Pimpin' Ain't Easy

Poor Robbie Williams. It's not easy being a pretty boy in the spotlight. Although Williams hasn't ever quite captured the attention of American fans, in the United Kingdom he has been tabloid fodder for years. As part of the phenomenally successful Britpop act Take That, Williams stood out as the rebel bad boy. To his legions of teen girl fans, Williams undoubtedly embodied fantasies of thwarting parental authority through "dangerous" boys, just as to his many gay male fans, Williams' fresh-faced beauty barely masked a bit of working-class rough trade. After quitting/being fired (accounts differ) from Take That, Williams dedicated himself to claiming some "real" rock cred by hanging with Oasis' Gallagher brothers, and partying, drinking, and drugging to excess. The press, of course, had a field day as Williams spun out of control, and his youthful physique turned bloated and worn-out. It didn't take Williams long to manage a self-transformation, however, and soon he was back, trim, toned, and fabulous with the release of his first solo album, 1997's Life Thru a Lens.

Still, as that title suggests, life in the public gaze never sat well with Robbie. Witness "Rock DJ," the first single and video from Williams' latest album, Smile When You're Winning. Of course, his own relationship to being seen merely as a "piece of meat" (as he has remarked to MTV) is the question he is always asked. And in its very over-the-top-ness, "Rock DJ" self-consciously ironizes all the beauty myths and gender panics Williams embodies. Nonetheless, all this self-reflexivity is unconvincing to me. Despite Williams' self-parody, it seems his very masculinity is at stake as he tries to negotiate the stereotypical female/feminine/passive position of sex object and sexual spectacle. Williams sings in the middle of some futuristic, all-female nightclub as a bevy of leggy Gucci and Dior models roller-skate in circles around him, pointedly ignoring his strip-tease and macho antics. The lyrics help us understand Robbie's performance of rock-star egotism and sexual exploitation of women. "Give no head / No backstage passes. / Have a proper giggle / I'll be quite polite. / But when I rock the mike / I rock the mike right." Clearly, Williams isn't sure if he wants to be (or is) a gentleman (he'll be "quite polite") or a cad for whom blow-jobs = backstage passes, but one thing is for sure, he can certainly rock the mike. Right.

Nevertheless, the video distances itself from the cocksure swagger of these lyrics. Instead, it focuses on Williams' complicated position in a specular economy in which his sexual objectification creates gender anxieties at the same time that he desires and openly courts that objectification. As he poses and preens, flexing his muscles and stripping down to a skimpy pair of black underpants emblazoned with a tiger's head on the front, the cool beauties circling him couldn't care less what he's up to. While Williams displays more and more of himself, the women retreat further into their aloofness. Eventually, he sings, "Pimpin' ain't easy / But if you're sellin' it, it's all right," and he strips off his tigery undies, presumably giving the women what they want. (Of course, Williams is only pimpin' it for women, despite the fact that he has a huge gay male following; admitting male observers into his display would further destabilize the masculinity he is trying to redeem.) But even this ultimate exposure fails to elicit a reaction, and the roller-skating babes remain unimpressed by his dick-swinging dance. And then, after all his narcissistic self-exposure, Williams finally "gets it": beauty is only skin deep, and it's what is on the inside that counts. Yelling "C'mon!", Williams grabs the skin around his hips and peels it off his torso like a too-tight t-shirt. Suddenly the women take notice and as Williams continues to disassemble himself, they catch the skin, muscles, and organs he offers, and literally devour him. In the end, after all his soft tissue is gone, one of the video's beauties (the nightclub's DJ, who is "keeping [him] up all night") approaches Williams and dances with his skeleton. Only after Williams has been bared to the bones (as opposed to merely baring his own bone) can proper heterosexual romance take place.