Maren Morris Can Be Horny, But Can I?
On the acceptance of and critical acclaim for GIRL
Let me start by saying, I adore GIRL. It’s a stunning album and I listen to it a lot. It’s just bangers all the way down.
That’s actually why I ended up here, thinking about how horny this album is and what exactly the difference is in the critical and cultural praise of GIRL vs. other songs/albums of the same nature.
And I think it’s because she’s married.
I’ve been formulating this take for a good six months, since GIRL burst into my life like a freight train. It seems to occupy this interesting genre space. It could easily be classified as solely a country album, but I think the mainstream success of The Middle and Bones have pushed Maren into pop territory with ease.
But this isn’t a letter about how the music genres we’ve developed can rarely encompass the broad spectrum of interesting artists today.
It’s about an album written by a woman that is thoroughly sexy, and has been recognized in the mainstream as good and worthy and serious. It’s charming and empowering and emotional. At times, it’s really reeeeeally horny.
Maren has said before that this album has two parts. The first, she owns as her. Her thoughts and what her head space is. Then it shifts. It shifts into being about her relationship, about her marriage.
It shifts during Make Out With Me:
“This is the end of Side One of this record
Please now turn it over for the second side”
I mean, it’s right there. Make Out With Me. Bam, we are here. We’re talking about intimacy and we are in and it is about her husband.
Not her significant other. Her spouse, her one intimate partner. The love of her life.
Two songs later we hit the mother load in RSVP.
RSVP…. is a fuckin mood. It’s sultry and it’s R&B and it’s a full late night mood and I love the hell out of it.
It is also above reproach, right?
It is good for a woman to adore her husband and it is wonderful for a woman to feel secure in their physical marriage. It also doesn’t have complications. We know who it’s about. It’s…. proper.
“If you want more than your eyes on me, yeah
You can let me know privatelyRSVP
Bring your love to me, yeah
It's an open invitation to an all-night situation
If I'm where you wanna be”
It’s hot. It’s hot as fuck, and it’s about her hot as fuck husband. The way….. it “should” be?
The comparisons to Maren and what she’s done with GIRL are easy in my opinion: Kelsea Ballerini and Kasey Musgraves. All women who are singing emotional and fanciful and romantic and kinda horny songs about their spouses and receiving critical acclaim.
When I press forward though, when I try to think of one of her contemporaries that is not married…. it’s slim pickings.
Or it’s Taylor Swift.
Taylor Swift is the same age as Maren Morris, actually - both are 29 years old. There are differences sure, but many many similarities. A historically country artist making waves in the mainstream.
But is one of the differences between them the seriousness with which we view their music? The lens we experience it through? Does it diminish the words she sings about relationships and intimacy because, well, the general public opinion is that she’s young? That we’ve seen her date a few men?
Can Taylor Swift be as overtly sexual in her music as Maren has been, as an unmarried woman?
I mean…. can I even be that overtly sexual as an unmarried woman? Asking for me.
As I was formulating all of these thoughts I went through Taylor’s newest album and I just stared at the lyrics for The Man for a hot second absorbing how pertinent a song about being judged differently than a male artist is in this conversation.
“I would be complex
I would be cool
They'd say I played the field before
I found someone to commit to
And that would be okay
For me to do
Every conquest I had made
Would make me more of a boss to you“
Does commitment to someone elevate an artists authority on love? On sex?
Does an artists commitment to someone unlock the next level of critical acclaim? Now that we know who this woman is talking about in this song, and they have committed to that person, we can stop talking about the gossip of it and start focusing on the music?
I think it does. I think it’s right there. It’s in the inherent bias that says the good and right and inevitable thing is to settle down. That in settling down, you get it now. You’re in the club! You can understand what all the other songs are about.
That in choosing a lifelong partner, you’ll finally glimpse what love and what sex should really be.
I’ll be honest. Most of me hates this take. It is a slippery slope that let’s you slide into a spouse defining you and I don’t want that. Just like I don’t want, in any way, to imply that Maren’s album isn’t as great as it is.
I just….. genuinely could not stop thinking about the reception of GIRL in the current landscape.
GIRL is revelatory, and when I walk down the aisle to Shade, don’t you dare come for me about this newsletter. Because again, this album SLAPS.
But does it take off like this if it isn’t backed by a true love story? One with a happily ever after that is also alluded to in every way through these songs?
I…. I don’t know.
………Am I biased in this take as a 29 year old single woman? Yes.
I am ready to fight on this one y’all. Send me all of your thoughts, I’m begging you. xoxo