by Monisha Dhingra
Welcome to the land of Honey Singh,a land of punk-ed up Punjabi dudes and sexed up Russian dancers. A land where music is defined by unoriginal Hip-Hop beats and tasteless Punjabi music. A land that thrives on offensively meaningless and sexist lyrics...Let me give you a few pointers on how to spot such nuisance. The absurdly pimped up Punjabi music would alert you, but rest assured just look for the following:
Look for a Punjabi munda trying to unsuccessfully ape a Hip-Hop star (that’s Honey Singh). See closely he'll have disproportionally hot girls next to him i.e. either too tall for him, or too hot for him. Next, listen to the lyrics. The song will besung too fast to cover up the senselesslyrics. For example “Don’t do dope- shope and stare at men, don’t spoil your liver by drinking neat alcohol have some food along?” Now obviously making no sense what so ever isn’t enough for him. As it is the trend with fools, they tend to make maximum noise, and in this case “noise”, I assure you, is a rather polite word for his songs. Next up are lyrics about female genitalia, that borderline misogyny – splotched with women centric abuses. As is typical, the men in his songs are self-righteous Punjabi – Hip-Hop punks, with strong body and small hypocritical minds. The women show more variety they are either sluts wanting to be used for sex, or alcoholics who babble when drunk or better still, gold diggers with too many boyfriends. Sometimes brown and other time’s anorexic girls are also featured in his songs.
If you still can’t identify the source of the stupidity you are being subjected to, listen carefully. In the middle of the mumbo-jumbo of dumb lyrics you'll hear a deep Punjabi voice owning up to this mental torture screaming “YO, YO HONEY SINGH!"
Now let’s analyse this man,and see why and how he got so (annoyingly) famous thatI am forced to write this article about him.
Well for one, most of his songs are about women, and his sole object seems to be slandering them. The fact that this strategy worked for him brings out the question - Whether this strategy uniquely discovered and used by Honey Singh, or many a fools have tried it too?
From where I look he is doing nothing but carrying forward the age old tradition of using sex and women as a means to sell products in the market. In fact he is not even being subtle about it!
This selling point rests on the idea that when say white is the norm ,then black becomes more attractive . White exists as an ideal and black exists as anti – thesis to that ideal , white is salvation black is the tempting distraction .Women who are demure ,subtle , disciplined are white and women who are bold , blunt and rebellious are black .White is normative and black is anti normative . Black exists to guilt women into white , and as a reminder as to what would it be like if all were not white .
The idea essentially is that when societal construct favours white then black assumes a position that is more attractive , by virture of it being anti normative and extreme .The white norm portrays women in a light of perfection, such that it’s unnatural and does'nt exist , Black on the other hand is an anti-norm, everything opposite to what society says. It’s a contradiction, and it guilt’s women into following what the society thinks is ‘Ideal’ and natural because if a woman chose to follow black or anything other than white she would be reprimanded .'Black’ despite being labelled “depraved “ gets more attention , it is a tempting distraction .
That’s why you are able to recall the Axe Deodorant advertisement, better than the one for a Harpic. This is why movies like Agneepath uses song like ‘Chikni-Chameli’ for more publicity. The song for its own sake has no bearing or importance in the movie. Men like Honey Singh think it’s cool to sing about abusing women.Anything and everything to do with nudity and sex becomes a rage.
We hence come to conclusion that black works!The next question that I ask myself is why it works? Why does an anti-norm attract us? When an external object attracts us, it represents an unfulfilled internal need, in this case an unacceptable object is vying our attention which means the existing norm has not been meeting certain needs that we harbour, since these needs are internal and hence natural. Could it be that existing norms are indeed unnatural and unyielding to our needs? In other words we are so sexually repressed that a slight sexually explicit stimulus excites us and that existing norms for women are so unnatural that a slightly contradictory idea thrives by virtue creating controversy?
Is the image of pure virgin woman a myth represents nothing but denial and frustration? Image of perfect woman, the perfect wife, created in a way so to make women guilty for not conforming to it? But at the same time as I accept the fallacy of the norms, I also ask whether it is okay to exploit the dichotomy in the system and degrade women as sexual objects and portray them as playthings and sell anything and everything in that name, because if every woman is not Sister Mary Jane she is also not a use and throw sex machine as she is so often advertised.
So whose fault is it? The society that formulates the norms? Honey Singh's songs that thrives on these norms, or the women who accept it?
