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I have thoughts on this new Megan Trainor “song”

March 03, 2023

Confession 

I’ve been tweeting again. I was pretty good about only lurking for a short time every few days for December and January, but vacation rolled around, and IDK, scrolling tweets is the best way to kill time at an airport. Mainly though, I missed my friends there. Some folks had migrated to Mastadon or ramped up their Tumblr or Instagram use, but a lot of my Twitter friends (many of whom have become IRL friends) were still using the site. 

Twitter was, and is, a very good tool for the nerdy culture-obsessed kind of queer people I get along with to connect with each other. The site keeps breaking in weird ways, Elon keeps firing people, and the overall vibes on the timeline are def off, so I don’t think the site is long for this world. So I’ll just let myself hang out with my friends there for now. Hopefully, we can all get on the same lifeboat when the Titanic finally sinks for good. Or, who knows, maybe Elon will be forced to sell the company off to cover his debts, and some investment firm will figure out how to keep it vaguely functional. 

Platform Updates

The Rest of Meta 

TikTok

Reddit

LinkedIn 

Pinterest (disclaimer: I’m currently a contractor with Pinterest) 

Mastodon 

Snap 

Twitter Alts

Culture Movers 

Fashion

AI 

You’ll never be mother 

Meghan Trainor is at it again. This week she released a preview of her upcoming single “Mother.” My mom always stressed the importance of mainly saying kind things about other people. But she just reads this newsletter and isn’t my editor, so I’ll say it. This track is wretched. It sounds like it was designed to be played exclusively in pediatrician waiting rooms. I’ve discussed my love for hating Trainor before and could dedicate this entire newsletter to describing the physical and emotional pain this song is causing me, but I actually want to use it as a jumping-off point to a larger internet-y issue: where “internet speak” actually comes from.  

If you’ve seen tweets like these or heard folks on TikTok use “mother” as a term of address, you’ll understand the linguistic trend Trainor is attempting to tap into here. While her lyrics (in this preview at least) don’t perfectly mirror the current slang, it would be naive to think, in today’s music industry, that this track isn’t calculating crafted for use as a TikTok sound for conveying a mood of mother-ness. While I’m not a forensic linguistics expert, I do have a good sense of where this use of the word “mother” comes from in our culture: drag, specifically drag queens of color.

I’m not the first person to notice how Black English gets coopted by the internet and repositioned as “internet speak.”  But this trend has no sign of slowing down, so it’s worth repeating. Language evolves over time, and I don’t feel qualified to say exactly when a term crosses over into general population use, but I do think all of us, especially white people who create content online, can do more to highlight the communities where this language originates. 

“Tea.” “Extra.” “Pressed.” So much of the language people now treat as “internet language” originated with Black people. There’s one specific community I want to call out here that’s been underappreciated for their contributions to American culture for decades. That’s the Ballroom scene. For those of you unfamiliar, please go watch Paris Is Burning and Legendary this weekend (both are amazing, you’ll love them). Ballroom gave us vogue (yup, it didn’t start with Madona). In Ballroom found family groups often organized themselves into Houses. 

Houses function as alternative families, primarily consisting of Black and Latino LGBTQ+ individuals, and provide shelter for those who feel ostracized by conventional support systems. Houses are led by "mothers" and "fathers" who are experienced members of the ballroom scene, typically drag queens, gay men or transgender women, who provide guidance and support for their house "children". The children of a House are each other's "siblings” (source) 

Performers from the House of Lanvin on stage in HBO’s Legendary wearing stunning all red outfits. They look good. 

Our current moment of “mother” feels like a reference to these House Mothers to me. Drag performers and trans women of color who care for their community, all while looking absolutely fantastic. So I hope Trainor has thought about how she can showcase Ballroom talent with this song. But given the track sounds like a TJ Maxx dressing room in the rundown part of purgatory, I kinda doubt it. 

Closing Blurb 

I finally played around with ChatGPT this week. But just to do a Blade Runner bit on Twitter. It was easy to use and, I guess, gave me a useful answer if I wasn’t trying to provoke it into revealing that it’s a Replicant. 

Anyway, have a wonderful weekend, go watch some queer art, listen to some good music, and live your life to the fullest.