The All American Rejects: Upholding Gender Stereotypes.

While driving home from school recently, I heard the song "Gives You Hell" by The All American Rejects. I had heard the song before, but I'd never paid attention to the lyrics. When I got home I was curious about the song so I looked up the lyrics and watched the music video. Listening to the song and watching the video give you two different ideas of what the song is about. Listening to the song, it sounds like he’s singing about a girl who dumped him, and how he is so happy that her life isn't what she wanted it to be. But in the video you get the impression that he is singing about his other, "good" half and that he and his good half are constantly fighting and don't like each other. Both of these interpretations are problematic: if you listen to the lyrics, it leads you to believe that, should your girlfriend break up with you, then she doesn't deserve to be happy; and if you watch the video its teaching you that the "bad" half is always more preferable to the "good" half.
If you read the lyrics to the song, its obvious that the singer was hurt that his girlfriend broke up with him, but now that he knows that she doesn’t have what she always wanted, he’s happy again. He seems confident that now that she has had time to realize that she won’t ever get what she wants, she will finally regret leaving him. The All American Rejects seem to be showing women as being heartless, materialistic (he sings about her wanting “that picket fence…and shiny car”), and if they ever dare to break up with their boyfriend then they don’t deserve to be happy or get what they want. They say “When you find a man that's worth a damn and treats you well/Then he's a fool, you're just as well/Hope it gives you hell,” basically saying that this woman doesn’t deserve the kind of man that can see who she truly is; after what she did to him, she only deserves someone who won’t be able to really understand her.
In the music video for this song, the All American Rejects show both men and women as only having two types. Men are always either the hardcore rocker who sleeps all day, lives in a dirty house, never cleans, and wakes up with a beautiful woman in his bed with him; or they are goody-goodies who sleep in a separate bed from their significant other (throughout the video its hard to tell whether they are married or dating), lead boring lives (shown cleaning his car and spending his night playing Operation), and live in a completely clean and sterile house. Whereas women are shown as either being the punk girlfriend of the rock star (she is disheveled, mainly shown in bed with her boyfriend, and the first time you see her she is in a short red bathrobe with her naked boyfriend), or the stiff significant other of the clean-cut man (she is immaculate, blonde, sleeps in a separate bed from her significant other, and is forced to try and control him). These two different types of men and women show the narrow views of both genders that our society believes in. Men can either only be a hardcore rock star or a clean-cut, upper-class, white man; while women can only be a girlfriend to a rock star or the wife of the upper-class white man.