In Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “Bongos” and Flyana Boss’ “You Want,” Black ladies hip-hop artists create areas for pleasure, pleasure and sisterhood.
“The way forward for rap is feminine,” declared the New York Instances simply days forward of hip-hop’s official fiftieth anniversary on Aug. 11, 2023. The proof of this is perhaps seen this month in two current music movies launched inside every week of one another.
The movies couldn’t be extra totally different. The primary, “Bongos,” pairing Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion on a second single that’s simply as raunchy and bawdy as their first controversial single, “WAP,” value a formidable $2 million with bedazzling fashions and a Beverly Hills mansion infamously showcased in motion pictures like The Godfather and The Bodyguard, in addition to Beyoncé’s third visible album Black Is King.
The second, “You Want,” that includes viral sensation rap duo Flyana Boss (comprised of bandmates Bobbi Lanea Tyler and Folayan Omi Kunerede) captures the modestly budgeted cosplay enjoyable and eccentric creativity of their TikTok “working” movies, teasing their tune over the course of the summer time season.
Each songs comprise specific lyrics about their sexual bravado, however one video leans into the hypersexual spectacle of Black ladies’s our bodies, whereas the opposite explores the quirkiness of mentioned our bodies.
This isn’t to counsel one is “extra applicable” than the opposite—removed from it! We’re witnessing the total spectrum of Black ladies rappers participating in pleasure and pleasure. It’s no marvel Niela Orr situates the way forward for hip-hop inside a neighborhood of girls who “are having all of the enjoyable.”
Final month, I authored a collection for Ms. on “Turning 50,” highlighting ladies’s roles in hip-hop over the many years. Regardless of the male-oriented and masculine bravado of hip-hop, ladies performed integral roles in amplifying the music within the wider neighborhood. Ladies particularly created the social and sonic areas for hip-hop to thrive: from Cindy Campbell, internet hosting and sending out the invitations to her brother Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell’s get together that fateful August evening within the Bronx, to producer Sylvia Robinson releasing the primary commercially profitable rap tune and signing the rap group Funky 4 + 1 Extra (that includes the primary feminine rapper MC Sha-Rock).
This continued with different ladies, featured within the “Turning 50” collection: Dee Barnes, the primary girl to host a hip-hop present, Pump It Up!, on community tv from 1989 to 1991, and Drew Dixon, who as an govt working at labels like Def Jam and Arista, built-in hip-hop with soul and R&B, with songs like “You’re All I Have to Get By” (Methodology Man that includes Mary J. Blige) and “A Rose is Nonetheless a Rose” (Aretha Franklin and Lauryn Hill).
Each ladies had been pushed out of the tradition attributable to violence, and this legacy remains to be an indicator of too many songs and movies in mainstream rap music. That is the irony of celebrating hip-hop’s milestone 12 months: It represents the beats and the voices of enjoyment and pleasure, simply as a lot because it captures a lot ache.
This week, my college students engaged in a dialogue about this legacy of hip-hop and even marveled {that a} label run by an alleged sexual predator that chased away the gifted Drew Dixon would go on to create the raunchy album cowl Hardcore that includes rapper Lil’ Kim—which basically grew to become the blueprint for depicting and advertising and marketing ladies rappers by means of a hypersexual framework. The throughline is straightforward to observe from this spectacle circa 1997 to Twenty first-century artists like Nicki Minaj, Metropolis Women, Cardi B, Meg Thee Stallion, Latto, Sexxy Pink and Ice Spice.
And but, as Black feminist porn research scholar Mireille Miller-Younger as soon as argued, Black pleasure and pleasure ought to mobilize our communities to withstand and struggle for freedom simply as a lot as our actions primarily based in Black ache and dying. As she put it:
“If we consider how some representations are injurious and damaging to our sense of progress or integrity, we’d miss studying the unreliability, unknowability, and ambiguity of [Black] ladies’s advanced sexual needs, fantasies, and pleasures. … This isn’t to low cost in any means the structural problems with sexism and violence as they’re reproduced continually in hip-hop and pornography; it’s to suggest that we take critically how and why [Black women] are discovering their very own legibility in these kinds, and the way they self-fashion themselves by means of and towards hypersexuality.”
That’s what makes the movies for “Bongos” and “You Want” a lot enjoyable to observe. The artists are creating legible areas for pleasure, pleasure and sisterhood.
The “Bongos” video supplies close-up pictures of twerking our bodies whereas Cardi B followers herself with a Playboy journal—a nod to her function because the platform’s artistic director, who additionally flips the scripts of as soon as male-dominated areas like hip-hop and the once-reigning intercourse journal. The power is clearly hyperfeminine and defiantly sexual in a world that also desires to police and confine feminine sexuality to a cis-heteronormative household dynamic.
Cardi B and Meg twerking towards right-wing conservatives, towards women-hating chauvinists, towards violent males is a triumph of the thrill and freedoms of sensual pleasure that so many have unsuccessfully tried to police.
Cardi B typically proudly owns her id as a married spouse and mom, as proven in her shared behind-the-scenes photographs of her “work spouse” companion Meg Thee Stallion interacting along with her kids; nevertheless, her sexualized performances push again towards notions that she has been “redeemed” for respectability. She refuses to erase her previous as an unique dancer and eagerly partakes in sexually fluid roles with Meg Thee Stallion when their our bodies intertwine within the video.
Cardi B even engages in a task reversal, through which males are diminished to eye sweet within the video. (Admittedly, the selection to have an Asian male mannequin on this function could reinforce the feminization of Asian males that’s too prevalent in our tradition; nevertheless, it additionally does a lot to supply a uncommon depiction of such males as desirous intercourse companions for non-Asian and non-white ladies.) Total, Cardi B meaningfully engages sexuality for each labor and leisure.
On this context, she and Meg Thee Stallion take pleasure in a fantasy the place Black and Brown ladies can name the pictures and revel within the leisure of sunbathing at a seashore or swimming at an opulent pool. The latter location can be an attention-grabbing callback to Beyoncé’s use of the identical swimming pool within the phase, “Temper 4 Eva,” from Black Is King. Right here, the pop star signified on the Hollywood spectacle of an Estelle Williams film by means of the mobilization of Jamaica’s synchronized swim workforce. That Meg and her backup dancers repurpose that pool for his or her aggressive twerk dancing in luxurious swimsuits is each a tribute to Queen Bey’s reclamations of the area for Black freedom and her personal feminist restyling of “scorching lady summer time.”
That this video launched across the similar time that Tory Lanez was set to start his 10-year jail sentence for taking pictures Meg in her foot—after he failed in a disinformation marketing campaign that made her out to be a liar concerning the incident—merely recalled the well-known phrases of Queen Bey: “I twirl on my haters!”
In Meg’s case, she twerked unapologetically on all her haters, who thought her sexual reclamations of her physique was an invite to be unprotected by the legislation. Cardi B and Meg twerking towards right-wing conservatives, towards women-hating chauvinists, towards violent males is a triumph of the thrill and freedoms of sensual pleasure that so many have unsuccessfully tried to police.
Cardi B and Meg Thee Stallion take pleasure in a fantasy the place Black and Brown ladies can name the pictures.
Their luxurious fantasy contrasts with the humbler area of Flyana Boss hanging out of their bed room and consuming takeout (with their tongue-in-cheek “product placement” from DoorDash). However their desires and fantasies are actually constructed for the viewer in a behind-the-scene inexperienced room with projected anime imagery. We’re clued in that their video is a literal building and projection of fantasy. This contributes to the playful vibe of their general personas. Black lady pleasure can appear like twerking in luxurious, or it could possibly appear like consuming quick meals in a bed room whereas hanging out together with your girlfriend.
This previous summer time may very nicely be acknowledged as Black Woman Summer time, from Beyoncé’s splashy world tour Renaissance to Janelle Monáe’s launch of her fourth studio album The Age of Pleasure. It’s maybe no mere coincidence that Flyana Boss, endorsed by this 12 months’s Rock-and-Roll Corridor of Fame inductee rapper Missy Elliott who’s featured in a remix of “You Want,” is now opening for Monáe’s present Age of Pleasure tour. Nor ought to we overlook how their stage identify derives from the “boss” Diana Ross, who was not too long ago seen as a shock visitor at Beyoncé’s Renaissance birthday present.
Each Beyoncé and Janelle Monáe, who’re additionally a part of hip-hop tradition, have offered a blueprint for methods to construct on these Black cultures and reclaim them for girls, femmes, and queer artists and audiences. That they’re a lot on the prime of their recreation is encouragement for the present crop of artists who can create concrete areas of pleasure, enjoyable and pleasure as a result of the inspiration has already been laid.
All of those artists have additionally been greater than adept at exhibiting their appreciation for individuals who got here earlier than them. Cardi B has lovingly shouted out Lil’ Kim in a high-heeled tribute in “Bongos”; whereas at her birthday present, Beyoncé confirmed her gratitude to Diana Ross and even interpolated a tune from the early days of Tia and Tamera Mowry’s lady band Voices when she noticed Tia within the viewers. And veterans in flip are doing what they’ll to create space for up-and-coming expertise, as Monáe and Missy Elliott have achieved for Flyana Boss.
That is the epitome of sisterhood and neighborhood constructing. It’s greater than edifying to see this modeled in our standard music, classes that hopefully we will switch to totally different arenas. If that is what hip-hop’s feminist future appears to be like like, we’re right here for it!
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