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Beyonce f/ Slim Thug :: "Check On It"From #1s (Sony; 2005)
We’re over to the other side of the floor, where the fairer gender unfairly games the older, slightly more reserved boys. It’s pretty great here. It’s also pretty fucking confusing.
More individual and fun than almost all other recent R&B/hip-hop singles, “Check On It” is a fat cut above the likes of “Run It!,” Beyonce’s coy, fluttering performance and irresistible vocal hooks meshing perfectly with Swizz Beatz’ whirligig thumper in a club number that epitomizes the sonic cock tease. Here Beyonce admonishes me, “You think that I’m teasin’ / But I ain’t got no reason / I’m sure that that I can please you / But first I gotta read you.” I sort of doubt the good motives of her reticence (and the inadvertence of the double negative), though, when just before that she’s singing, “You can look at it / As long as you don’t grab it / If you don’t go braggin’ / I’ma let you have it.”
Beyonce first asks her victims to chase her, promises eventual reciprocation as long as they pace themselves, but then demands that if they’re “gonna put it on” her, they have to do it like none’s done before. By the end of the second verse, she’s admitting, “I can be a tease,” but, no, really, Beyonce Knowles just wants to please you. Really. Move on past some totally inconsequential Slim Thug rhymes (why’s a dude interrupting our mass fantasy?) back to the ridiculously catchy chorus, which repeats four times and bludgeons the male ego into domestic submission. “Check On It” certainly isn’t about the ideal empowerment of women, though, but rather empowerment via self-objectification. In her anthem, the only pronoun that Beyonce can find for herself and her ladies is “it.”
Thankfully, the track’s jubilance aborts any notion that cold pragmatism fuels “Check On It” and instead casts the whole affair in the more affable light of cheeky role-playing. Its ambiguities only make an already terrific single more interesting; for me, the defining images from the song’s video are the shots where Beyonce’s “tworking it” in a pink two-piece with her hair in braided rows and mammoth shades on her face. No one ever made such a get-up look attractive (or even acceptable) until that point. More importantly, no one’s ever looked so simultaneously the skank and the untouchable princess. If “Check On It” is just another example of what Dave Chappelle gripes on when he talks about titties bursting out the top of turtlenecks and proper girls in whore uniforms, then Beyonce as a person is a mystifying rejoinder to his frustration.
The fact that all this was used to promote a Pink Panther film starring Steve Martin defies further contemplation.
Chet Betz :: 18 March 2006 |
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