With a liberal arts education comes the awareness that everything is horrible. Any general knowledge of the theories of Sigmund Freud, for example, ruins everything. Literally everything. More specifically, it ruins Jeremih's "Birthday Sex" (2009).
Upon first listen, the song appears to be a standard R&B slow jam about having sexual intercourse with a girl on her birthday. But true meaning never comes from a first listen.
To understand this song we must understand Freud's conceptualization of the psyche, comprised of the id, the ego and the superego. The shorthand of the model is that the id is the instinctual part of the psyche that seeks out pleasure; the superego opposes the id and punishes misbehavior and excessive pleasure; and the ego attempts to moderate between the two.
"Birthday Sex" embraces the id, offering a full day of sex, alcohol, romancing and, ultimately, unrestrained pleasure. The birthday is framed as an opportunity to completely ignore the shame of the superego. "Don't tap out; fight until the end," Jeremih instructs. This can be understood as the superego's drive to stop, to come short of experiencing the full breadth of the pleasure available.
In Lacanian terms — Lacan was, after all, first and foremost, a Freudian — this would be the birthday girl's "jouissance," the unrestrained, shattering, potentially lethal experience of something akin to excess pleasure that ultimately becomes painful and unbearable. Experiences of jouissance are few and far between, and Jeremih seems to propose that he and the girl search for the objet petit a, the unattainable object of desire.
To do this, Jeremih proposes copulation all over his house: the couch, the kitchen, the stove, the table, the waterbed, etc. The complete disregard for the ramifications of sex in all of these places is a further disregard of the superego, but that's not the only force present in "Birthday Sex."
"I been fiendin'; wake up in the late night/Dreamin' about your lovin', girl," Jeremih sings. Much of Freud's work is concerned with the unconscious, and a common trope is that of the Oedipal complex, the desire to eliminate the father figure in order to obtain relations with the mother. Freud uses this as an explanation of how the superego comes into being: By repressing the Oedipal urges, we learn to moderate other desires. Hence, superego.
It would not be a stretch, by any means, to suppose that Jeremih's late−night dreams are about his mother, as, Freud contends, many sexual dreams are.
The ideal birthday sex, then, is Oedipal. It is the anti−birth−day sex: On Jeremih's birthday/day of birth, he was removed from his mother's womb. On his mother's birthday, he could make her whole again.
The song even sounds like a suggestion from a little child, the ramblings of an over−libidinous, unrestrained toddler to his mother/the object of his desire. He does what many children do in the early years of speaking and discovering language — he claims ownership of everything he talks about: "my house," "my couch," "my waterbed." He also makes strange justifications logical only to a child, such as, "you say you wanted flowers on the bed/But you got me and now it's on again."
Many of the lines even include what is apparently a nervous stutter, yet another vestige of childhood: "It's your birthday so I know you want to ri−i−i−ide out/Even if we only go to my−y−y house/Sip Mo−y−zy as we sit upon my−y−y couch."
By disregarding the superego completely, Jeremih is able to justify the desire to commit incest.
With this twist, the song takes on a new, highly uncomfortable nature. Liberal arts ruins everything.
