Shut Up, Cunt! The Cultural Logic Of 97th-Wave Feminist Band Millionaires

Ladies: I have bad news for you. Feminism is over.

No! I am serious! Feminism - that is, the belief that women deserve full autonomy, full participation in the public sphere, and the right to make their own choices - is totally dead. No sane person can believe in it now. Why is that, you ask? Well, because SOME OF YOU - and I am not naming names, here - made the choice to participate in the public sphere by starting the band "Millionaires."



You know, Millionaires, I have some thoughts about this video. My thoughts are: WHAT.

Millionaires has been around for a year or more, apparently! Sometimes on a thing called "The Warped Tour"? I don't know what the kids are up to today.

Now: I have been engaged in Millionaires Studies since 9:00 this morning, when the gentleman with whom I happen to date woke me up, with a manic gleam in his eye, and was like, "ARE YOU GOING TO WRITE A BLOG POST ABOUT MILLIONAIRES? YOU SHOULD TOTALLY DO IT. YOU SHOULD WRITE A BLOG POST ABOUT MILLIONAIRES. LOOK AT THIS MILLIONAIRES VIDEO I HAVE SEEN." Also he showed me videos by Brokencyde and Attack Attack? I don't get him.

Now: I will, indeed, write a blog post about Millionaires. ("CALL IT 'MILLIONAIRES: THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM!'" No.) Because one of the most interesting things about Millionaires is that many of their songs are about how much people hate the music of the band Millionaires! The people that they envision as "haters" of the band Millionaires are, specifically, girls.

They have an entire song about this! It is called, "Talk Shit," and it is available on their MySpace! Which is kind of what it would look like if one of those girls who self-tans a lot and wears the Playboy bunny shirts vomited out 19 apple martinis and also the contents of her subconscious onto your face! It has done a lot for me, in terms of illustrating how any dialogue with Millionaires might go.



"Seriously, Millionares: WHAT?" I would say. "Shut up, cunt! I'll cut your tongue," Millionaires would say. "Again, WHAT?" I would say. "I fucked your son," they'd say. "I don't even have a son! That makes no sense," I would reply! "You can get [your boyfriend] back; look like this and fuck like that," would be Millionaires' response.

That's where things would get serious. Because, seriously, Millionaires: what is up? Why all of the references to girls who think you are "annoying" because they are "jealous?" Do you really think that all of the women who have issues with you are upset because THEY are not the ones paying half-naked black men to play strippers who pour champagne directly from bottles into their mouths in what is more or less a direct rip from porn (THE BOTTLES SYMBOLIZE PENISES)? Is the problem just that we all wish we could be huge racists? Because I do not think that is the problem, actually, Millionaires.

I think the problem is that when you are including lyrics like "no talent, just lucky, they still want to fuck me" in your singles you are basically saying that there is nothing good about you outside of the fact that boys want to touch you with their boners, and selling your fuckability as literally the only valuable thing about your person - the badge of your worth, and the sum total of your accomplishment, in fact. Whereas a whole bunch of us are not so convinced. We know that you are actually probably having unsatisfying two-minute hump sessions with dudes who think that Brokencyde is the sound of their souls and also don't want to use condoms because they might extend the hump sessions past two minutes, which would be AWFUL. We are not "jealous" of this! You will never believe it, but "jealousy" is actually the very last thing we experience when faced with such a prospect!

But that makes us cunts, right? Whereas the guys who are doing you or determining you to be a candidate for doing based on the fact that you pour play money over your boobs are totally awesome. Those are the dudes who are going to be there for you when the chips are down. Those are the people whose good opinion and respect and friendship it is not only desirable, but totally possible, to obtain.

Bad news, ladies: you're cunts, too. We're all cunts, to those guys. We're either cunts they're going to fuck, or cunts they used to fuck (SHE WAS A PSYCHO, BRO. SHE GOT ALL MAD JUST BECAUSE I SLEPT WITH A BUNCH OF OTHER GIRLS AND DIDN'T TELL HER ABOUT IT) or cunts they don't want to fuck, which are the worst cunts of all, of course, because the cunts they don't want to fuck often scare the shit out of them, due to the fact that those cunts don't constantly send out signals indicating that it would just be the bestest thing ever if boys such as themselves would honor them with a boner. And this is a survival tactic, for many cunts of the latter category: we're actually, purposefully, trying to scare those guys off, so that we can determine which ones get freaked out by women who act like people, and maybe eventually end up dating ones who don't get freaked out, who not only sleep with us and maybe have feelings for us that are of the romantical nature but actually like us, the way you would like a person.

Millionaires? Are you listening to me, young ladies? This is the voice of wisdom! I am TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD, so I can speak to the younger generation!



Oh, Jesus. "Let's get fucked up?" This is not even a lyric. This is a vague mission plan for what a lyric might be, should you ever get around to writing lyrics. This is like if Nirvana (a band the old people once enjoyed!) wrote a song called "Let's Do A Lot Of Heroin And Be Depressed." It is like if there were a Ramones song called "This Is A Limited Number of Simple Chords, Played Really Really Fast." If Eddie Vedder ever wrote a song called "I Will Now Bellow Earnestly Into Your Ear," that is the equivalent of this lyric, I am telling you. Millionaires: WHAT?



You're twelve years old. You're twelve years old, aren't you? Only a twelve-year-old thinks of White Zinfandel as the height of alcoholic debauchery. Well: you are either twelve years old, or my mom.