Column: 'Spectacular' serves irresponsible message

By ChaToyya Sewell

Published April 16, 2010

There seem to be three ways to shed your squeaky-clean branded image.

You can travel the Hilary Duff route and make small routine family or romantic comedies, nothing earth-shattering, but pay your bills and avoid drunken paparazzi photos littering the tabloids. Or you can travel the tragic Corey Haim route. You can lose yourself to drug or alcohol addiction and have your formerly promising career filled with little more than party promotions or reality programs. Or you can travel the Elizabeth Berkley route and star in something like "Showgirls."

Kiely Williams, formerly of the Cheetah Girls and my seventh-grade favorite, 3LW (you might remember her as the one who couldn't really sing and really couldn't rap but was always inexplicably in the front of every video), picked the road often traveled, No. 3.

Recently, she released a music video for her song "Spectacular," a song I can only describe as offending my sensibilities on multiple levels. First, it sounds like hell if it were a song. For the purpose of this article, I subjected myself to multiple listens of the track, and I am sure if the devil liked low-budget pop with Club Ibiza circa 1990 backbeats, he'd like this song.

My personal prediction aside, this song reads suspiciously like an endorsement of at best horribly unsafe sexual practices, but more likely out and out sexual assault. The set-up through the first verse is this: Song character is drunk at a bar or club, meets a guy who buys her drinks, tells her he is like a stallion (I would have gagged and bolted at this point) and then the shit hits the problematic fan during the chorus, of which the lyrics are as follows: "Last I remember I was face down/Ass up, clothes off, dozed off and broke off/Even though I'm not sure of his name/ He could get it again if he wanted/'Cause the sex was spectacular."

Seriously.

Now, it's not my place to tell a woman how to analyze her own sexual encounter. But in the context of a pop song this seems to come dangerously close to glorifying sexual assault — and by dangerously close, I mean it's there. If someone is so blacked-out drunk they cannot stay physically conscious, they cannot consent.

It's an odd song; the second and third verses characterize the aftermath of this night: her walk of shame, how you can call her a slut if you wanted, etc. Yet those lyrics were peppered with the odd moment of introspection. "What was I drinking? I can't believe I blacked out," she rasps in verse two, "I hope he used a rubber, or I'mma be in trouble" in verse three.

Williams used those moments of a little reality in the song as jumping off for her defense at the inevitable backlash. She characterized herself as merely a messenger when she wrote the lyrics; she was, according to a statement she released, bringing "attention to a serious women's health and safety issue." Bringing attention to a woman's health and safety issue would be writing a song about the effect sexual assault can have on women's lives, health and happiness. Bringing attention to the issue would do more than say, Hope there was a condom, oh well, sex was great.

To be clear, I couldn't care less that Kiely was once a squeaky-clean name on the Disney roster. If she wants to cavort in alleys in hot pants, do so, Kiely. That's not my critique. I just wish she could have done it to a song about having fun with her girls or one that presents a positive and consensual sexual encounter, be that between long-term partners or new acquaintances. In a country where one in four women will be sexually assaulted or raped in her lifetime, songs like these aren't just stupid or poorly thought out, but they are down right irresponsible.