The message is simple: love you for you, don’t play their game. Christina Aguilera and Demi Lovato dropped a towering empowerment anthem for the #MeToo era on Wednesday morning (May 16) when they unveiled their fiery duet “Fall in Line.” The song opens with a low-end rumble and spare beat as Aguilera croons “Little girls, listen closely/ No one told me, but you deserve to know/ That in this world you are not beholden/ You do not owe them your body and your soul.”
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The lyric video for the song slated to appear on Aguilera’s upcoming Liberation album features a series of close-ups of the singer’s faces interspersed with images of women’s bodies and street scenes as Christina dives further into a cautionary tale about how all the youth in the world won’t save you from growing older and the wisdom that the truth inside a girl is too precious to be stolen.
The song builds into the chorus, with Aguilera lamenting that things have always been this way, but that she’s got every right to stand up and say her piece. “I’m gonna pay for this/ They’re gonna burn me at the stake,” she sings. “But I got af fire in my veins/ I wasn’t made to fall in line.” Lovato slides in on the second verse, adding, “Show some skin, make him want you/ Cuz god forbid you know your own way home/ Ask yourself why it matters/ Who it flatters, you’re more than flesh and bone.”
The powerful four-minute vocal summit ends with the two women ad-libbing runs over a man’s dull voice ordering: “one, two three, shut your mouth, stuck your ass out for me, march two three, who told you your’e allowed to think,” even as they soar above his noise to jointly pledge to never fall in line.
Check out the lyric video below.
Aguilera and Lovato will debut the song live at the 2018 Billboard Music Awards on May 20.