Until recently I was disturbingly unaware of several important bits of information relating to female rapper Nicki Minaj.
Though I'm 65, not exactly Minaj's target audience, I still try to keep up on youth culture by watching the MTV Video Music Awards each year and...
Um. Well. Let me think. And...
OK, not much else.
Still, I was vaguely aware of Minaj's assets, so to speak, having noticed somewhere the difficult-to-forget image of her album.
What truly drew me into learning more about Minaj, though, was coming across a mention of how someone had added fart sounds to her "Anaconda" video. Believe me, anytime I see the words "fart sounds," I will damn well click on that link.
I was hugely glad that I did. So was my wife. We laughed uncontrollably at the video.
Naturally I then became curious about what Minaj's original Anaconda video was like, since some (well, a lot) of the sexual allure was obscured by the fart-sounds.
That video also was appealing. Sorry, it can't be embedded. Watch on You Tube. With over 146 million views, obviously many other people felt the same way.
Not everyone though. Browsing through some comments on the above-linked video, I noted some along the lines of "I can't believe Minaj is considered to be a feminist."
Now, I am totally comfortable -- no, more than that, highly approving -- of women who shake their asses seductively in the course of making a cultural statement about female empowerment.
At the same time, I could understand why some would question Minaj's feminist credentials given the lyrics to "Anaconda."
Which include:
Don't don't don't, my anaconda don't
Don't want none unless you got buns, hun
Oh my gosh, look at her butt
Oh my gosh, look at her butt
Oh my gosh, look at her butt
Yeah, he love this fat ass
Yeah, this one is for my bitches with a fat ass in the fucking club
I said, where my fat ass big bitches in the club?
Fuck those skinny bitches, fuck those skinny bitches in the club
I wanna see all the big fat ass bitches in the motherfucking club
Fuck you if you skinny bitches WHAT?
I got a big fat ass
Come on
This does seem to set women in the "fat ass" category against the "skinny bitch" contingent, though maybe just in the "fucking club." Not sure about the grocery store, coffeehouse, or PTA meeting.
I then sought further enlightenment about Minaj's feminism through the Great God Google. Here's an excerpt from "Nicki Minaj's Feminism Isn't About Your Comfort Zone: On 'Anaconda' and Respectability Politics."
Nicki Minaj is not a woman who easily slides into the roles assigned to women in her industry or elsewhere. She’s not polished, she’s not concerned with her reputation, and she’s certainly not fighting for equality among mainstream second-wave feminists.
She’s something else, and she’s something equally worth giving credence to: a boundary-breaker, a nasty bitch, a self-proclaimed queen, a self-determined and self-made artist. She’s one of the boys, and she does it with the intent to subvert what it means. She sings about sexy women, about fucking around with different men. She raps about racing ahead in the game, imagines up her own strings of accolades, and rolls with a rap family notorious for dirty rhymes, foul mouths, and disregard for authority and hegemony.
While Beyoncé has expanded feminist discourse by reveling in her role as a mother and wife while also fighting for women’s rights, Minaj has been showing her teeth in her climb to the top of a male-dominated genre. Both, in the process, have expanded our society’s idea of what an empowered women looks like — but Minaj’s feminist credentials still frequently come under fire.
To me, it seems like a clear-cut case of respectability politics and mainstreaming of the feminist movement: while feminist writers raved over Beyoncé’s latest album and the undertones of sexuality and empowerment that came with it, many have questioned Minaj’s decisions over the years to subvert beauty norms using her own body, graphically talk dirty in her work, and occasionally declare herself dominant in discourse about other women.
That concluding link led me a Salon article, "Nicki Minaj's retroactive feminism: How the biggest female rapper stops just short of being the best feminist."
Minaj truly can be a wonderful role model in the way she encourages embodying your own destiny. But this interview on Nightline, in which she forgoes naming herself a “feminist” in lieu of “girl power,” brought to light exactly what her feminism is about: the 1990s.
If you’ll recall, in the ’90s, the term “girl power” was invoked by the Spice Girls and other corporate entities to neuter the explicit feminism inherent in other music of the day—the in-your-face woman power of Yo Yo, the subversive energy of Bikini Kill, as two examples.
“Girl power” feminism ushered in a convoluted feminism that gave birth to sentiments like “I am the female Weezy”: sex positivity was often framed as “if men can be promiscuous, so can I”; throwback glamour to the ’50s and ’60s was framed as countercultural, rather than retroactive.Minaj’s invocation of the term recalls that era. And while complex, complicated definitions of feminism are important to its progression—there is a point in which the water gets stale. We’ve heard it all before.
Perhaps so.
This is why the fart-enhanced video of Minaj's "Anaconda" is so important. It takes a wrecking ball to the patriarchal ideology of what a female rapper music video should be, subverting the culturally dominant male gaze through radical humor.
Or something like that.
I think the Salon article goes well with Minaj's farting fat ass. It's just a lot of hot air.
And despite the humor intent of the video (it is funny), the fact is that Minaj's fat ass most likely does fart quite a bit. Probably around 17 times a day which according to research is about average for most humans.
And the lyrics:
Don't don't don't, my anaconda don't
Don't want none unless you got buns, hun
Oh my gosh, look at her butt
Oh my gosh, look at her butt
Oh my gosh, look at her butt
Yeah, he love this fat ass
Yeah, this one is for my bitches with a fat ass in the fucking club
I said, where my fat ass big bitches in the club?
Fuck those skinny bitches, fuck those skinny bitches in the club
I wanna see all the big fat ass bitches in the motherfucking club
Fuck you if you skinny bitches WHAT?
I got a big fat ass
Come on
--American pop culture has come a long way since the Beach Boys' "California Girls" don't you think? Gives you hope that in the end everything will come out OK.
Posted by: tucson | September 12, 2014 at 07:37 PM
great insight!!
Posted by: shelby | November 01, 2015 at 02:52 AM