2 October 2014
Body image is a complex and sensitive subject, and I don’t have any expertise or insight to share on the matter. I have the impression that many people with personal experience regarding body image issues have found ‘All About That Bass’ helpful and many other people haven’t. I’ll confine my remarks to noting how the song’s lyrics seem to frame body positivity purely in the context of women being physically attractive to men. The male-gaze paradigm in art, media and advertising has had a toxic and corrosive effect on pop culture, wider society, and the daily lives of individual women; it’s unfortunate that one of the biggest and most accessible pop hits of recent times, aimed at celebrating body positivity and calling out unrealistic and harmful beauty standards, can’t shake it off.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that ‘All About That Bass’ became such a mega-hit purely on a wave of public discourse on body image issues. After all, you wouldn’t guess its theme purely from seeing the title or hearing its chorus. Also, that chorus is sufficiently goofy and singalongable to entertain a barful of adults and a carful of children: it has crossover appeal and generational cut-through, while pulling off the trick of being inoffensively memorable when taken literally but also enabling bantz if that’s how you choose to live your life.
Overall, though, the song’s throwback to ’50s doo-wop and pop balladry feels corny and retrograde, and that’s with me making a supreme effort to block out the US trad-girl vibes of the verse lyrics and video. ‘Beautiful Girls’ by Sean Kingston is similar in sound, and Madonna’s ‘True Blue’ might be considered a forerunner in aesthetic. However, an Irish equivalent of ‘All About That Bass’ may actually be Dana’s ‘All Kinds Of Everything’. Let that thought sit with you.
