have noticed, I’ve found the term useful to my own self-confidence.
You may have also noticed earlier that I said, “we just started identifying haters”.
Our parents didn’t have the term “hater”. At least, not my white parents.
Is it because people didn’t hate on other people when my parents were growing up?
Or, was it so déclassé to flaunt your own wealth, that potential haters had nothing to hate on?
Was it maybe because the wealth divide wasn’t so large that:
1) there were so many rich people able to buy so many flaunt-worthy trinkets, or,
2) the rich people that did exist, weren’t that much richer than their neighbors on the next economic rung down.
Whatever may have been true for my parents is far from the case for my generation.
Forbes, practitioner of the smokescreen psuedo-science called “economics” likes to imagine this divide in the wealth gap was all due to America leaving the gold standard in ’68 (see the line in the graph below), and Reagan did the “best thing that could be done without actually re-fixing the dollar to gold” with his “across-the-board supply-side tax cuts” in 1983.
Ah yes, that sweet, sweet, completely invented “supply-side economics” theory which says, “economic growth can be most effectively created by lowering taxes and decreasing regulation,[1][2]“. What a convenient theory for rich people.
Whatever any of that shit means, all I hear is Forbes admitting: Reagan did this thing and then rich people got a lot richer than everyone else.
Am I wrong?
But I digress.
The rise in popularity of the term hater – and the decline of Jantelagen, to whatever degree it existed, in America – is part of a trend over the last 40 years to normalize excessive wealth and the flaunting of that wealth.
I would argue the current cultural attitudes towards the rich all started with Dynasty. Yes, that Dynasty.
Jim Gaffigan would agree with me. Yes, that Jim Gaffigan.
“You Don’t Have to Watch Dynasty, To Have An Attitude”
Dynasty premiered in January of 1981.
By the fall of 1982, it was a top 10 show, and by the spring of 1985, it was the #1 show in the United States.
Wikipedia
Here’s Jim Gaffigan, talking to Conan O’Brien, on Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend. Quotes are exact but edited together here for sake of clarity.
Jim: I remember when the bragging (in pop music) really started occuring, I was like, well this, this is not sustainable, like people bragging, “I am the king of everything”.
I’m like, “this is gonna backfire, right?”
Conan: Here’s how things have changed. Did you ever watch the show My Super Sweet 16?
It was this show where…they would follow this 16 year-old girl who was always very wealthy who was having her super sweet 16.
I remember one episode started with, she has a knight in shining armor ride to her high school and hand out invitations to some people but not other people.
…and people who didn’t get the invitations were inconsolable.
And I was watching this and thinking, “if this had happened, at my high school, in 1980, or 1979…the knight would be killed immediately…then I would be killed…and I’d be ridiculed”.
You just didn’t do that shit.
Conan O‘Brien Needs a Friend
The two continue talking about My Super Sweet 16 and how the show’s usually ended, with expensive cars for the guest of honor, while all their friends cheered in support of them.
Jim: Here’s what I think it is. I believe that the big cultural shift was when Dynasty got on the air.
I’m serious: materialism was rewarded.
Dynasty is the root cause of all economic disparity in America.
Conan and his assistant Sona laugh, but Jim is right. Well, not about the root cause part (which was said in a jest not conveyed with text), but that the cultural shift began in the early 80s, and specifically, with Dynasty.
The New York Times described the pilot episode of Dynasty (which was a 90-Day Fiance-esque 3 hours long) via the two children of its main character, petroleum baron John Forsythe.
As the daughter, Pamela Sue Martin, longs to succeed her Daddy in the business and proves it by affecting his far-right politics and his interest in venery…
Al Corley, who plays the (homosexual) son, spends his time lounging around the mansion lecturing his father from time to time on the sins of the oil companies, homosexuality being equated, in this cliche-ridden script, with liberal left leaning politics.
New York Times, 1/12/1981
It also, mentions of course, that Dynasty is “an embarassingly obvious knockoff of Dallas”.
Which means, this whole “I’m a rich person who is temporarily poor” probably started with Dallas in 1978?
Except Dynasty took it to another level.
It’s hard to image this of a primetime drama now, but Dynasty had merchandise.
Like, expensive merchandise meant for adults.
The whole package of merchandising deals was called “the most expensive worldwide line of products ever inspired by a tv show”
Deals were negotiated with thirteen clothing companies, producers of luggage, linens, jewellery, optical ware and home furnishings.
p 65, Dynasty Years: Hollywood Television and Critical Media Studies.
This merchandise, showcased at Bloomingdale’s and in the pages of Vogue and Cosomopolitan were, as Jostein Gripsrud, Professor in Media Studies at the University of Bergen, writes in Dynasty Years: Hollywood Television and Critical Media Studies, “targeted at women belonging to the middle and lower-middle social classes”.
But, according to Jane Feuer, who refers to a report in the Wall Street Journal of 23 January 1986, “the big-ticket items were taken off the market” in 1986; only the less expensive products, such as the perfumes, were financial successes for their manufacturers, at least in the domestic market.
“Apparently, Dynasty’s mass audience had the power to desire the items but not to purchase them”, Feuer comments.
p. 66, Dynasty Years: Hollywood Television and Critical Media Studies.
He goes on to write,
The custom among Dynasty fans (at least in the US, according to various US media) of “dressing up” to view their favourite show most probably did not occur or at least did not catch on until after the merchandising had started.
The producers could thus be seen as the ones who sugested the various “taking part in the fantasy” practices
Yup.
In early 1980s America, mainstream, middle and lower class audiences, started dressing up like the rich people they saw on TV.
Let’s see what’s happened since then.
A Timeline Of Rich Acceptance
- April 1978: Dallas premieres
- June 1979: “Money (It’s What I Want)” is covered by the Flying Lizards and reaches #50 on the U.S Billboard Charts.
- January 1981: Dynasty premieres
- September 1982: Family Ties premieres. Meant to be an ironic figure who praises the rich, Alex Keaton (played by Michael J. Fox) becomes a massive right-wing and mainstream cultural icon.
- March 1984: Lifestyles of The Rich and Famous premieres. Pretty straight forward, this one.
- December 1987: Oliver Stone’s Wall Street is released. Similar to Alex Keaton, Gordon Gecko becomes an unironic, anti-hero icon with his catch phrase, “greed is good”
- January 1989: Donald Trump, made famous in the 80s simply for being a gaudy rich kid, makes the cover of Time with a tagline that couldn’t be more apropos, “flaunting it is the game”.
- October 1990: Beverly Hills 90210 is released. Developed by Aaron Spelling, of the aforementioned Dynasty, 90210 lowers the bar even further. A decade after Dynasty ok’ed rich adults acting rich out in the open, 90210 normalized rich kids being rich un-ironically.
- October 1992: The film version of Glengarry, Glen Ross makes an icon of Alex Baldwin for a 7-minute speech in which he berates and emasculates under performing salesman. American culture remembers this scene most prominently, as antithetical as it may be to the rest of the story.
- November 1992: “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” is released with the most popular money-centric hip hop chorus to date, “with my mind on my money and my money on my mind”. The video’s lack of materialism is striking in contrast to later 90s music videos.
- August 1994: “Juicy” is released as an underdog rags to riches anthem with its video alternating between those “Before” and “After” realities. Within a few years, the rags to riches aspect would be done away with entirely.
- 1996: Jim Carrey becomes the first movie star to earn $20 Million for a movie, for his role in The Cable Guy. Conversations on entertainer’s exorbitant incomes would dominate the culture during the decade, with the salaries of Friends and Seinfeld stars being common knowledge.
- August 1997: “It’s All About The Benjamins” is released. It didn’t take long for Puffy to cash in on the concept of cash.
- September 1998: Will & Grace premieres. Karen Walker is a hit as a rich, alcoholic housewife, who only works to get out of the house and make fun of all things poor or middle class.
- February 2000: Boiler Room is released. Though only a cult hit at best, it idolized Gordon Gecko, and the Baldwin Glengarry speech, directly, with its characters referencing those roles explicitly, and Affleck stopping by to give his best”coffee is for closers” impression. The young men (Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel) that are the core of the film’s characters, show unabashed adoration for their capitalist on-film forefathers for all the “wrong” reasons. Like the films it pays homage to, Boiler Room is often more remembered for the characters, and scenes, it was purporting to preach against.
- September 2000: MTV Cribs premieres. A younger Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous, Cribs is a series on which I blame most of my misconceptions about adult life.
- June 2003: Where were you the day the Black Eyed Peas stopped being the Black Eyed Peas – a band built on the identity or originality and not selling out (yes, really) – and released the pop-schlock, “Where Is The Love?” featuring Justin Timberlake? It seems like a small footnote, but this was the first time a boy band member, also known as America’s teenage royalty, had ever successfully crossed over into Hip Hop, a genre that once accused Nas of selling out for having Lauryn Hill sing a Kurtis Blow hook on his track. The release of “Where Is The Love?”, nearly a decade after “The World Is Yours”, was a defining moment in Hip Hop’s journey to mainstream appropriation, and the yacht-rock crowd’s ability to pat themselves on the back for being culturally inclusive at their fancy yacht weddings.
- August 2003: The O.C. premieres. Another prime time iteration of America living vicariously through the rich.
- September 2004: Not content with letting rich Southern California kids simply be dramatized, MTV debuted Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County so that real rich Southern California kids could get their moment in the sun, regardless of their ability to act.
- August 2006: Not to be outdone, Bravo releases The Real Housewives of Orange County and starts an era of Real Housewives spin-offs. Early episodes include graphic pop-ups with the price of items being bought.
- September 15th, 2008: The Great Recession begins with the fall of Lehman Brothers and forever gives the world this video of two men necking heavily behind a CNN correspondent. No American bank executives would face any jail time for the largest economic catastrophe since Black Thursday, 1929, an outcome so wildly unfair it would embed itself in the collective consciousness of a generation just entering the job market.
- October 2010: Instagram launches and would go on to become the standard bearer app for selfies, status symbol gluttony, and living vicariously through the rich and famous.
- 2012: The Rich Kids of The Internet account starts on Instagram, going on to confuse the meaning of the terms “grinding” and “hustle” for a generation.
- July 2012: Channel Orange is released, putting the most artistic spin on rich kids, who grow up fast due to their access to drugs and ability to not give a fuck, to date.
Too many bottles of this wine we can’t pronounce
Too many bowls of that green, no Lucky Charms
The maids come around too much
Parents ain’t around enough
Too many joy rides in daddy’s Jaguar
Too many white lies and white lines
Super rich kids with nothing but loose ends
Super rich kids with nothing but fake friends
- October 2013: Myley Cyrus releases Bangerz and crosses over to Hip Hop. It is clear nothing matters anymore. One of the richest, most famous, most privileged women in all of America cashes in even further by crossing over to a culture she would later decry as being too “lamborghini, got my rolex, got my girl on my cock”. Bangerz has great songs, and black musicians got paid to make it, but it is nonetheless a sign of money being able to pay for coolness at the highest levels of pop culture, to a degree that had arguably never been done before. This would be like Madonna making an album with The Bomb Squad in 1990. Everyone would have been mad about that and they would have been right, but it probably would have been amazing.
- December 2013: Wolf of Wall Street is released and becomes immediately misunderstood by many a frat bro, and film critic, alike. The story of Jordan Belfort, a true 1980s anti-hero who scammed people for a living and was rewarded financially for it, WoWS successfully promoted and berated the lifestyle it portrayed making it either great, or terrible, art.
- November 8th, 2016: America elects Donald Trump, a born-rich, racist narcissist, who sexually assaulted dozens of women, to its highest political office. The ultimate Fuck You to the ultimate perceived enemy: elitist liberals, Donald Trump’s ascendancy to President marks the epitome of 1) being rich is an admirable quality in-and-of itself, 2) being rich no longer being a disqualifier for self-association to many, many white non-rich Americans, as whole swaths of white Americans – including 64% of white, non-college educated voters – identified with the son of Manhattan real-estate developer than they did with a perceived Washington insider and 3) being rich actually being seen as rebellious, as long as that rebellion is a cultural one.
- July 2018: In a desperate effort to garner more hate-clicks than any other article in internet history, Forbes declares Kylie Jenner the world’s “youngest self-made billionaire”. That’s right, “self-made” now applies to America’s royalty.
It has certainly never been shameful to be rich in America.
America has always been a violently capitalistic nation. But the common culture’s feelings towards its rich has risen and fallen over the course of its history.
100 years ago there were socialist class warriors like Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, and Big Bill Haywood.
The working class was more aware of itself than it is today.
What the rich have done in the last 40 years, post-WWII really, is to convince the rest of us that we’re just a hard days work away from being one of them, and that any other identity along class lines is communism.
Pop culture hasn’t done very much to oppose this point of view, however demonized Hollywood is for being liberal.
The one-two punch of paid-for political policy and pop culture purveyance has worked, so far.