I’m going to write an eloquent and sophisticated opinion of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
But first, as the song says, let me take a selfie.
For those whose lives have not been made complete by the The Chainsmokers’ hit single “#Selfie”, here is a summary:
The music video opens with a girl in the bathroom of a club trying to figure out if the texts from Jason were a booty call. She wants to go smoke a cigarette. But first, she needs to take a selfie.
Enter catchy techno beat.
The girl returns, trying to pick both a filter to make her look tan and a clever caption for her Instagram post. She decides to take another selfie when she doesn’t get enough likes.
Catchy techno beat returns.
The girl returns, judging the other girls in the club, like the “fake model” who definitely bought all of her Instagram followers. Jason texts her, and she wonders if she should go home with him. She congratulates herself on her good selfie and the techno beat returns to finish the song.
And to think people told me that trying to memorize all the words over spring break would be a waste of time.
It would be easy to write the song off as a typical pop hit void of depth, musicality, or anything other than sex.
It could easily join the ranks of other current hits like “Talk Dirty,” where Jason Derulo “sings” about how he has been with girls around the world, and only needs to understand when they talk dirty to him, and 2 Chainz comes in to rap about international oral sex.
But “#Selfie” isn’t just a song using the “sex sells” philosophy to make money. “#Selfie” captures today’s culture.
The girl in the club represents most young women.
“Hold on! I do not go clubbing or get booty calls. I’m not like her at all,” you are probably thinking.
Partying differences aside, most women are just as self-absorbed and judgmental as she is. Replace girls in the club with people walking into class, Saga, or the aisles of Wal-Mart, and we all spend our time having very similar conversations judging what people are wearing or the way they talk or any number of other things.
Being judgmental is part of human nature, and has been since sin entered the world. If that weren’t the case, Jesus wouldn’t have said his oft-quoted command to the Pharisee: “Don’t judge, or you shall be judged.”
I could write about how we should judge less, and how “#Selfie” should open our eyes to how self-absorbed today’s society has become, but God already wrote a whole Bible about sin and judgment.
The point is that “#Selfie” represents our culture with frightening accuracy. Replace the booty call debate with trying to figure out if a guy likes you, and most girls have had fairly similar conversations.
Today’s social media and technology have magnified the problems. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter can capture every second of our lives and share it with the world.
This provides women fodder for their judgmental nature. They can see what all of their friends are doing at any given moment and form opinions about all of it.
But, conversely, it leaves women spending much of their time putting themselves in the best light so nobody can have anything negative to say about them.
My spring break is proof of how much time a group of girls spends taking and editing selfies. (For the record, the girl in the song shouldn’t even have asked if X Pro II or Valencia would make her look tan. She should definitely have gone with X Pro II. It even made my skin not look like it had spent the semester in a sunless polar vortex.)
But, rather than enjoy the sunny beaches of Florida, we spent our time on our iPhones editing pictures of ourselves so that everyone else could see how good we looked at the beach.
Between that and memorizing “#Selfie,” it was a break well spent.
