Looking For A Man

How a joke tune off the internet turned into a song of the summer

Jun 09, 2024

DJ duo Loud Luxury playing their “looking for a man” remix at some big concert somewhere.

Like many tales of our time, it all started with a blonde girl on TikTok asking the internet for help: make a song using a single sentence she came up with. The sentence is her dating checklist manifested. All she wants is a man who works in finance, has a trust fund, is 6’5, and has blue eyes.

Reader, if there’s one thing I’ve learned since the days of dial-up, it’s never underestimate the power of the internet. The poster’s silly soundbite—spoken in an exaggerated Valley Girl drawl (and posted under the username girl_on_couch)—got picked up, repackaged, and bedazzled by countless musicians online. If you go on the internet and search “looking for a man in finance” you’ll find a bunch of renditions of the track, some better than others. But this remix by songwriter Tima Pages, who slapped a like a G6 beat on her soundbite, has appealed to my Older Millennial sensibilities the most:

@rubythepookie I had an ideaaaa😭✨

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And if you know how the algorithm works, once you interact with a video using this audio, the social media gremlins will take it as a sign to flood your feed with more of it. That may or may not have happened to me. Suddenly, this song kept showing up in videos on my feed. It seemed I was stuck in the corner of social media where the track had become the audio track to use, with the hopes that their videos would go viral, too.

But it turns out it wasn’t just my algorithm. What started as a joke song now has jumped offline, with the catchy chorus being remixed by big-name DJs David Guetta and Diplo during their live concerts. While I don’t think it’s the “summer anthem” that the track’s original creator proclaims it is, I think it is a fun and hilarious (and dare I say catchy???) song to start the season. Of course, some observers have wadded into the deep end and read into this trend too literally, with Vogue proclaiming loudly that Men in Finance are Apparently Hot Again (what). But that interpretation feels like a shallow misread of what’s fueling the track’s virality.

🌊🌊🌊

While it may be quicker to assume the tune has become popular because 20-something girls just love men in finance (this is an absurd idea because have you met a 20-something girl?) the song’s backstory is much simpler. The tune’s original poster, who goes by Megan Boni in real life, said she did it to poke fun at single women who, according to her, were endlessly complaining about their singledom while keeping an unrealistic checklist that their romantic matches must fulfill. As she told Canada’s National Post:

“It was just making fun of that, so I started thinking of the most outlandish, hardest things to find in a man and wrote it down, then I came up with that rhyme.”

What a disappointing origin story! It’s like expecting Heath Ledger’s Joker and ending up with Jared Leto’s whack interpretation. Never mind that the most “outlandish” dating criteria she could muster were all shallow physical traits. The traits she deems so unattainable are just imagining some tall white guy with blue eyes working in finance—those are actually very easy to find depending on the neighborhood or campus where you’re at. The real distressing part is perhaps that the song was supposed to be a dig at single women, the same demographic that’s driving the song’s popularity. And here I was expecting the catchphrase she came up with to have some deeper-level meaning to it, especially with the subtle dig at trust fund babies who like to cosplay as working people (why does he work in finance AND have a trust fund?). But alas.

Forgetting the original intent behind the track for a moment, I think there’s still a subliminal reason behind the song’s unexpected rise. Aside from its Girls Just Wanna Have Fun vibes, which make it a perfect manufacture for the summer, I think a lot of women (and just people in general) are starved for the Soft Life. The keywords in the track here are “trust fund”—a dating criteria that isn’t as easy to check off, unless you’re a socialite swiping on Raya. I think the real pull of the song is embedded between the lines: your girl isn’t really looking for a loaded finance bro with the personality of a milk carton. That’s not what she wants. What she’s actually after is the Soft Life, a life of leisure and pleasure. She wants the finer things in life but she doesn’t want to toil under the thrum of capitalism to obtain them, either. And what could be the closest thing to that privileged existence than a primped white guy backed by generational wealth? The song’s mass appeal hits at a core truth: everyone—not just the girlies—wants to have enough money to afford not to work.

The term “burnout” has been thrown around plenty since the pandemic. During the worst of the crisis, people were confined indoors and separated indefinitely from one another. Yet, the world still turned and we all had to push through the daily slog at our silly little jobs. The whole situation put things into perspective for many. A silver lining is that it’s pushed people to think more deliberately about work-life balance. But the concept of burnout, of course, wasn’t borne out of the pandemic. The term has been around for nearly as long as drug consumption culture has existed as it was originally used to describe the profound effects of extreme drug abuse.1 It wasn’t until the late 1970s that the term took on new life when German American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger, who dealt a lot with substance abuse patients in his line of work, recycled it to convey the emotional depletion that came from work-related overexertion, primarily among social service workers. Freudenberger first used the term academically in his 1974 book Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement. Ironically, even with his expertise, Freudenberger himself experienced multiple burnout episodes. After he passed, his son divulged to the press that he was your average workaholic, working a crazy 14-15 hours (!!) a day until his death2.

Yearning for the Soft Life3 is a sentiment I’ve seen memefied and proliferate across social media for maybe the past year or so (interestingly, these sentiments are shared more frequently and publicly by women, and femme and nonbinary queer folks). Veering off topic a bit but sort of relatedly, my theory is this existential state is also the driving force behind the emergence of the cottagecore trend4 which leans into a colonial homestead kind of hyper-femininity. Cottagecore is simply one kind of manifestation of the Soft Life (remember when everyone was baking sourdough indoors??).

reformation

A post shared by @reformation

While my age peers and I grew up in the ambitious lean-in Girl Boss era, when it was du jour to brag about how overworked you were, younger women are doing the opposite. They’re taking the lead in leaning away, proudly and publicly. They’re embracing a less frantic existence and not sweating too much about things like “having it all,” the curse that’s befallen generations of women before. The girls now just want to chill and be pampered, maybe by a hot stranger with money—turns out, that’s a feeling that’s relatable to many! This collective sentiment is why the “looking for a man” track has taken hold of the public psyche so quickly. As the glass ceiling becomes a steel box the average person can’t penetrate, folks are taking the scenic route instead. We all want to live a carefree life. As Ariana astutely proclaimed: everybody’s tired!

The desire for the Soft Life includes the tune’s creator herself. Like a lot of Gen Z-ers, the siren call of the influencer life has sunk its hook into Boni’s plans for the future. Right now, she says she’s looking to release an official single of her viral tune and make some coin through the summer festival circuit. And why shouldn’t she? As an Older Millennial who came into age during a broken economy that’s never fully recovered, I completely support taking any opportunity to make as much money as you can while doing as little work as possible. Maybe strike it big and become a rich man yourself.

What I’m enjoying at the moment 🌊

There are just some songs that I can’t get out of my head right now. This playlist has ebbed and flowed a lot but the ones I’ve compiled on Spotify below are my current repeats as I embrace the warmer weather. The biggest surprise for me has been Hozier’s “Too Sweet”. I’m not usually into the kinds of songs produced by men who look like Jesus with a guitar, but his new track has me singing along whenever it comes on. Okay, Hozier!

What are your songs of the Summer? I’d love to hear about them!

blue space writing.

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