SOTW : "We Belong" by Pat Benatar

My song selection for this week's rotation comes on the heels of a set of recent global events in the last few weeks as well as some mid-day musings on my larger project of belonging as I’ve been reading some critical works on the topic (namely, Elspeth Probyn’s Outside Belongings and Lauren Berlant’s , The Female Complaint, the final installment in a trilogy).

Even in my pre-pubescent (and proto-MTV) years of jamming out to Friday Night Videos, I always got the sense that Pat Benatar's anthemic "We Belong" was a song that spoke to more than just the inner workings of intimate or romantic relationships. In my rebellious and feminist-separatist years of attending an all-girls Catholic high school, the song took on the tenor of banding together in a utopically-driven sisterhood, mobilized around a diverse set of interests –race, ethnicity, music, sexuality or fashion, to name a few. The song marked a type of naïve yet crucial political commitment to dialoguing with others in the spirit of understanding while simultaneously recognizing the Zen-inspired belief of mutuality or, as profoundly sung by The Monkees, the ethos of "a little bit me, a little bit you"



(more deep suburban thoughts and Oh! posting on this musical quartet later on down the line) that infuses the entangled nature or, in the vein of visual studies scholar, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, “the framework of bondage” that structures projects of belonging to national, racial, cultural, feminist, queer politics.

Drawing from the lyrical philosophies of Benatar’s power ballad, the sentiment of “cutting my feelings to the bone” provides a visceral and ironic reference to last month’s barrage of anti-emo riots in Mexico City. As thoroughly covered by LA Weekly writer Daniel Hernandez and OC Weekly editor Gustavo Arellano, violent reactions to emo youth goes beyond mere disagreements over fashion or musical taste. In Mexico City, where a majority of emo-affiliated youth are queer, the “anti-emosexual” campaign takes on a different valence of violence in belonging as homophobic aggression is thinly disguised under pop music “cultural” differences while emo youth continue to choose overt association with the scene despite consequences such as this



Meanwhile, half way across the world, a recent BBC News radio program debated this question – “Do Blacks and Asians have to behave like white people to succeed?”

Sparked by incidents of journalists and bloggers throughout the British Empire messily grappling with their levels of identification towards ideologies of blackness (whether as “coconuts” or “oreos” or even as “not-black-enough” by African American standards), at the same time, these incidents gesture towards the parallel experience of U.S.-based people of color’s reactions towards the now infamous blog, “Stuff White People Like.” As myself and a plethora of friends and family have wondered – Am I “white” because I like some of this stuff too? OR Does normalcy, almost to the point of boredom, still constitute what is considered “white” (and, therefore, not black and deviant, brown and spicy, or Asian and exotic)? OR, in the end, as the years in my undergrad Ethnic Studies classes taught and then beat into my head, can we really not veer that far from the Hegelian dialectics of intercultural contacts embodied in Benatar’s lyrics –

Don’t want to leave you really
I’ve invested too much time.
To give you up that easy
To the doubts that complicate your mind.

Heard through the headphone filters of this constellation of related news stories and critical writing, the melancholic yet tenacious undertow of “We Belong”’s melodies and mantra pull it back to its goal of meditating on the limits and possibilities of relationality (and away from the Hilton commercials’ creepy lifting of the children’s choir-sung ending to invoke its domestic and branded appeal for world travelers). The song’s strong, affective pull not only propels the currents of markets, cultures, politics, discourse, and commodities that infuse intellectual projects around belonging, it also provides us a soundtrack as we ride the waves of more ethical yet realistic approaches to living with each other in the present. - (CBB)



p.s. - please leave a comment and let us know if you
a. appreciate how PB is catherine zeta-jonesin' us by covering her pregnancy with above the chest camera shots

b. too owned this white blazer with shoulder pad look back in the late 1980s (bonus points if you had an additional brooch)

c. can explain the continuum of 1980s music videos that featured hanging cloth as backdrop

d. would like to argue for this video's reference to Tuck Everlasting or a bayou scene from a certain Disneyland ride with the final shots of the children's choir