Subversion and Convention in Eddie Money, Essay Example

Eddie Money’s “Shakin’” is a sultry, sensual pop song about young love, sexuality, and rebellion. It would have absolutely scandalized Confucius. Far from promoting period-specific contemporary cultural values, “Shakin’” glorifies young people breaking the rules about absolutely everything. For example, consider the first two lines: “Rosanna’s daddy had a car she loved to drive/Stole the keys one night and took me for a ride.” The male singer narrates the story of absconding with his girlfriend, who has helped herself to her father’s car. Far from promoting social virtue, ren, or social propriety, li, Eddie Money is singing about going behind one’s parents backs, helping one’s self to the car in order to spend some un-chaperoned time with one’s paramour (Lau 118-119). As such, “Shakin’” qualifies already as suyue, “vernacular music,” designed to promote sentiment and what Confucius—and the conventions of American culture, for that matter—consider to be immoral behavior, as opposed to yayue (118).

The chorus of the song, in particular, is heavy on innuendo. “She was shakin’ oh oh oo-oohh/Snappin’ her fingers oh oh oohhh/She movin’ round and round… That girl was shakin’.” The values of the song could not possibly be more clear: give in to your impulses and desires, and wonderful things will happen. The driving rhythm and melody, punctuated by the beats of the drums, accentuate this considerably. It is a highly melodic song in some parts, notably in the verses, and the riffs are positively scorching. Collectively, this reinforces the overall theme of the song. The second verse goes on to talk about youthful alcohol consumption and speeding: “We started drinkin’ wasn’t thinkin’ too straight/She was doin’ 80 and she slammed on the brakes.” Here, there are no consequences for reckless and quite possibly illegal behavior: “Got so high we had to pull to the side/We did some shakin’ till the middle of the night.”

And yet, Eddie Money’s music fits within a long-standing niche in American popular music, for crooners of precisely this type: artists whose songs glorify giving into youthful desires and impulses, especially in contravention of the rules laid down by parents. True, Eddie Money and other popular artists are suborning one of the most basic of the five great relationships Confucius delineated, namely that between parents and children. On the other hand, what Eddie Money and other popular artists of this type arguably represent is a manageable expression of rebelliousness.

Eddie Money’s music, like that of many other artists before, during, and after his time, was popular in no small part because of the degree to which it expressed youthful desires and angst. However, the very popularity of this music attests to a relatively widespread acceptance within American culture. Generation after generation of American youth has had its Eddie Money, Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar, and the like: artists whose music glorified hormone-fueled angst and rebellion against ever-disapproving, stern, fundamentally clueless parents. At what point can it be said that such artists simply represent the expression of a kind of rite-de-passage in American youth culture?

And, too, the music of Eddie Money speaks to an ethos of self-expression, autonomy, and doing one’s own thing which is quite arguably an expression of conventional, mainstream American culture. As such, while “Shakin’” and many of Eddie Money’s other songs derive much of their popularity from their seeming subversion of “The Rules”, they also cater to a very popular set of attitudes in American culture that encourages doing precisely this. From a strict Neo-Confucian perspective, “Shakin’” promotes immorality and sentiment, and is thus vulgar ‘popular’ music. On the other hand, it is a kind of ‘manageable rebellion’ in service of promoting a certain image of impulse, angst, and autonomy, and there could scarcely be anything more conventionally American than this image.

Works Cited

Money, Eddie. “Shakin’.” YouTube.com. YouTube, pub. 25 Sept. 2012. Web. 03 Jan. 2014. Retrieved from:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q9Y_jb1pcU&list=PLwCH6fXCwwNCmc_UDidjZTI5eXbqZfb4j&feature=share&index=7