The Boy is Mine – Brandy & Monica
My old friend Adam and I used to disagree vehemently over this. It came out around the time he left – as it proved, permanently for the Southern Hemisphere – and I did him a minidisc mix (ha! remember minidisc? No, me neither) which contained not only several false starts of it, but a complex set of gags about it using the editable track title function of said format.
How guilty do I feel? well, obviously not *that* guilty: it’s a great song. What is there to feel guilty about? If I wanted to have some actual guilt, I should prolly pick something by Screwdriver, or Wagner, or Tomorrow Belongs To Me (although the Cabaret scene is amazing), so there’s no pleasure part.
In my quest for guilt, I suppose there’s a not-so-subtle undercurrent of masculine infidelity, but the video puts the lie to that, with Mekhi Phifer getting the door slammed in his face at the end. He might have been slippin’ it both ways for an undisclosed period of time, but Brandi and Monica have come to an understanding and he gets a double rejection. (You can read a brilliantly deadpan promo synopsis and all the other details here.)
What occurs ot me now, writing this is that whenever I hear this, I end up thinking about a clip I once accidentally saw of R Kelly, dressed in a business suit, wearing earrings and lifting a pair of baby seats (containing babies) out of the back of a Ferrari. I’ve tried to find the promo it came from to check it is actually two babies, but after wading through the confused ego of R Kelly for twenty minutes, I can take no more. It’s a brilliantly lazy shorthand for half a dozen aspirational mores – ‘Hey, chicks, dig me – I’m professional, successful, caring and busy’ – but it seems my subconscious has made the connection for me, whereby a pair of innocents are used only as ciphers in a male control fantasy.
OK, now I feel guilty.
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The Bush of Goats 