we have to rescue jax from 2012
Update: I have now seen Jax live twice, and I think we did it, guys.
Twice in my life now I’ve noticed that whenever a Democrat president succeeds a Republican, the national mood doesn’t get any less frenzied, but its frenzy takes… sillier directions. More frivolous directions. Like how Dubya had us all freaked out about war and recession, but as soon as Obama took office, we decided we could have a moral panic about Twilight instead. The Obama administration perpetuated far greater global harm than the Twilight franchise could ever conceive of, but The Killers couldn’t have known that would happen when they updated their 2007 song “Tranquilize” to decry “the vampires and the bombs” instead of “the Bushes and the bombs” (capitalization theirs) in 2009.
So last summer when I heard “Victoria’s Secret”, third place American Idol contestant and TikTok star Jaclyn “Jax” Miskanic’s epic pwnage of the titular company, my first thought was, “We are so fucking back.” Who was mad enough at Victoria’s Secret to not only write a song about it, but organize a tie-in flash mob outside one of their stores? Well, from late 2016 to early 2021, nobody. But now we think we can chill out and focus on smaller, lower-stakes targets. Like hell yeah, fuck Victoria’s Secret! I too spent my entire adolescence afraid to even look at their storefronts lest they exile me from the mall premises for having a BMI greater than 17. If a recovering anorexic wants to lyrically eviscerate them in F#, the best key in the world, on behalf of her babysitting charge, good! And now everybody hates Victoria’s Secret — either because they hate the song, which would not exist without the company in question, or simply because Jax is right: VICTORIA WAS MADE UP BY A DUDE!
I genuinely, unironically love “Victoria’s Secret.” I have no interest in defending myself in the court of public opinion for this one, but it’s true. Everything about it is straight out of the early ’10s, from the sound to the subject matter to Jax’s Photoshopped duckface on the single art. She’s a month younger than me, so I know we have the same taste in nostalgia. Which is what I assumed she was trying to invoke.
But “Cinderella Snapped”, Jax’s Buzzfeed article of a follow-up single, has me convinced that her mind is actually trapped in the year 2012. Her corporeal form has aged, but her spirit doesn’t know what COVID is. Listen to this thing! She sounds like Avril Lavigne covering “I Don’t Care” by Fall Out Boy. So once again, she did get me on a sonic level. I will scream “Cinderella Snapped” in the car at the slightest provocation. The slightest provocation being I voluntarily added it to my driving playlist. At first I told myself it was simply in service of this article, but like, I don’t think I’m taking it off at the end of the week.
The lyrics on the other hand… Let’s. Let’s just go through them together.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of three subversive Cinderella adaptations from my (and Jax’s) childhood years where the titular character corollary has agency and saves the day and all that, and none of them are half as clumsy and unsubtle as this. Like, I don’t have a problem with Evil Adulterous Prince if he functions as a stand-in for the monarchy itself, but as you’ll see, he really doesn’t. He’s an outlier.
Dude! Remember one (1) song prior, when CEOs were old men who live in Ohio making money off of girls like you? Why is this aspirational??? You live in an absolute monarchy circa before capitalism. So monarchies are fine and good as long as women are in charge? That’s what I assume Jax means, anyway — that princess = CEO. If the illegitimately-appointed CEO of a morally unjustifiable business cheats on his wife, you can just replace him with said wife, and the business ceases to be morally unjustifiable! That’s how it works!
Also like, not to discount the fact that Cinderella escaped an abusive household, because that is a very brave and impressive feat, but she quite literally was not a goddamn C! (C!) E! (E!) O! (O!) before the prince “saved” her. She was essentially enslaved. And given how shitty this prince guy is, I cannot imagine he’ll take this assertion seriously.
I confess I did not realize Jax was doing Disney-specific revisionism until I got to Jasmine making out with Mulan. Okay, Jaclyn. As the preeminent begrudging expert on the works of Walt Disney Animation Studios, you have stepped on my very intentionally neglected turf, and I have no choice but to drop my apathetic façade and tell you why your headcanons are all bullshit.
I guess I don’t actually want to challenge the galaxy-brainedness of they/them Rapunzel. I think Mulan, famed DIY hairdresser and canon drag king fits the bill better, but they’re busy making out with Jasmine, and it’s not like there’s a maximum number of nonbinary royals you can have in your bad pop song. I’m glad we got one at all, so J.K. Rowling’s stupid-ass crowd can’t co-opt it. I can’t imagine why they’d want to, but I’m glad they can’t.
Jasmine/Mulan is what we in the business call a crack ship. Like, whatever Jax, I have no stake in this, but a) bisexual legend Li Shang is one of the least awful boyfriends in the pantheon of conventionally attractive, two-dimensional animated human men, b) I thought cheating was bad???? There’s no disclaimer that Jasmine and Aladdin, or Mulan and Shang are open, because there isn’t room for it in the verse. We have to hit as many heroines with the girlbossification beam as possible! Except Snow White, apparently, even though she’s the chronological first Disney princess, she’s fourteen years old, and Cinderella’s husband is perving on her. If anyone in this song deserves to go apeshit…
The Sleeping Beauty thing is tricky because yes, obviously, you shouldn’t kiss someone nonconsensually, and people in comas are famously incapable of consenting. On the other hand, the kiss was quite literally the only way to wake her up from said coma.
Yeah, Ariel was confident without any feet… confident that she fucking wanted a set! Like, for all the myriad criticisms lobbied at The Little Mermaid, both justified and non, has anyone ever made the case that the titular character lacks confidence? If anything, she has a surplus! She’s like, “Nothing bad will happen to me if I make a deal with a witch, unlike all these horrible screaming flesh blobs lining her entryway!” and everyone on both sides of the aisle is like, “GIRL.”
You know who’s a goddamn C! E! O? Tiana. Of her own business that she built from the ground up. She is incontestably the most girlboss princess Disney’s ever put to screen. She’s a chef, she’s naturally talented, she opens her own restaurant. She marries a prince along the way, yes, but he’s broke! He’s incidental. Barring a few roadblocks, she still would’ve broken the glass ceiling and become sole proprietor of Tiana’s Palace eventually. How is going to medical school, after expressing zero interest in medicine whatsoever, more girlboss than using her lifelong passion to climb the corporate ladder and rule the food industry? Has Jax rewatched the movie since it left theaters in early 2010? She’s just throwing girlboss spaghetti at the wall by this point.
WHAT DOES THIS LINE EVEN MEAN? Belle’s tenure as princess is eventually going to make her as selfish and entitled and short-tempered as her husband used to be? And that’s… good???
Cinderella’s prince’s adaptational assholery is even more baffling now, because nothing in this verse contradicts the actions of the other love interests. It doesn’t make them sound like an oppressive class outside of standard patriarchal structures, it just sounds like Cinderella was in a uniquely shitty relationship. You can’t tell me Eugene Fitzherbert wouldn’t help Rapunzel shave their head. HE CANONICALLY ADMINISTERS A HAIRCUT EVEN THOUGH IT WILL KILL HIM.
The first time I heard this song, I was worried the second verse would never end, and Jax was just going to keep girlbossifying more and more obscure princesses and princess-adjacents until the heat death of the universe. Like:
Raya learned to sail from her new girlfriend Moana
And climate change was stopped thanks to Elsa and Anna
Merida ruled Scotland with her bow and her arrow
Kida from Atlantis got her country to join NATO
Pocahontas told the colonists to go back to Britain
And as a result, this goddamn fucking song was never even written
Now that we’ve added this lens, Jax, Disney is an old man who lives in California making money off of girls like you. And like me. But more importantly, like you. Get angry about that! They’re making money off of girls like you, and they’re using it to buy Fox, Hulu, ABC, A&E, National Geographic, Lucasfilm, Marvel Studios, ESPN, an entire fucking island, and a whole bunch of other shit, instead of paying their theme park employees enough money that they can afford not to sleep in their cars and freeze to death overnight.
There’s another bad anti-Disney pop song from a few years ago, called “Mad at Disney” by Salem Ilese of Me or the PS5 fame that actually has the resolve to interpolate “When You Wish Upon A Star.” I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that Salem Ilese also isn’t mad at Disney for what I’d consider the right reasons — it’s essentially that one Facebook page in song form. At the risk of stealing every talking point from these three Lindsay Ellis videos, the (current) problem with Disney isn’t that their animated movies aren’t feminist enough, it’s that they’ve monopolized the film industry. You guys are missing the enchanted forest for the trees!
In this regard I’ll defend “Victoria’s Secret” again, because at least in that song it seemed like Jax was getting to the actual root of the issue, i.e. she knew what it was. “Cinderella Snapped” is like if “Victoria’s Secret” was about how VS’s sister store shouldn’t be called PINK because not everyone likes pink, or why they shouldn’t have discontinued the Rush body mist because I really want to wear it to [REDACTED]. Outdated or misguided depictions of women are not Disney’s greatest crime!!!
Jax whispers this bridge so quickly that she has to go, “Phew,” at the end of it for comic effect. And because she hopes you won’t remember what she just said, since half of it doesn’t make any sense. Like, I’m a stone-cold sober native English speaker, and looking at these lyrics make me feel like I’m trying to decipher ancient Greek on 200mg of Delta-9. I think it’s because she rhymes emotional with itself three times.
Why is the prince on trial? Is Cinderella suing him for equal wages? Because I would assume that the outcome of a guilty treason verdict is Prince Goes To Jail And Then Maybe Gets Drawn And Quartered Or Something, not Prince Closes Wage Gap. Does she want to rule? ISN’T THE DISNEY VERSION SET IN FRANCE?
On that note, cheating was treason… under Henry VIII. In my cursory research, (because I’m not putting any more effort into this than Jax did) the only cases of treasonous adultery convictions were Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard of England, and Johann Friedrich Struensee of Denmark. So Cinderella is totally losing her case here! And the prince is gonna be so condescending about it!
Then we get one more goddamn chorus, about which I have nothing else to say, so allow me to pull a Jax receipt: she performed at the 2018 White House Fourth of July celebration. This quote from her father in a local news article defending her decision is incredibly revealing: “You put your politics aside if you have any — and Jax’s [sic] doesn’t — and you go.” To the Trump White House. To sing an original country pop song about how awesome your Marine old brother is. And how much he loves mac and cheese. I changed my mind; “Cinderella Snapped” is a masterpiece.
To her credit, Jax has ostensibly stopped playing “Somebody’s Kid” live, according to setlist.fm and removed it from Spotify, (though not from her YouTube channel) and it predates “Victoria’s Secret” by almost four years. She has not expressed any regret over her White House performance, but she does seem to have evolved politically since then, if “Victoria’s Secret” and “Cinderella Snapped” are anything to go by. She’s in the neoliberal stage of ex-conservatism (or ex-apathy). And like, so was I in 2012. I don’t want to discount her growth, if that’s indeed what this is, but it’s not 2012 anymore. I’m not sure we can afford to worry about Twilight or Victoria’s Secret or the content of animated Disney films right now.
If Jax wants to write angry bangers about social injustice, (and, you know, be taken seriously as an artist) there’s a horrifying array of topics that are much more dire, and much more relevant. I’m not saying she has to come out with follow-up single called “Trans Liberation Now” or “Fuck Ron DeSantis” or “Here Is A List Of Oil Execs Responsible For Climate Change.” But I’d respect any of those far more than “Cinderella Snapped.”