"What Would You Do?" Pop Prostitute Edition

Maybe you (faithful readers . . . . hello??) have noticed that I haven't blogged in . . . well. A while. But I've been reluctantly brought back to the blog by an extended rant I posted on a friend's blog. She indicated this rant was really not so much a comment as a blog entry of its own, so here I am. Welcome to "What Would You Do?", Edition 1 (or, Pop Prostitute Edition), written in response to the below-linked blog post:

In Defense of Poppery II: "Sweetest Girl"

"Sweetest Girl" is a pretty good example of the song type my friend names the "pobrecita-prostitute" (or, "po'ho") genre, and I agree that the way the "Sweetest Girl" referenced there is respected is much preferable to other approaches, that begin by pitying but ultimately fall back on judgment and a strange brand of moralizing. For example, in the song "What Would You Do," by Citi High (or City High?), the singer describes a similar reunion with a girl he used to know:

Saturday night was at this real wild party
They had the liquor overflowin' the cup, about
Five or six strippers tryin' to work for a buck
And I took one girl outside wit' me
Her name was Loni
She went to Junior High wit' me

"Why you up in there dancin' for cash?" he asks her, but she throws the question back in his face, asking:

What would you do
If your son was at home
Crying all alone on the bedroom floor
'Cause he's hungry?

She then, very appropriately reminds the singer that he is a client of hers, even perhaps a victimizer: "for you this is just a good time, but for me this is what I call life."

Initially, the singer seems to absorb neither her question nor the charge leveled against him, offering the rejoinder, "You aint the only one with a baby; that ain't no excuse to be living all crazy." But after Loni answers by looking him "straight in the eye" and declaring, "every day I wake up waiting to die," he seems to be willing to listen to her story.

Unfortunately, after she once again posits the question "What would you do?", the singer/stripper patron regrettably attempts an on-the-spot answer that really reverberates - because it's totally hollow:

Then she said, What would you do if?
Get up on my feet
And let go of every excuse
What would you do if...?
'Cause I wouldn't want my baby
To go through what I went through
What would you do if...?
Get up on my feetS
top makin' tired excuses
What would you do if...?
Girl I know if my mother can do it
Baby you can do it

This, to me, is a very regrettable climax to the song, primarily because it doesn't describe any (non-metaphorical) action that Loni could take to alleviate the difficulties of her situation. Obviously, the singer's invocation of his mother is meant to lend a feminist-flavored weight to his hackneyed answers; however, following the graphic descriptions of the youthful circumstances that preceded Loni's pregancy - obviously, for her, the straw that broke the camel's back - it's no longer a given that if singer's unknown mother could do it, so could Loni. And, in the end, we certainly have no reason to trust that our contradictory narrator (I pay for strippers, but I would never be one) has successfully let go of every excuse in his own life.

So, zero stars out of . . . let's say, 100 . . . for "What Would You Do."