Whip-Smart

I came here hoping to find someone who could tell me what this means: "When they do the double dutch, that's them dancing" But no one has addressed that detail, and I have no idea.

I think this song is about the same mom who wrote "Girls! Girls! Girls!" when she was younger, and now she has a son who she has very protective feelings about. She knows there are smoking hot, rapacious young women in the world who are just waiting for a chance to "...take full advantage of (her son) and get away ... with (what the girls call) murder." She knows this because she was (is still?) such a one.

So she wants to lock her son up in a tower like Rapunzel for his own protection against these rapacious girls who might want to ravish him and then take advantage of him. She says she'll teach him to "keep a watch on every hand between his thighs", because these girls are going to put their hands there when they are doing their best to seduce her son. She doesn't want her son to end up as the (figuratively) whipped boyfriend of some girl who is playing him for all she's worth. She knows how ruthless and exploitative and high stakes the game can be, because she got really good at playing guys in her slightly younger days.

OK, so what does the chorus mean? "When they do the double Dutch that's them dancing..." I presume Liz is talking about the double Dutch jump rope game and not the elaborately esoteric alternate meaning of "double Dutch" involving several hundred years of economic and cultural competition between England and the Netherlands (look it up).

That being said, I'm not quite sure what jump rope has to do with the main theme of the song. I imagine her son as a kid, playing jump rope with (school?) friends. A couple things about double Dutch jump rope might be relevant: It is a more advanced form of jump rope. It takes some practice to learn how to spin the ropes and how to jump in that game. It takes at least three skilled people to do double Dutch jump rope - one to jump and two to spin the ropes. Sometimes there are songs you chant while doing it to help keep the rhythm.

Maybe Liz is watching her son play on a playground with other boys and girls. The kids aren't really old enough for sexuality and boy-girl dancing yet, but they will be soon enough. In the meanwhile they can have fun being kids playing together and postpone all the hard stuff Liz has been fretting about until another day. So maybe jump rope for kids is a little like dancing for teens because boys and girls can do it together, and everyone moves their body and gets some exercise. But in jump rope no one is touching. Yet.

I think this song is super catchy. The interplay of super clean rhythm guitar and loping bass is really cool. The gratuitous farty sound effects don't add much, in my opinion, unless the intent is to just lighten up the whole thing in a playful way.

OK people, I finally tracked it down. The lyric "When they do the double Dutch that's them dancing" is borrowed from the 1983 song "Double Dutch" by Malcolm McLaren from his pretty well-known album Duck Rock. Liz Phair was hipper than I was, so she was hip to this song back in the day.

The early version of Whip Smart on the Girly-Sound Tapes album even includes the counter-refrain "Hey Ebo-Ebonettes!" You can see the Ebonettes doing the double Dutch in this very cool and fun video of the Malcolm McLaren song: https://youtu.be/FZ4jMSCBswY?si=LWpP995KE9biLQpE1

I've got to say that I find this video impressive on several levels. 1) It's a super catchy and fun world beat song. 2) Those girls are amazing athletes and dancers! I did some simple double Dutch jump-roping as a kid but we never ever did anything approaching what these girls are doing. I am so impressed by their performances.

So there you have it.

I'm surpassed no one commented on this song. I like the second verse the best! I wish may parents were this cool. How she wants her son to let his hair down and will tell him all the things she did wrong in her life but also expects him to make mistakes. It's like she is warning him about all the hardships of life in one song.

i think liz said the thing about the hair because it has a lot to do with rupunzel, which is a very sexual story and she wants her son to have sex a lot.

ewwww yo mamma what the fuck no................................i like repunzelEED's coemment better haha. i think its about her waiting to watch her song grow up or something

I was just kidding. ha! But this is how I want to raise my son!!

To me, it seems to be about a jaded woman who doesn't want her son to approach life with rose-colored glasses.

I think 7daysatsea has it right. This can't be a woman who is too caring, because of the line "And I'm gonna tell my son to join a circus so that death is cheap and games are just another way of life." She is already foreseeing her son's death as cheap and saying that life is game. Perhaps the conception of the son was not pleasant, the idea of a child is not comforting.

Liz once said that this song was about deception. It's actually a feminist song that uses the idea of Rapunzel. She said, "I'm sort of switching it around and locking up a boy in the castle instead of a girl. It's sort of like saying you should go through some of the experiences... like if I had a son, I would raise him to understand what it is like to be a girl. (...) I use a lot of fancy images just trying to say that if men knew what it was like to be a woman, the world would be a better place."