Bodies on bodies

Megan Thee Stallion at Chase Center, June 23rd, 2024

There is this tedious new trope in the world of mainstream music journalism in which rock critics contribute articles about being a Swiftie Dad. What happens is, they take their daughter to see Taylor Swift, and then discover to their immense surprise that Swift’s music has some merit. She’s no Bob Dylan, but you know: Tunes! Fun! Bon Iver! Aaron Dessner! What’s not to like?

This type of article is becoming so frequent that I was thinking about writing a satire of it for McSweeneys, in which a Gen Z-er goes with her Dad to see Bruce Springsteen and discovers he has merit – but somehow the trope doesn’t work in reverse. And then just as I was thinking about the plethora of Swiftie Dad articles, a bad thing befell me: I became a Megan Thee Stallion Mom.

photo by Caitlin.

Well, I exaggerate. Unlike the teenage girls in the Swiftie-Dad stories, my daughter could easily have gone to see Megan Thee without me. She was just being kind by inviting me along. It was actually very inappropriate for me to be there, but I do love a spectacle, so there I was.

Due to my chagrin at the aforementioned phenomenon, I will try not to tell you in a condescending manner what my daughter thought or what a revelation it was to find that Megan’s music has merit. I actually already knew it had merit. Such essays may be interesting to non-music fans, but I am not sure to who else, since kids today don’t read rock criticism or writing and in fact hate the idea of it. Being me, I did have some thoughts about the sound and the video set-up, but my daughter also got mad at me when I said something slightly snotty about the opener, GloRilla, so I won’t repeat it.

I will say, however, that GloRilla’s set was a reminder of just how good a rapper Megan Thee Stallion is. She’s a giant in the field. In my experience, even legendary male rap artists often spend a lot of performance time wandering around the stage or rapping over backing tracks, so it makes perfect sense that a female headliner in that genre would have to do that twice as well AND dance her ass off, throughout. Indeed, a la Ginger Rogers, it’s inevitable that someone in her position would have to be once, twice, three times better than every other contender. I think she’s the best of them all, except maybe Kendrick Lamar, whose work hers closely resembles. Her message is different and more specific, but her word play and flow are just as good and her place in the hearts of her fans is similar.

To be honest, though, I’m not even that familiar with the majority of Megan’s music, but I do really love the song “Thot Shit,” and often use the video for it in a lecture I give in my college course on race and popular culture, in order to discuss the exploitation of female black bodies. In the video, a politician tweets about how lewd Megan is (a real tweet and incident, btw), after which she haunts his every move by literally twerking his face off. Her point, in both the song and the video, is twofold. One, black women are the backbone of a work force that this man depends upon entirely, and two, he and his ilk have sexualized black women like her for their own pleasure forever; that being the case and not likely to change anytime soon, well fuck that shit.

As with “Thot Shit,” Megan writes and performs songs that seem to be highly sexual -- every other word in them is pussy or dick – but which have a whole other dimension, i.e., the way that sex and sexualization currently takes up a huge space in America’s psyche, and how that informs the world we live in. Megan’s songs are funny and sexy and rude as hell, but at the end of her show, she shouts her explicit message to her ecstatic crowd: love yourself, love your body, and no matter what anybody thinks about you, have confidence in yourself. As a person who was taught by my culture and era to hate their body and who suffers from grave confidence issues because of that, I appreciate that message, and it clearly resonates with the crowd, which is largely young women, a smattering of gay men, and a few lumbering boyfriends who look 100% less hot than their girlfriends and therefore a little out of place. Except for those guys, the whole crowd is super dressed up: fancy, nakey, cosplay, crazy stuff, like Halloween on Castro Street, super bright and fun. Every single one of them clearly feels hugely empowered by Megan and is therefore having a hot girl summer.

Me, maybe not so much. I mean, there is no question that I was highly out of place at that concert and really shouldn’t have been there. Indeed, I have nothing to add to the dialog that others can’t say better, except this: I am not sure that regular people realize the extent to which the whole concert industry is currently being driven by very young women and very old men. The day of the young male music fans is definitely done, and good riddance:

By contrast:

That is all. Cheers!