Conflicted jerkdom

Let us examine two different ways in which contemporary musicians articulate their conflicted relations with their looks, or should I say, how they expect their audiences respond to them. Snapping and crackling like the best Whispers song ever recorded, Maroon 5's "Makes Me Wonder" is so confident in its buoyancy that it puts me on my guard. This song is pure steel, impervious and clean. This is a replication of funk by a decidedly white band that's better than anything attempted by Justin Timberlake's crew (let's not even mention the Chili Peppers), and its lasciviousness way more convincing. Luckily Adam Levine can't project ardor; like any nascent pussyhound who could only afford expensive hair gel when he and his rather homely bandmates (see the Rob Sheffield Dictum: like Bryan Ferry and Brandon Flowers, Levine "makes sure he never gets upstaged by always surrounding himself with much uglier men in public") went multi-platinum three years ago, he revels in jerkdom not just for its own marvelous sake, but because he's learned that lots of girls find it hot. The genius bridge, each verse sweeteened with piano licks, spells it plainly:

I still don't have the reason
And you don't have the time
And it really makes me wonder
If I ever gave a fuck about you

This dialectic – vocal swagger atop honeyed arrangement – strengthens all that's best and shiniest about Miranda Lambert's songs, most of which delineate the hazards of toying with gender stereotypes (the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) just long enough until you get bruised. I hear a little of teenpop's self-involved bravado on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's "Gunpowder and Lead"; I've even got Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" next to "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"on my iPod playlist ("Desperation" even sounds like a woozy version of Avril's "Complicated"). The glee with which she crunches on the lyrics to "Guilty in Here" bespeak a young woman who's wily enough to play around but affects the right degree of guilt to get her man back. But the bizarre "Love Letters" tells a different story. Discard the tired tropes (angels who don't get their wings, pearly gates, wet paper) and we're left with an admission of adamantine forbearance ("I'm better off living with memories/I know that it's gonna hurt but I don't think it gets any worse") that owes nothing of the self-help pieties to which Lavigne clings as if espousing them signified maturity. Not that it makes life easier for Lambert.

I wish I could find available reproductions of their new albums' cover art (the clearest one of Maroon 5's extant is on Amazon), but how the representations of Levine and Lambert intersect with their personae is fascinating. On the Maroon 5 one Levine is foregrounded, photographed wearing one of his tailored suits with a sullen expression floating a couple of feet off the ground; his bandmates, of course, are either seen in profile or too far back to count, as if to remind us who remains pretty and who's still ugly. Meanwhile Lambert, so white and biscuity-soft that she could be one of the younger Simpson sisters, looks more demure than in her Kerosene cover shot – so demure that the words "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" printed below her image seem to mock her (this is crazy?). The message and marketing are clear, but do their respective audiences know who (and what) they're listening to? Are the kids who made "Makes Me Wonder" the fastest-rising Number One in Soundscan history and listen to Lambert turn small town life into the Peyton Place of John Mellencamp's nightmares aware that these artists are using pretty for un-pretty ends? Judging by casual chats I have with my students, they're more willing to accept caddishness from their pop stars than my generation; caddishness, my students argue, humanizes the likes of Levine and Lambert. This surely must count as an advance.