This Year's Girl - The Modern Man Considers the State of the Modern Woman, Identifies Areas of Concern

The repeated closing line to "This Year's Girl" has been stuck in my head for a couple weeks now. I hear it not as sung, but in the well-greased, almost maliciously insinuating tones of a British magazine show announcer: "All this...and no surprises...for this year's girl."

Mr. Narrator pretends sympathy for his subject, but cool contempt edges out any trace of real empathy. He stands aside, observing the "Girl" who's become the momentary focus of predatory male desire. Meanwhile, she, entranced by alibis, pills and (god forbid) synthesizers, fails to take proper account of her brief celebrity's ultimate cost. Of course, the song reserves its sharpest darts for the circling pricks who "want her broken with her mouth wide open", but a tut-tutting undercurrent seems to insist on her complicity in whatever comes next.

I dunno, I don't mean to fault Elvis Costello. It's a good song, and the sexual politics of his early material have by now been done to death. But I'm reminded of the Rolling Stones' "Mother's Little Helper" and XTC's "Battery Brides", two more songs in which a gimlet-eyed man takes cynical stock of the women in his view and extrapolates from his observations some larger social commentary. As She goes, so goes the world...

Do people still write songs like this? Can y'all think of any other good examples? And how do things shift when the genders are reversed?

Hyped about this album tbh, they're getting great copy on Vice

there seem to be a lot of new-wave songs like this, I guess as a genre it was big on both angry nerds and "social commentary"? I thought of Little Bitch by the Specials and Wait Till Your Boat Goes Down by XTC again, but both of those maybe have the anger and bitterness a little too close to the surface, possibly what you're getting out requires at least a pretence of superior detachment?

isn't there a thread somewhere on an ilm with a long acrimonious debate about whether Common People is one of these songs?

O god, the Common People thread. Yeah, it's all kinds of clusterfuck. Mostly abt class iirc.

Tori Amos - Girl would be an example of how the narrative shifts when a woman sings of objectification.

I'm not going to expand too much on this one, other than to say that it's more effective coming from Tori as she can relate to the experiences of the gender she's describing. So when she says "She's been everybody else's girl, Maybe one day she'll be her own" it doesn't read as detached cool or being observant and having her cake and eating it too, it reads like learned experience.

Tori Amos track is interesting, but yeah, very different in tone & sensibility.

In wondering about how the form would work with the genders switched, I suppose I was thinking of TLC's "No Scrubs" and Paula Cole's "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone", songs where the modern man gets called out. Not that either of those really fits, either...

Um, "Wait till your boat goes down" was about a "Yachting boy" though?

Or buoy, maybe..

xp Innocence by Kirsty MacColl maybe? possibly similar to This Year's Girl and Battery Brides in that the song's "narrator" has an insight denied to the subject, the latter being an oblivious dupe of society?

How about Marianne Faithfull - Why D'ya Do It? - it's an indictment of the cheating lovers though.

Love the Kirsty MacColl song. Never heard it before, or perhaps just never listened closely. Doesn't seem to be attempting any larger comment on the state of the world, but maybe I'm just not catching all the implications.