Lyrically Speaking: Bodies, fantasy, and vanity in ‘Take a Sexy Picture of Me’ by CMAT
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, away from social media, you’re bound to have come across the viral TikTok soundbite of ‘Take a Sexy Picture of Me’, the latest single from CMAT. As she laments being “the butcher,” “the baker, the home and the family maker”, people are dancing along in what has been roundly dubbed the ‘woke Macarena’. It seems a joyous occasion, but the irony is that this spontaneous freedom depicts CMAT at her most vulnerable.
Although the title of the Euro-Country single ‘Take a Sexy Picture of Me’ suggests all the fun and frivolity that the social media age has to offer, this is also the precise point. That such supposed confidence and carelessness are nothing but a mirage facing the masses, as the very basis of such an image-based society is women being plagued with bodily insecurities from their very first memory of catching people’s eyes.
“Ever since I was a little girl/ I only wanted to be sexy/ Nine years old, tryna wax my legs with tape,” CMAT sings in the tune’s opening line. If there’s any illusion of avoiding the issue behind, this instantly blasts it away. The subject matter is searing, uncomfortable, and confronting, yes, but it only is this way because it’s true.
As she then charts through: “I did the butcher, I did the baker/ I did the home and the family maker/ I did school girl fantasies”. There’s the sense that girls are always supposed to grow up, both physically and mentally, way ahead of their time. As children, they’re immediately forced to consider their image in relation to whatever career path they may take. And it’s only once they’ve achieved all that, years later, that they, as adults, look back and wish they could strip it all away in favour of being their authentic selves.
CMAT has already spoken widely about how she wrote the song in response to previous searing public criticism of her physical appearance. But the reality is that the lyrics can be applied to nearly every woman in every situation, regardless of whether she lives out her days in the eye of fame or not. “You haven’t looked at me the same/ Since I turned 27/ Where goes my potential?/ Oh, she’s up in Heaven/ Rest in peace to any chance of me/ Dating within the station”, the singer claims in the song’s bridge. Therein lies the secondary problem—women are forced to fly through their lives, only granted a split second to be deemed commercially attractive, before they’re just considered a commodity forevermore.
“I’ve been having a horrible time/ Of late, I get none of your sympathy/ But all of the pain hits and the fog lifts/ And then it’s too much for therapy”, she wails in the chorus, and in this sense, it is steeped in pathos and tragedy. This is the effect of when scrutiny and criticism become too much, whether hailing from inner or outer voices. But in the sorry state of the world today, what do we do to make ourselves feel better? “Heed my solution/ And take a sexy picture of me.”
It’s in this moment that the true extent of the insecurity comes to light, but only when CMAT thinks you’re no longer listening. In the song’s closing lines, she says: “Make me look 14, oh/ Or like ten, or like five/ Or like two, like a baby/ Whoever it is you’re gonna love/ So you’ll be nice to me”. It’s delivered in a jaunty, easy rhythm, so you’re too distracted to truly comprehend the meaning, but this is exactly the point. We’re all too obsessed with our image-oriented bubbles of vanity that we don’t realise the plague of insecurity going on around us and coursing within us. We are so starved for love, respect and decency that we have implicitly agreed to being rendered in whatever image of an age required for the beholder to accept us, as long as they accept us, putting our wants and image of ourselves aside to serve a monolithic entity.
As a whole, ‘Take a Sexy Picture of Me’ is equally superfluous as it is profound, which is its precise lyrical strength in not only holding a mirror up to society and all the commentaries that come with this, but cementing CMAT as a truly visionary songwriter who possesses the ability to reckon with the world while bopping your head. The rising message from the song is that, unfortunately, no matter how depressing it may look, image scrutiny is here to stay in some form, but it’s our choice to dance in the face of it anyway.
The clever lyrical journey of the song is one that begins in relative innocence, soars to sexual heights, and then begs to return to its starting point. CMAT starts by trying to wax her legs at the age of nine, laments her supposed loss of youthful beauty at 27, and then wants to look like a two-year-old by the end, so where’s the throughline? The point is this is not just social media—although it does play a major role—but women’s constant battles with their age and external value, which will forever be dismally linked.
In between it all, you’ve got the wrath of Instagram and body image to contend with, and in many ways, CMAT points out that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy when women are blatantly taught to hate themselves from their earliest memory. The fact that all this weight, literal and metaphorical, can simply be cast off with the power of one sexy picture is so frivolous, but also searingly true.
Who knew a TikTok dance could hold such a poignant point? It’s ironic, in this sense, that no one’s really listening; but, then again, you’ll only have their attention for another 30 seconds before the next trend takes hold. So, better make it count.
