Commentary

Better than number 1

By LEIGHTON WILLIAMS, Staff Reporter

LAST MONDAY NIGHT a colleague and I had a discussion surrounding some utterances he heard at an event he went to cover.

He said while at the event, several female artistes claimed the reason they have been able to take another woman's man is because they were 'tight'.

Then, while I was trying to come up with something to write about for the hack notes, my colleague decided to play a song where the theme centered around the same topic.

Now all this 'tight' lyrics being 'deejayed' by both male and female entertainers have got me wondering about how women (and men) on the side view themselves.

I take it, based on these songs, that most think they are more important than the number one woman (or man) a.k.a. the wife (or husband) because of the service they provide (pun intended). It does not matter if they are number two, 20 or 200.

It doesn't even matter that being anything other than number one may mean spending most of their nights in a hotel, the back of a car or somewhere else. It may also mean hiding from the true wife (husband) because becoming too 'forward' may mean a date with the undertaker or a heavy hospital bill.

Yet, despite all these hazards it is still fashionable to be the girl with the 'good hole' or the man who is good in bed.

It is also not a deterrent that one day the person playing the balancing act may one day tell someone else that the hole was not so good or the 'toy boy' was not so good at all. But, being the person on the side still carries some clout.

What is strange though is that I can't seem to recall any of these songs speaking about how many of these elicit lovers are desperate to leave out the current position because the promised land is not what it was hyped up to be.

In some cases it is just another form of prostitution but with society's approval. In other cases the person playing the field was just building up his/her statistics. It was not meant to be a 'hitching' thing but it just ended up that way.

But, why should playing second fiddle be bad when society accepts it to the point where it is immortalised through song?

And, why should it be bad when husband or wife is often left to pick up the scraps left by number two. I guess that's why being anything other than number one sometimes looks so good.

E-mail: leighton.williams@gleanerjm.com.