I don't watch as much music video TV as perhaps I should in my line of work and research, but mostly because so much of it is just horribly shit. But on Sunday morning I caught some of Video Hits while getting ready to start marking for the day, and within a minute or two I was gobsmacked with utter repulsion at what was playing out on the screen (and pumping out through the speaker system):

or at least a version of this: Stefani's 'Rich Girl' clip

I'd never heard the song, but hearing her going on and on about 'Harajuku girls' seemed kind of familiar, and bizarrely repetitive since she does the samething in the first single from this album, 'What You Waiting For?'. It probably appears in every single track for all I know. And then I started remembering all those photos from NW in the past couple of months which depict her flanked with four Japanese women, dressed up like dolls and posturing bizarrely, framing her excessive Whiteness. That photo above is pretty typical.

At first I couldn't decide whether I was more angry at the exploitative consequences of this performance, or because she had so missed the boat on the Harajuku craze but hadn't realised it. Rationality won out and I let the red mist take its hold in the direction of the former...

I started writing this post and the did some Googling to find out if these four Japanese women are always the same, or if she swaps them interchangeably like hair accessories. I came upon this article from Salon, and reproduced in full here.

There are a couple of passages which articulate much of what I was mulling over:

They shadow her wherever she goes. They're on the cover of the album, they appear behind her on the red carpet, she even dedicates a track, "Harajuku Girls," to them. In interviews, they silently vogue in the background like living props; she, meanwhile, likes to pretend that they're not real but only a figment of her imagination. They're ever present in her videos and performances -- swabbing the deck aboard the pirate ship, squatting gangsta style in a high school gym while pumping their butts up and down, simpering behind fluttering hands or bowing to Stefani. That's right, bowing. Not even from the waist, but on the ground in a "we're not worthy, we're not worthy" pose. She's taken Tokyo hipsters, sucked them dry of all their street cred, and turned them into China dolls.

Stefani has taken the idea of Japanese street fashion and turned these women into modern-day geisha, contractually obligated to speak only Japanese in public, even though it's rumored they're just plain old Americans and their English is just fine. She's even named them "Love," "Angel," "Music" and "Baby" after her album and new clothing line l.a.m.b. (perhaps a mutton-themed restaurant will follow). The renaming of four adults led one poster on a message board to muse, "I didn't think it was legal to own human pets. But I guess so if you have the money for it."

I don't think Stefani's smart or interesting enough for me to assume that this performance is in any way interrogatory of the exploitative mining of non-Western cultures for American pop cultural profit - she's already had her fun with Indian iconography with the appropriation of bindis in her early days of success. And a similar joke I made concerning Jet's motives didn't seem to go down that well (I wasn't *serious* people!)...

So I can't help but feel the bile rising as she seems to be reaping not only Japanese street culture (which is already a pastiche of every cultural artefact produced in the last thousand years) but recontextualising Japanese women outside of the active play that Harajuku street culture represents/ed, and transforming them into playthings for her amusement. It's so fucking decadent and archaic: dressing up humans, forcing them to enact her own little fantasy, or self-indulgent theatre in which she is the artist/creator who innovates and glows with blinding Whiteness.

It's a great big "Fuck You" to these women she belittles for her own gain

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