Rapping About Your Pussy Is All the Rage Nowadays
Earlier this year, the enormously successful rapper Nicki Minaj told Vibe:
I felt like I had something to prove to everyone who said a female rapper could not make an album unless she was talking about her pussy. And so I went above and beyond to prove that I could not talk about sex and not talk about my genitalia and still have a successful album. And I proved that. And now my time for proving things to my critics is over. I don't really need to prove anything to anyone else anymore.
That's admirable, if not exactly in line with the kind of lyrics that put her on the map and made her eligible to record an album in the first place (from her riff on Lil Wayne's "Lollipop", released on a mixtape before her debut album: "He make my pussy say 'Ah!' like it's Mozart"). Her pussy, her choice to talk about it or not talk about it or tell us that she shares a mutual love of soup with it.
That said, the current most celebrated female rapper's refusal to talk about her ill na na has left a hole in the discourse that, thankfully plenty are willing to fill. (All puns are intended.) Last week, Georgia's Lady revealed the video for last year's "Pussy," whose title is a mere indication of its bluntness. It is a song-long list of all of the things her vagina is starting with, "Tight pussy, right pussy, fuck-me-all-night pussy, make-you-leave-your-wife pussy, ‘cause this-what-ya-like pussy." As the modifier game goes on, the song gets more hilarious ("Aquafina-wet pussy," "Pussy-snap-back-feel-like-it's-brand-new pussy," and "Make-ya-cum-once-twice-maybe-even-thrice pussy" are my favs) and yet Lady's face stays straight. "So fresh and so clean I got that STD-free pussy," brags Lady, but weirdly, her pussy isn't the only thing that hasn't gone viral — nine days out, this thing has notched less than 10,000 views at the time of this post's publication.
If Lady's vag humor is dry, Awkwafina's is sloppy. Like Nicki Minaj and Azealia Banks, she attended New York's Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, but she's campier than both of them put together. Last week's "My Vag" is similar to Lady's "Pussy" in that Awkwafina runs through a litany that gets more ridiculous as it goes on, only this time it's a compare-and-contrast exercise (example: "My vag won Best Vag / Your vag won Best Supporting Vag"). Her ability to be lewd while suffocating the sexiness out of sex is ripped right out of Peaches' book. However, the song's casual queerness ("My vag make your girl panties cream," "A vagina is 50 times better than a penis") provides a nice texture.
Finally, Brooke Candy released her debut video/manifesto, "Das Me," yesterday. It's not as invested in vaginal description as the other two mentioned here – Candy, who starred in Grimes' "Genesis" video, talks less about what her vagina does than what it does for her. "A dude could fuck three bitches and they say that he the man / But I get it in with twins, ‘She's a whore,' that's what they sayin' / It's time to take the word back, ‘slut' is now a compliment / A sexy ass female who runnin' shit and confident." That she looks like a breathing collage of every single woman in sci-fi from the past 50 years speaks to said confidence.
In this trio of songs—and three makes a trend—released over the course of about a week, we are provided graphic depictions of the versatility, the hilarity and the implications of vagina-owning. This is about as 360 of a view as we've been afforded in pop culture, bringing us at least a step closer to the ideal expressed by a Japanese tourist in Showgirls: In America, everyone's a gynecologist.