Despite the fact that we’re “in the future” there’s quite a bit that somehow seems much tamer than it used to “back in the day” that was circa 2001–incidentally when City High charted at number one on Billboard’s Hot Rap Singles chart with “What Would You Do?” As the first single from their debut self-titled album, the subject matter of forced prostitution (how else is a woman with a palatable body with no other prospects supposed to make ends meet?) for an initial release and introduction to a group might even be considered too much of an artistic “risk” today, what with the easily offended nature of conservative parties that would not take to a message supporting (or at least not judging) hooking as a means of paying the bills for oneself and her son. And even though it was conservative in the Bush II era, the statute of limitations on offending was much more lax.
Cut to fifteen years later, when Clean Bandit releases the single “Rockabye”–eventually to be included on What Is Love?–in mid-October of 2016 (still the blissful pre-Trump era, a period when everything didn’t seem to be so rife with political meaning). The content extremely reminiscent of “What Would You Do?,” Sean Paul (who increasingly looks like Timbaland) opens the track with the dedication, “For all the single moms out there/Going through frustration,” and is then joined by Anne-Marie (best known for exhibiting codependency issues on “Don’t Leave Me Alone“) to paint the picture, “She works at nights, by the water/She’s gone astray, so far away from her father’s daughter/She just wants a life for her baby/All on her own, no one will come/She’s got to save him (daily struggle).”
An exact replica of the narrative depicted by City High members Ryan Toby, Robbie Pardlo and Claudette Ortiz, the original scene created in their single conjures the image of a single mother at her ultimate moment of desperation, hitting rock bottom as she mixes the art of stripping with the art of hooking.
To add insult to injury, Lonni–as we learn her name is at the outset of the song (though is it her real name or her stripper name? It’s at your discretion.)–is someone our narrator used to know from junior high, and is clearly feeling very judgmental about Lonni’s fall from grace, to which she counters, “What would you do if your son was at home crying all alone on the bedroom floor ’cause he’s hungry/And the only way to feed him is to, sleep with a man for a little bit of money?”
Still feeling high and mighty about it, however, he returns, “Girl you ain’t the only one with a baby/That’s no excuse to be living all crazy.” “All crazy” being simply the only norm for most people needing to make money when they were not born into Trumpian wealth or did not miraculously manage to turn their Instagram following into cash. Barring his air of superiority or not, Lonni makes no bones about being unashamed of doing whatever it takes to support her son and give him a better life, getting extremely graphic at one point to say, “Me and my sister ran away, so my daddy couldn’t rape us, before I was a teenager.”
We definitely don’t know half as much background information about the sex worker in “Rockabye,” an eerie lullaby indeed, as the story describes an exchange between mother and son that goes as follows: “She tells him, ‘Your life ain’t gon’ be nothing like my life. You’re gonna grow and have a good life. I’m gonna do what I’ve got to do.” So, um, in that sense, “Rockabye” is somewhat grittier for having a scene of this committed matriarch having no qualms about telling her progeny that Mommy is a whore. Talk about imbuing someone with an Oedipus complex.
In the same way as the tragic heroine of “Rockabye,” Lonni insists she endures the pain and humiliation of it all “‘Cause I wouldn’t want my baby to go through what I went through.” Ah, there truly is nothing more inexplicable than a mother’s love (or hate, in Joan Crawford’s case–but, as addressed below, that’s probably just because Joan had a daughter she was jealous of, rather than a son she could be “maternal” toward).
Visually, however, “Rockabye” takes “What Would You Do?”‘s concept to an even more depressing level as the video (which has almost two billion views to City High’s 15.5 million) shows our reluctant stripper mother essentially dissociating from her club milieu to envision herself somewhere more pleasant, respectable–like the forest. That way, she doesn’t have to fully acknowledge what she’s doing to make sure her son is taken care of. Further, the “Rockabye” video is more intricate in displaying moments of tenderness between mother and son, as though to drive home the point of just how important her spawn is to her in order for her to find the strength to lose a little bit more of her dignity every day for the sake of performing this job (what Lonni would characterize as, “For you this is just a good time, but for me this what I call life”).
Of course, in the end, if we were to get follow-up tracks to each of these tales, it would be inevitable that the son had grown up to resent the fact that Mama was a rollin’ stone (a.k.a. whore), judging her profession with as much uppitiness as everyone else despite the fact that it kept him with clothes on his back and food in his paunch–somehow, in his mind, giving him license to act like the asshole son in TLC’s “Waterfalls” (“But all the praying just ain’t helping at all/’Cause he can’t seem to keep his self out of trouble/So, he goes out and he makes his money the best way he know how/Another body laying cold in the gutter”).
But it’s not about all she sacrificed, so much as how she sacrificed. Maybe if she’d had a daughter, on the other hand, there would be a little more empathy and understanding–then again, Mama probably wouldn’t have worked the pole as hard, or at all, for a daughter. The mother-daughter competitiveness scene generally being tense enough as it is without adding body rivalry to the equation as a girl grows older and presumably into a more alluring version of her mom in that she has youth and Mama don’t. Youth that’s good for many more generations of this type of song discussing the mother who has to “work at the Pyramid tonight,” as it were, in order to raise what will invariably be another ingrate misogynist.
