(desperation + noise)

Hear a pop song lately that compelled you—beyond all reason and learned behavior patterns—to jump up and down on your bed, hairbrush-mic in hand, your emotions incomplete and raw at the ends, your impending adulthood unimportant and totally square?

You’re welcome:

IDA MARIA: “I LIKE YOU SO MUCH BETTER WHEN YOU’RE NAKED”

“I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked” is Norwegian whiskey-throat/pop-songwriter Ida Maria’s song “for the male population of this planet,” who, according to an interview with MTV, she would much rather prefer to “be naked all the time.”

I could list the reasons why this is great for the world of popular music which has largely lacked the joy of sex from the female perspective as a lyrical arc except in very subtle degrees. Not that there’s anything wrong with subtlety, or that subtlety shouldn’t be ultimately preferred—it’s just that subtlety doesn’t work half as well without a coexisting bluntness.

I could also list the reasons I’m uncomfortable with how much I like this song, as it casts unsure and flickering lights on a lot of my opinions about music and feminism and how they relate. Like how this song’s turn on objectifying other humans suggests that maybe I ignore or actually like objectification when it’s either clever (hip-hop) or a seeming reversal of centuries of patriarchal destitute (Ida, and also this is really just as bad as objectification in the first place).

Or maybe I accept objectification as a given in human experience because it’s not like we have storied histories proving we can do otherwise, and maybe I would like to be treated like I’m hanging from a rack once in a while by girls who would otherwise find me lacking in interest or any communicative skills.

Photo from Pitchfork

But whatever. This is so missing the point. “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked” doesn’t have to carry that baggage because all good pop transcends baggage, leaves baggage sharing a Coke with the world while it explores the nervous stratosphere of sex for sex’s sake.

Also, all great, lasting pop has at least one of its eyes turned inward and accusing, which this song pulls off with a simple exchange of “me” for “you” in the chorus, where the sudden desire for a partner’s stripped contours pivots on an equal desire for self-love. Suddenly, the whole affair takes on a sad weight.

All great, lasting pop would be nothing without the sound, though, and this sound hearkens back to punk. But it is punk so cognizant of its pop innards that the guitar lines reveal in good time that they are all made of syrup and that a syrup-based existence isn’t a bad thing at all, in fact it is the best thing, think of all the waffle lives you could improve, etc.

It is this sort of big sound that has led me to, for the first time since freshman year of high school, buy an entire album from the first listen of one song (for history’s sake, that was Pete Yorn’s Musicforthemorningafter, the song being “Life on a Chain,” and it was much less rewarding than our subject at hand).

It is the first time in a while that a song has tapped the nerve that leads to my jump-on-the-bed reflex, as though through sheer sonic pleasure I had time-traveled to simpler emotional pastures.

Maturity be damned, though!

We should all be so lucky to find a song that causes immediate uncontrollable vibrations from within.

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LINKS:

My colleague Andrew Necci wrote a brilliant piece charging the depths of Ida Maria’s album Fortress ’round My Heart:

Is this fun for you? [My Ghetto]

And incidentally, the album at hand is only $5 digitally from Amazon, so you have no excuse for not enjoying your life right this second:

Fortress ’round My Heart [Amazon]

Also, thanks be to Maura Johnston of Idolator. Without her loving bludgeoning of readers with Ida Maria sermons, I would not have checked out this record.