What's interesting is that a lot of the male R&B I've listened to recently seems to play out this anxiety pretty acutely -- basically questioning whether or not the "mainstream girl" or "popular girl" (often a woman who worked her way up to mainstreamness from a position of less power) really wants him. The-Dream's archetypical girl is very firmly in the "popular girl" mold, and may be mainstream, I think, meaning (at least) that she has waded out of a smaller stream into a bigger one. He keeps breaking up and getting back together with her cyclically, and he never trusts that the moment he secures (with astonishing confidence) the popular girl's fancy (mmm that girl was fancy) he has any real claim to it for very long. The courtship is great but the relationship sucks.

Or there's Kanye, badmouthing his ex for being superficial and shallow when you sense he's just bitter that they're not together.

(I have a bunch of questions about what relationship money and affluence has to a mainstream, and to what extent values of "mainstream" intersect with values of a middle class. Or whether "mainstream" is just what you call the other guy.)