Spending a mellow New Year’s Eve at home, with my pregnant wife and twenty-month-old daughter asleep, I flipped through the stations on the Tee Vee and paused on the perennial Dick Clark “Rockin New Years” or whatever it’s called. After a moment I was just about to change channels when Willow Smith - movie star Will Smith’s pre-teen daughter - came on the stage.
Now, I’m generally allergic to the bubblegum/hip hop/top 40 style of the music she “sang” so I won’t bother commenting on that. But what did strike me was how awkward this ten-year-old kid seemed on stage. She performed all the choreographed moves smoothly with the other dancers, and pranced around in what surely was a heavily rehearsed routine. But underneath the gloss of the performance she had - to me at least - an unsettling look of terror, or misery, or maybe just unease. The look of a marionette being expertly manipulated. With child stars like Brittany Spears you sense that they strove for the spotlight. With talent, luck, and hunger, pop tarts like Spears made their way to the top. But when a child star is the offspring of a famous person you can’t help but wonder how much of their career is simply the manufactured product of the parent’s desire.
But Willow’s face behind her “face” isn’t the only thing that was off. Her voice was so auto-tuned and weird sounding that I couldn’t even tell if she was lip syncing or not. Now, I have no problem with manipulating the sound of instruments, including the human voice. Any technique that can lead to interesting and artistic or moving music/sound is positive. But when that manipulation distances me from the artist (using that term loosely in the Willow Smith context) and his or her work, and especially when I’m distanced from the artist in a live performance, then it is a problem. Live performance should offer us a connection we’re not able to achieve with a pre-recorded work. Perhaps not necessarily a better connection, but certainly something different, and hopefully never worse. But Willow’s performance - just like those of performers who stand behind a laptop for a whole show - left me further away than if I hadn’t seen her at all. Not surprisingly, the crowd, pumping fists and “whipping” their hair as instructed, were delighted with the spectacle, which served only to distance me further - first from the performer, then from the crowd.
The song performed was called “Whip My Hair,” with Willow sporting a fantastic pompadour so cartoonish that it makes Ace Ventura’s do seem sedate by comparison. And she and the background dancers indeed whip their hair throughout the routine, with the song lyrically culminating with the command “don’t matter if it’s long [or] short, do it, do it, whip your hair” - a final, sad irony for a young black woman, whose natural hair could never be whipped the way she and the dancers are doing in the show nor as she sings for us all to do. The liberation of whipping one’s hair is a peculiar message to send to other young black kids who, without the aid of thousand-dollar weaves and toxic chemical relaxers, could never do so. A double bind is never easy to stomach, but when it’s perpetrated by a ten-year-old entertainer on a national stage it makes for a sour way to ring in the New Year.
In bed well before midnight, and far away from Dick Clark, I hugged my wife and smiled at her warmth, and the silence.
