The Year Megan Thee Stallion Became a Symbol

There is a story Megan Thee Stallion tells often. In 2013, she was enrolled in a summer bridge program at Prairie View A&M University, working to improve her GPA before her first official semester at the HBCU that fall. She would eventually go viral for her freestyles, but first, she and some friends gained attention on campus for a twerk video they’d shot and posted online. Unlike the student body, however, the school’s administrators were not impressed. One day that summer, Megan says, she and her friends were brought into a room by a teacher. A projector whirred on, and the girls were confronted with the clips. “Is this how you want to be represented?” a woman asked. Uh… yeah?

Megan was as unruffled then as she has been since the early days of her career when people criticized and/or insulted her for her clothing choices or the frequency with which she casually, and adroitly turned any occasion into a twerk session. But when she joined Cardi B on “WAP” this past August, the uproar turned vicious.

The lyrics—“Yeah, you fucking with some wet-ass pussy/Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet-ass pussy” goes the uncensored hook—and the simulated sex of the accompanying choreography prompted a reaction, to put it mildly. There were the routine, if ahistorical, complaints about this generation of women rappers’ inclination to foreground sex in their lyrics. But there were also Family Values-esque objections, including one semi-viral tweet from a one-time Republican congressional candidate.

Once again, Megan blew it off. “You must not have noooo WAP if you’re mad at this song,” she told Allison Davis, in a GQ cover story. She continued, a little more seriously: “Sometimes people are really not comfortable enough with themselves, and I don’t think they like to watch other people be comfortable with themselves. And I don't think they want anybody to teach other people how to be comfortable with themselves.”

Following the discourse over the past few months, I returned to an early experience of my own. When I was in the fifth grade, my friends and I relished in the universal Black-girl ritual of choreographing dance routines. For one Friday-night talent show at our international school, we put together a number that concluded with us turning our backs to the audience and shaking our barely-there butts. The following week, our homeroom teacher gathered us to share that she had been approached by a white parent who found our performance offensive. Her response—“This is our culture. You don’t have to like it.”—was so perfect a lesson in the powers of personal and cultural agency that I sometimes wonder if I made it up.

These conversations are not new. Scholars, activists, artists, and working-class Black women have elucidated these ideas for decades, exploring connections between histories and lived realities, from the 19th-Century enslavement and objectification of Saartjie Baartman to the modern-day adultification of Black girls. And you don’t have to have experienced it to understand that the forces of patriarchy and anti-Black racism rain down on Black women in a specific way, that our bodies are sexualized without our consent, and our sexualities are in turn pathologized and weaponized against us. Women of all races have been sold empowerment as an antidote, often through a neoliberal framework that emphasizes individual women’s successes over expansive structural change.

It can be hard to locate oneself in our mediated, algorithmically-determined world. Especially so this year, as the pandemic, the election cycle, and increased awareness of social and racial injustice converged into an upwelling of political angst. In the midst of it, with the forerunners of the celebrity class climbing out of their towers only to occasionally sell us something, Megan was thrust into the spotlight and transformed into an avatar of Black womanhood. Leaning into her vulnerability while erecting clear boundaries, she became, instead of the trope of the strong Black woman, the bad-bitch next door. In a year marked by discourse about Breonna Taylor and about the simultaneously sought-after and ignored electoral bloc of Black women, Megan turned “protect Black women” into a rallying cry, articulating a liberatory politic with concerns beyond aesthetic representation. The confluence of her experiences stood in for urgent ideas bigger than herself: about gendered and racialized encounters with violence, creative expression, and autonomy.

But Megan’s symbolic womanhood is only part of the story of her 2020. While the pandemic sent Americans retreating inwards, she bloomed, heliotropic like a sunflower seeking light. While many of us withered into isolation, marking time elapsed since our last hug or family dinner, she shared on Instagram what looked like one endless slumber party with BFFs. And while collective insecurities about work distended, she stacked up career milestone after career milestone after an assault that she described as the most traumatic experience of her life.

The volume and caliber of her accomplishments this year have been staggering: Megan dominated TikTok with dance trends set to her music; she recruited fellow Houstonian Beyoncé for a remix of the single “Savage” and landed her first No. 1; she seized her second soon after, with “WAP”; she staged elaborate performances on Saturday Night Live and at the American Music Awards and the BET Awards, earning nominations and wins at both; she secured four Grammy nods; she stunned on magazine covers, including Time, which listed her among its 100 most influential people of the year; she followed up a hot streak of mixtapes and EPs with Good News, a critically acclaimed debut album; and with her single “Body,” Megan became the first woman to score three No. 1s on the streaming charts in a single year.

That’s not to say it was all good. Far from it. In March, Megan went to battle with her record label, suing 1501 Entertainment for what she described as an “unconscionab[ly]” exploitative contract. The suit was so acrimonious that when Megan was shot months later, fans speculated a connection. Of course, after being pressed and disbelieved by members of the public, she named Tory Lanez as the person who allegedly shot her in the feet, leaving her bleeding on a Hollywood Hills sidewalk and requiring emergency surgery. (Lanez, who released an album attempting to capitalize on his alleged violence, has since been charged.)

For all of her collected triumphs, the assault will likely be one of the defining moments of Megan’s 2020. So too, one imagines, will the whiplash of swinging between harassment and adulation. But she kept characteristically calm, as she had in 2019, another year filled with dramatic highs and lows. Last March, as her star was rising, her mom died of a brain tumor; that month, she also lost her grandmother. Within weeks, her breakout song “Big Ole Freak” would enter the Billboard charts. Improbably, she kept it together, grieving in private while in public molding the level-headed, hard-working persona that has delivered her to this moment.

The circumstances of her rise are singular: Megan raps in a clipped, non-melodic flow that puts her at odds with many of her Gen Z-cusp contemporaries; she architected her trajectory without the shadow of a prominent man as co-signer; and she used the aforementioned level-headedness to fashion herself as a diplomat, forging relationships across the industry and, most pointedly, fighting off the requisite intra-gender beef so many other women rappers have had foisted onto them early in their careers.

“Protect Black Women,” as verbalized by many and amplified by Megan, lands much closer to the original meaning of the concept of empowerment, which emerged from mid-century radical social movements but found its footing in the sector of development. “The term was introduced into the development lexicon in the mid-1980s by feminists from the Global South,” Rafia Zakaria, co-author of a report on the subject, wrote in a 2017 New York Times op-ed. “Those women understood ‘empowerment’ as the task of ‘transforming gender subordination’ and the breakdown of ‘other oppressive structures’ and collective ‘political mobilization.’”

Several decades later, “empowerment” has lost its teeth in the context of development and even more so outside of it. “[T]he crucial part about ‘political mobilization’ has been excised. This depoliticized ‘empowerment’ serves everyone except the women it is supposed to help,” Zakaria explained. Indeed, that is very much the case across pop culture, where women’s bodies became vehicles for empowerment in the marketplace, not the power to change their problems.

I see this nuance reflected in Megan’s stance, which holds up the idea of protecting Black women, not as an aesthetic choice but a political mandate. She articulated this in an October New York Times op-ed headlined “Megan Thee Stallion: Why I Speak Up for Black Women.” (Never mind the publication’s accompanying video, which intersperses Megan’s words with footage that has the cinematography and quick-cut editing of a Wieden+Kennedy Nike ad.)

“[D]espite the way so many have embraced messages about racial justice this year, Black women are still constantly disrespected and disregarded in so many areas of life,” she wrote. “Maternal mortality rates for Black mothers are about three times higher than those for white mothers, an obvious sign of racial bias in health care. In 2019, an astronomical 91 percent of the transgender or gender-nonconforming people who were fatally shot were Black, according to the Human Rights Campaign.”

On the one hand, we are bombarded with statistics about the velocity at which Black women are launching businesses and succeeding in post-secondary education. On the other, it recalls the disconnect articulated by the Global South feminists Zakaria invoked: what is the value of economic achievement if it is not matched by the dissolution of “other oppressive structures”? This is not at odds with the way Megan talks about her body. It’s bound up in it.

Again, none of this is especially new. In Angela Davis’ 1998 book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, the scholar and activist considers the political implications of the work and lives of blues pioneers Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. Among many profound observations about the ways Black women have shaped American culture, she establishes political grounding for the uniquely sexual—graphic, even—nature of Rainey and Smith’s lyrics and performance. “The historical African-American vision of individual sexual love linked it inextricably with possibilities of social freedom in the economic and political realms,” Davis writes, explaining the significance of sexual agency as a touchstone of freedom.

Across genders, it was an assertion of deliverance, one of few on the long road towards liberation. But for Black women, expressing, and acting on, desire took on another dimension of political imagination in the years and decades post-enslavement. “The women who sang the blues did not typically affirm female resignation and powerlessness, nor did they accept the relegation of women to private and interior spaces,” Davis writes. Women like Rainey, Smith, and untold others manifested power through the erotic, decades before the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Per Davis, these blues performers modeled a new archetype of Black woman: sexy, independent, cleverly seeking avenues to interrupt male dominance. They also were, it’s worth mentioning, at the fore of the growing Black entertainment industry. It would be disingenuous to suggest that, a century later, Megan faces the same circumstances. But it would be equally so to deny the shared history.

The scholar and theorist Paul Gilroy has famously argued that Black diasporic people’s common experiences of racialized terror have marshaled cultural production, and music in particular, that both responds to and scatters those experiences; the result in the context of Black American art has been the kind of thing writers in recent years have called Black genius. But what, then, can be extrapolated about the creative expression of Black women, at the nexus of racialized and gendered terror, to develop and sustain creative modes of expression?

A couple of years ago, I profiled the Chattanooga rapper Bbymutha. In a conversation about the discourse, nascent then, about the changing tide of opportunity for women rappers, she said, “There are a lot of female rappers that people have no idea exist. I’m ready to hear more about [them].” And there have always been, using the genre to do what many of their male counterparts have done: literally, sardonically, or aspirationally turn their experiences into art. Though the overwhelming majority don’t make it anywhere near Megan’s level, it’s not for a lack of skill or inspiration.

One song that has, rightly, emerged as a standout on Good News is “Shots Fired,” Megan’s personal indictment of her alleged assailant. She has said she recorded it soon after the shooting and saved it for months to serve as the album’s opener. It sets the tone: a clever, unflinching rebuttal aimed at both Lanez and forces much bigger than him. The next track, the anthemic “Circles,” features some of the most revelatory lyrics of her ups-and-downs: “Bullet wounds, backstabs, mama died, still sad/At war with myself in my head, bitch, it’s Baghdad.” And with that out of the way, it’s back to the body.

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork