A Few Too Many Words on Gags, Snakes & Getting To The Top
A Few Too Many Words is a very informal analysis essay series of any given topic. These posts are for people who are familiar with the subject that I’ll be discussing. It is also a way for me to be able to get rid of perfectionism when it comes to writing posts for this blog.
It all began with two bars.
“These hoes don’t be mad at Megan. These hoes mad at Megan’s Law.”
Megan Thee Stallion’s new track, Hiss, gives a scathing commentary on the shadier aspects of the industry. It walks up to the line of defamation lawsuits and happily stands there. It dares anyone to walk straight into Megan’s pit and get bit.
Which is exactly what Nicki Minaj did. Minaj has been mired in controversy over the past several years, from openly beefing with other female rappers like Cardi B to marrying a registered sex offender to openly defending her brother who is serving life in prison for raping his 11 year-old stepchild. While watching this can be entertaining for some, it serves as yet another example of the end of the “girlboss era” and the beginning of a new one.
Over the past several years, we have watched the continued downfall of the idea that marginalized people can do the same things that men can do in straight white cis men can do white supremacist cis hetero-patriarchal capitalism. Critiques of this phenomenon have been around for a number of years, but over the past several years it has left the small discussion rooms of local liberation organization chapters and the dusty lecture halls of academia.
We also have seen the results of pledging allegiance to these systems will chew you up and spit you out. From the ousting of first black female Harvard President Claudine Gay to the suicide of Lincoln University vice president Antoinette Candia-Bailey, we are routinely seeing how easy it is to be destroyed ourselves by institutions that rely on the destruction of others.
The rap game is no different. While the rap game likes to position itself more than 50 years after its inception as something different, it is still an institution that is filled with the same isms, ists and phobias found in even the highest seats in Washington. Its toll to get to the top is the same. One has to walk the road littered in the corpses (literal and not) of those who had even an ounce of humanity they didn’t want to leave behind.
Nicki Minaj is one of those people. Listen, I’m not absolving her over any bullshit she’s engaged in because victims and victimizers can be the same person. As a survivor of sexual assault and harassment, I’m not interested in engaging in the type of apologetics that her stans do on the regular. However, let’s face it: a person like her was always going to be devoured by the industry she was in.
For a decade, she was the most prominent and often only female rapper that charted in the Billboard Top 10 and Top 100. There was a price for that, one that was paid in ways we will never fully or truly know. The industry chewed her up and spat her out because she wanted to get to the top. That wasn’t the Illuminati, just good old white cis-hetero patriarchy. When a woman is on top, she usually has to strip a fair amount of her humanity to get there (if they ever had it) and is always stripped from them once they’re not shiny and new anymore.
It’s a tale as old as time, that usually has a similar ending. The woman, thrown out of the industry, spiralling alone in her mansions or on the street until her tragic death. Then, like vultures, everyone picks whatever contributions they made to world apart while enjoying the newer, younger, shinier model.
