Quote:
Originally Posted by mellonxcollie
I was so fucking confused at first cause I saw posts about it before I realized it was a song, I thought it was a new term for white people like WASPs but slightly different somehow??
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same
anyways time to give my hot(tm) take
so the song is significant not for the content but the controversy surrounding it.
as etienne already mentioned, sexually explicit songs are nothing new, when sung by men or women. but there's two things here that stand out: the song is more explicit than other sexual songs by contemporary artists (e.g. anaconda by nicki minaj, whistle by flo rida (ew)) and the song and the accompanying music video portray women as in charge of their sexuality and dominant over their partners (who we'd assume are men). music today is indeed very sexist, and women-- especially black women-- are often objectified.
we then have the music video which o n l y includes women, predominately black of all shades. an exception is kylie jenner, which i think is an interesting inclusion. she is very much white but her and her family have been accused over the years of co-opting black culture for money and fame. some think she shouldn't have been in the video at all, as her presence is detracting from the attention that cardi b and megan thee stallion should have instead. i don't know what to think of it, really. we also see normani at the end of the video who is talented af and let's us know it, but she's spoken out about racism in the music industry before (edit: and has not seen the meteoric rise in her career that she deserves). her music video "motivation" was also criticized as sexual when, really, it was pretty modest compared to other music videos when we think about it. why is that?
when people decry this song, they call it trashy. specifically, trashy. that's not the wording we use when a male singer makes a sexually explicit song, or when a woman is sexualized in a male singer's music video... or when a white or white passing woman makes a sexually explicit music video. i think this points towards the intersection of racism and sexism in both the music industry and in society as a whole.
and that's why i love this song. it's also a b o p