Review Of Alanis Morissette's "My Humps"

Funny!:

No doubt realizing it would be impossible to make the song even dumber than it already is, Morissette pretends to take it seriously. Her version is nearly dirge-like, with sad-sack pianos and a vocal that sounds as if it were recorded at the bottom of a dark, damp well. "Whatcha gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside that trunk?" she wails, inflicting existential angst onto what was once a playful dance-floor tease.

All that ass inside them jeans, Morissette suggests, all that breast inside that shirt isn't emancipating this woman at all—it's imprisoning her, trivializing her. Ironically (isn't it?), the biological markers of womanhood infantilize the song's narrator, reduce her to grotesque baby-talk. By decelerating lyrics like "Tryna feel my hump hump/Lookin' at my lump lump" to the point where you actually have to listen to them closely, Morissette makes such lines sound even more like a talking chimp's plaintive, terrified attempts to alert the world to the sexually abusive tendencies of its handler than they do in the original.

But that's just part of the Morissette version's charm. Along with tweaking Fergie, Morissette satirizes her own serious-artist pretensions as well. In the one scene in her video that doesn't have an antecedent in the original, Morissette is crouched on the floor, her body enveloped in a slow-motion storm of feathers as she sobs hysterically and great torrents of mascara run down her face like the Mississippi in flood season. "You don't want no drama!" she howls, but it's clear that's all she has to give—drama, drama, drama. So fervently introspective, so relentlessly vigilant about maintaining her integrity as an artist she can even suck every molecule of fun out of three minutes of pure pop-fluff mindlessness!

...Fittingly, Fergie's response to her new doppelganger was to send her a gushy fan note—imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all—and a cake shaped like an ass. And, really, is there any more astute commentary on the video than that? "My Humps" allows the erstwhile pop tart to have her feminist cake and shake it too.

...What's gone largely undiscussed about the music video resurrection, however, are the specific qualities of the videos that repeatedly prove to be the most popular. In the early days of MTV, it was all about crazy New Wave haircuts, matching suits and the absence of anyone who looked remotely like David Crosby from your line-up. Today, three key elements pop up again and again amongst the web's most popular music videos: familiarity, humor and dorky white people dancing. Long before the advent of the web, it turns out, "Weird Al" Yankovic had already discovered the secret to success in the YouTube Era.

Familiarity is necessary because there's too much content on the web. When thousands of music videos are always just a click way, why try to tempt viewers with something completely new? It's a battle you'll rarely win. Instead, use something familiar.