Femmes fatales have long been primary fixtures in cinema and art, captivating the viewer with their alluring beauty, moral ambiguity, and potentially fatal mystique. Dan Auerbach's "Stand By My Girl”, a single from his second solo album Waiting on a Song (2017), firmly locates the unease they generate within a context of everyday domesticity while reminding the listener that her deadliness remains intact: “I'm gonna stand by my girl, don't think I won't/ I'm gonna stand by my girl, because she'll kill me if I don't/ I said she'll kill me if I don't”.
Pitchfork’s Stuart Brennan has pointed out that Auerbach draws on the blues lyrical tradition of “well-worn witchy-woman cliches” (who inevitably ‘do’ their well-meaning men wrong) as he blends country, soul, folk, and power pop influences into a radio-friendly tribute to his new Nashville habitus. The song’s banjo strings and vintage-leaning guitars are reassuringly familiar, while Auerbach’s casually delivered vocals suggest that he has come to (ambiguous) terms with the relationship dynamic he describes: ‘I love a girl with fire in her eyes/ That's what I used to say/ But now I've come to realize/ If I wanna live another day/ I can't be livin' that way’. If there’s any uneasiness or dissonance in this perspective of a henpecked male figure, it’s all in the listener’s head. The gender politics at work here might be troubling, but it seems preferable to country music's 'bro tendencies' - while being more interesting than the genre's turn towards the pedestalization of its female subjects.
The Allister Ann-directed music video decides to place the societal and personal unease towards the prospect of female/feminine power front-and-center. J. D. Wilkes stars as an embodiment of male anxiety in the stylish video, which upturns the strongly gendered dynamics of the 50s as it recreates its rosy suburban ideals and gendered divisions of labor. Ellia Sophia stars as a young and prim housewife/serial killer who maintains her poise and composure as she chops strawberries, drys her clothes dangerously close to Wilkes’ bathtub, fluffs his pillow, prunes roses, buries her murdered lover, and makes breakfast for her next victim.
