Reading Between the Lines

We have read about this idea of “tabloidization” when we read the piece that Johansson wrote. However, sometimes the stars do a successful job in keeping some of their personal life secret. My friend showed me in an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine about how some artists, in the lyrics of their songs, put in little messages that almost none of the listeners of the songs can pick up…without the help of Cosmopolitan magazine at least, which has a section that actually decodes some of these lyrics from artists such as Jay-Z and Joe Jonas.

In Jay-Z’s song “Venus vs. Mars”, he throws in lines that talk about his relationship with Beyonce. One line reads, “shawty like Pepsi,” which has to do with Beyonce because Cosmopolitan says how she became a spokesperson for Pepsi in 2002. He also continues to say “the Bonnie to my Clyde,” and this has to do with how Beyonce was featured on Jay-Z’s single “03 Bonnie and Clyde”.

While Jay-Z’s hidden messages were out of love for Beyonce, Joe Jonas’s hidden messages that are directed to Taylor Swift in his song “Much Better” are not so loving towards her. One line says “get a rep for breakin’ hearts,” which Cosmopolitan says how “Taylor told Ellen DeGeneres the Joe dumped her during a 27-second phone call”. He also has a line that says “tears on her guitar”, referencing to Taylor’s song that was released in 2006 “Teardrops on my guitar”. These lyrics are very hurtful and are ones that couldn’t be displayed in the open.

This also relates to Hall’s discussion about encoding and decoding messages. These artists are encoding their songs with these hidden messages, and some people can decode them while others just take them at face value. This is one way that artists can put the word out a little bit but without the tabloids there to blow things out of proportion or misinterpret anything.