I’ve never made a music video — alas, the world must wait for my cover version of Fernando (I’d want my mum on the maracas). But if I did put one together, I would hope it could have one droplet of the sheer magnificence of WAP: probably the most talked about four minutes and 12 seconds on the internet right now.
Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion have crafted the most exuberant and defiant carnival of empowerment I have seen for an incredibly long time. It’s jammed with the most formidable kind of visual sexuality and lyrics of such sensuous intensity they’ll burn your ears right off your head. If I tried to reproduce lines here, there’d be rather more asterisks than letters (I can’t even tell you what WAP stands for — though the first word is Wet…)
Inevitably, Russell Brand decided to see WAP as exploitation of the grimmest kind of fleshly capitalism and asks “is it equality if the template has already been established by the former dominator?” (men) and answers “No”. Well, Russell’s heart might be in the right place, but he’s dead wrong. It’s exactly what 2020 needed and, fortunately, I am here to gaysplain why.
I am myself a truly passionate devotee of female hip-hop and grime artists (people never seem to believe me… apparently, I’m only allowed to adore Mahler and Twenties Russian art). I fell in love with Cardi B after disappearing down an internet rabbit hole — led there by Lady Leshurr’s Queen’s Speech. Ever since then I’ve been obsessed.
I would recommend anyone wanting to learn more to go and take a look at City Girls’ Twerk (featuring Cardi B) in 2018. It’s a riot of spectacular and divine female empowerment: women of all shapes, sizes and colours shaking their asses. The set-up may be a competition, but it isn’t what women look like when they’re being pitted against one another. Their pride and delight in each other’s twerking prowess is abundantly, joyously clear.
Brand sees capitalist exploitation, but he simply has no idea what he’s talking about. WAP seems to me to be a genuine, profound expression of what it actually is to be a woman.
These are anything but the values established by men… the values established by men for women say that they should be thin, feeble and preferably deeply ashamed. These women are diverse, strong and unapologetic. Yes, the women in the video ooze sex appeal, but it has nothing to do with Brand.
Obviously, I say this as a man. But it instantly made me think of the pushback I saw against television representations of unfettered homosexuality when I was younger.
When I was a lad, easy laughs at token gays were more or less the only representation you got to see. Then, suddenly, Russell T. Davies’s Queer As Folk appeared and seemed to come from another planet.
It was an utter revelation: these men weren’t conforming to the gay shame narrative I’d seen everywhere else … they were going about the authentic business of being alive and gay. When I watch WAP I see exactly the same thing.
Women in grime don’t twerk for the male gaze but for the pure joy of being alive and female
I genuinely believe if these artists were white women performing in upwardly mobile Shoreditch hotspots, they would be recognised as modern day Sylvia Plaths.
Women in hip-hop and grime are throwing off their cloaks of shame and writing lyrics telling their lives exactly as they are; grinding and twerking not for the male gaze, but for the pure joy of being alive and a woman.
