The offensive original lyrics to ‘Cheerleader’ by St. Vincent
St. Vincent, also known as Annie Clark, has carved out a place for herself as one of the most innovative artists working in contemporary alternative pop. Since making her debut with Marry Me in 2007, Clark has forged her own unique, glistening baroque sound, which has earned her three Grammys, comparisons to David Bowie, and excellent collaborations with David Byrne. Though she may have delivered some of the most important art pop albums in the modern iteration of the genre, even Clark has taken some lyrical missteps.
In 2011, St. Vincent delivered her third studio record, Strange Mercy. Another demonstration of her pop experimentation and rightful place in the new generation of art rock, the album earned Clark her greatest critical and commercial success yet. The record was preceded by three singles – ‘Surgeon’, ‘Cruel’, and ‘Cheerleader’ – the latter of which Clark struggled with during the writing process.
With pulsing vocals and distorting instrumentation, ‘Cheerleader’ is a statement of self-respect. “I’ve played dumb when I knew better, tried too hard just to be clever,” Clark declares in the verse before repeatedly stating, “I don’t wanna be a cheerleader no more.” Giving its name to the title, cheerleading becomes the song’s central metaphor, but Clark initially had other ideas.
“I had the ‘I, I, I, I don’t want to be a ‘blank’ no more’ line,” she recalled to A.V. Club, “and my original – I probably shouldn’t admit this – but my original thing was ‘dirt-eater’. Because I was thinking of the people in medieval times who were sin-eaters, and I was thinking of a word that could describe that sentiment.”
“I went through a million different ideas, like, ‘Wait, what’s this many syllables and can describe this thing that I’m trying to get at?’ And there were a lot of really bad ideas. John was like, ‘Dirt-eater sounds like you have a scatological fetish.’ I was like, ‘Oh no, gross.’ And then we Google it, and it’s also some obscure racist term, so I was like, oh no, that’s not going to work,” she continued.
Eventually, after lengthy brainstorming sessions with producer John Congleton, Clark landed on “cheerleader”.
“I wasn’t an actual cheerleader in high school,” she clarified, “I was a theatre nerd and was in the jazz band, and I was not that person. But I also didn’t harbour a secret hatred for cheerleaders or anything like that. I was pretty mellow and egalitarian.”
Though she had no actual experience as a cheerleader, the idea of it seemed to perfectly match the emotions in the song. Initially, her collaborator didn’t take her seriously, but Clark maintained that that was “just the word that summed it up. So there it was, take it or leave it.” Luckily, he took it and ‘Cheerleader’ was born.
Revisit the track below.
