Prince’s song, “If I Was Your Girlfriend” not only twists gender roles, further showcasing his androgynous-like lifestyle, but it also shares an overall truth to the female population. This truth is not something symbolic or larger than life, the truth is: girls tell their girlfriends EVERYTHING. In this song, Prince wants to get inside his lover’s head so he can know how to please her and know exactly what she wants at any given time. While analyzing the lyrics it is simple to see that he not only wants to know what she says to her friends about Prince, or the supposed speaker since the lyrics are poetic, but the speaker also wants to know everything he can so he can please his woman. However, a few of these lines are disturbing, and would definitely not happen if he was a “Girlfriend” of anyone I know. Towards the end, Prince uses the lines, “Would you let me give you a bath?” and “And would you, would you let me kiss you down there/ You know down there where it counts.” What these lines are basically saying is that he wants to be the best girlfriend ever, but by still being this woman’s lover. He wants her to be able to tell him everything and anything she needs to, and through these lyrics, he would connect not only on the obvious physical level, but also on an emotional level.
In a similar song, Beyonce’s “If I Were A Boy,” she uses conflicting action in her verses, in comparison to her chorus. In the verses of the song, she uses actions that would be deem her boyish self “bad boyfriend material” while the chorus displays the male Beyonce as an understanding and faithful man. When watching the video for this song, it is easy to tell that the gender roles are switched: she is the cop while the boyfriend is a secretary; she is surrounded by all males and he is surrounded by all females; and he watches her in a close situation with a co-worker with tears filling up his eyes. Though these seem more like double standards and false reputations for most men, it has, unfortunately, become a message to girls in American culture that men cannot be trusted; this is shown through many songs (the first that come to my mind are more Beyonce songs and also a few by Rihanna) and adultery and infidelity portrayed in television and film. However, in the video, there is a twist. It switches back to the “proper gender roles.” The last chorus is changed to:
“But you’re just a boy/ And you don’t understand/ How it feels to love a girl someday/ You wish you were a better man/ You don’t listen to her/ You don’t care how it hurts/ Until you lose the one you wanted/ Because you’ve taken her for granted/ And everything you had got destroyed.”
By analyzing these two songs, it is easy to see that one sex cannot always know what the opposite wants or feels because, technically, nobody can be both male and female, and feel the different emotions and hormones, (testosterone and estrogen included. God help if someone has both hormones.) The scary thing about a relationship is that you can never really know what the other is feeling.
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