Like any other media, certain popular songs have not aged well due to several issues, encompassing everything from their blatant sexism to racism. In their piece Girl Talk, artists Wu Tsang and Fred Moten are attempting to reimagine an old popular song of the same title. "Girl Talk" has been deemed by musician Michael Feinstein as the "last great male chauvinistic song written in the '60s." Through Tsang and Moten's work, the song is reimagined. It has made progress in terms of gender equality, reflecting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Gender Equality.
As described by ArtNews, the video piece, Girl Talk, is an attempt to answer the question, “What happens to a song about women written by men when it’s reconstituted by a woman, re-recorded by a man, and then sung by a man dressed as a woman?” This is exactly what Wu Tsang and Fred Moten do.
Girl Talk, with many iterations sung by different artists, was originally written by Neal Hefti and lyricist Bobby Troup. The two men wrote misogynistic lyrics such as “They like to chat about the dresses they’ll wear tonight / They chew the fat about their tresses and the neighbors’ fight / Inconsequential things that men really don’t care to know.” However, in 1969, jazz legend Betty Carter wrote a version for women to sing along to that excluded the misogynistic lyrics.
The original lines reinforced that Girl Talk is about gossiping as it is seen in the eyes of patriarchy. In the fourteenth century, the so-called dawn of modern England, the term gossip referred to companions one acquired in childbirth and was also a term for close women friends with strong emotional connotations. It wasn’t until the fifteenth century, when English women began to lose their social standing, that popular mystery plays began derogatory depictions of women and their gossip.
Within these plays, women went to taverns in groups to drink and complain of their marital situations, only to then return home and tell their husbands that they had been to church. Hence, over the centuries, the term “gossip” continued its downward spiral, coming to mean discord-sowing talk, far from its original meaning of strong and healthy sisterhood.
Wu Tsang and Fred Moten took this song about gossiping women, which had been written by two men and then rewritten by a woman, and rerecorded it with the help of their mutual friend, musician and composer Josiah Wise, otherwise known as Serpentwithfeet.
Moten then lip-synced to the song Serpentwithfeet recorded in the final video art output, a music video of Wu Tsang and Fred Moten’s version of Girl Talk. In the video, Moten is dressed in light drag, wearing make-up and a flowy feminine robe. He twirls playfully in a sunlit garden and even shakes his finger at some of the lyrics.
The end result feels celebratory: a chance for the artists to playfully poke at how patriarchy had reinforced gender roles.
When Tsang and Moten’s Girl Talk was shown at the New Museum in 2017, a critic’s piece at the New Yorker had called Tsang Moten’s longtime female collaborator. The critic's words had completely misrepresented them as people, artists, and the work that they produced.
Tsang and Moten reached out through a letter to the editor to clarify that while Tsang does use she/her pronouns, she is not a “female,” and that referring to their work as simply Tsang being Moten's "female collaborator" is a complete mischaracterization of their relationship. They affirmed that Girl Talk “is part of an ongoing refusal of the imposition of such choices and every other mode of (self-)determination,” reminding their audiences that gender is fluid and that there’s a need for gender equality not just for women, but also for gender non-conforming people.
You can find out more about Girl Talk and other pieces by Wu Tsang and Fred Moten by checking Wu Tsang’s Instagram @wu_tsang and Fred Moten’s Academy of American Poets’ page.