Barbie Girl

Hello Bloggers!

I'm back again, ready to write more about music and lyrics. Lately I've been listening to a lot of music in English so I've got some songs picked up to talk about here. But the song I'd like to talk about today it's neither new nor I've been listening to it recently. Do you remember a band called Aqua that sang Barbie Girl back in the nineties?

Yes, the bald boy and the red-haired girl (along with their band). The song was a hit in 1997, and got to number one in many countries - like Spain, Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Norway, UK, etc. Barbie Girl has been classified as bubblegum pop. I believe this is important because bubblegum pop refers to songs that “typically have singalong choruses, seemingly childlike themes and a contrived innocence, occasionally combined with an undercurrent of sexual double entendre. They also have a catchy melody, simple chords, simple harmonies, danceable beats, and repetitive riffs or "hooks". The song lyrics often concern romantic love (...)”, says Wikipedia.

Even if the quality of the song has been questioned many times I can't deny that the song never gets old for me and I have to admit that I have it on my MP3. Probably, because it reminds me of my childhood. Yeah, because when the song appeared I was 6 and I was crazy about it.

But where I wanted to get is the fact that I was a child and I didn't understand English, however, now that I do I have realized that the lyrics has double entendre and that they are pretty dirty and sexist. Well, you could think they are dirty.

For example,

I'm a blonde bimbo girl in the fantasy world
Dress me up, take your time, I'm your dollie
You're my doll, rock and roll, feel the glamour in pink
Kiss me here, touch me there, hanky-panky

You can touch, you can play
If you say I'm always yours, oooh whoa

First of all, a girl calling herself “blonde bimbo girl” is not right. Who would call herself that? But we know that sex sells and money is very important... In case you don't know, bimbo is an adjective used in popular 20th century-English to refer to an attractive but unintelligent woman. Furthermore, she calls herself a doll and the guy does too. So, for me, the conclusion is that the girl is treated as a sexual object.

“Kiss me here, touch me there, hanky-panky”? Well, I think this line is very sexual and confirms what I said about the girl being treated as an object. With the excuse that they are talking about a doll you can play with, they talk about playing and touching. What did they want us to think? And there is a plus, the chorus also has hidden sexual messages:

You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere
Imagination, life is your creation

Apparently, it looks fine. You can brush your doll's hair, you can undress her where ever you are playing with it and imagination is basis of playing. But, after all that is said before (playing, touching, “I'm your doll”, “you're my doll”, etc.), don't you think that these two lines could be saying something more?

Then we have the following verse:

Make me walk, make me talk, do whatever you please
I can act like a star, I can beg on my knees
Come jump in, be my friend, let us do it again
Hit the town, fool around, let's go party

We can see that the idea of the girl as a sexual object is reflected again on the line “do whatever you please”.

After this line, we have the most controversial sentence, at least for me. I am talking about “I can beg on my knees”. The only thing that comes to my mind is: What??. I can admit that the other lines are just talking about playing with Barbie dolls, but this line is too much. It doesn't happen very often that a girl makes her doll beg when playing. It might happen, depending on the story the girl invented. But let's just say that kids don't go that far on their stories.

So, if you add “I can beg on my knees” to all the other double entendre lines, what do you end up thinking about this song?

To conclude, I would like to say that, besides the suspicious lines, what makes me think that this song has a double entendre about sex is that the lyrics are supposed to be a conversation between the dolls Barbie (female) and Ken (male). The sentences that Barbie says about playing, undressing and being a doll could be perfectly fine if she was talking to a human. But she is talking to Ken. So Ken is the one who can play with her. There it is the double sense.

Song in YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dGcYH6Fwj8

Lyrics: 

http://www.purelyrics.com/index.php?lyrics=fhjpacrk