A traumatic, transformative year
Megan Thee Stallion sparks conversation that has been one of the most vital in pop
Megan Thee Stallion didn’t realize she had a thick Texas accent until she left her hometown of Houston.
“Words that I can understand and that the people around me can clearly understand — a lot of people would be like, ‘What did you say?’ ” the rapper, 25, recalls. “Or I’d see people typing my lyrics on the internet, and they’d be absolutely wrong.”
To a point, Megan was sympathetic: “I was a little ratchet thing back then,” she says, laughing, of the viral freestyles that first brought her attention as a student at Texas Southern University. But although her subsequent travels never led her to smooth out her deep Texas twang — just listen to the way she chews the word “nasty” in “Savage,” one of a pair of smash hits she took to No.
1 in 2020 — the experience of being misunderstood made her consider her priorities.
“The older I got, I was like, ‘Let me go ahead and enunciate this whole word so that people know what I’m saying,’ ” Megan said. “I had to learn how to talk to you in my songs, because I want you to grasp where I’m coming from.
“I want my music to feel like a conversation.”
This year that conversation has been one of the most vital in pop. With “Savage,” which took off initially on TikTok before going global with a remix featuring Beyoncé, and “WAP,” her chart-topping raunch-a-thon duet with Cardi B, Megan created a smart, rowdy forum for complex ideas about gender, race and sexuality.
And the conversation broadened after a widely publicized incident in July in which she says she was shot by rapper Tory Lanez; suddenly, Megan became a focal point in a reckoning over the oft-unpunished violence faced by Black women such as Breonna Taylor, whose killing by police she invokes on “Shots Fired,” the opening track of her debut album, “Good News.”
Fans have taken part in this dialogue by streaming Megan’s songs hundreds of millions of times and by adopting her catchphrases and nicknames for themselves.
Of course, as in any discussion of important issues, there are those who disagree with Megan’s views, including the handful of conservative politicians who were scandalized by “WAP,” whose title abbreviation unrolls to describe a well-lubricated part of the female anatomy.
“This is my body; why can’t I talk about it?” Megan asks. “Men have been doing it for years. Me saying I have a WAP should not be making the boys cry this hard.”
Yet now she’s having the last laugh with four Grammy nominations — for record of the year, rap song and rap performance (all with “Savage”) and for best new artist prize.
Megan’s buoyant attitude permeates “Good News,” which after “Shots Fired” offers up one joyful, up-tempo cut after another.
“2020 obviously just threw everybody under the bus, so with this album I wanted to talk about things that make me feel happy,” she says.
The unexpected downtime during the COVID-19 lockdown in the spring was a creative boon. “My album turned out the way it did because I had the time to sit and write and marinate with the songs,” she says. “Before, I was doing a show in a different city every single day, squeezing in my writing where I could.”
The meticulousness of Megan’s rhymes, as delivered in the crisp yet chatty flow she has worked hard to develop, sets her apart from the rappers making blearier, more abstract sounds at the moment.
Juicy J, the Memphis hip-hop veteran who has known Megan for years, remembers the first time he met her in the studio.
“We talked for a sec, vibed out, then she jumped in the booth and just killed the song,” he says. “Pulled up another song, she went in the booth, killed that one too.”
Megan, whose last name is Pete, started rapping in Houston under the tutelage of her mother, Holly Thomas, who herself rapped under the name Holly-Wood and eventually began managing Megan’s career. Thomas died from a brain tumor in 2019 but not before her daughter had started turning heads with songs like “Big Ole
Freak,” which Megan recorded between assignments for the health administration degree she says she’s still pursuing.
Not having her mom around for support made the shooting last summer that much more difficult, Megan says; ditto the ugly way she was treated online by people using the incident as fodder for jokes and memes — and by Lanez, who released an album suggesting she’d lied about him. (Lanez has pleaded not guilty to felony assault charges.)
Megan says she’s prohibited from discussing the case but allows that the aftermath put her in a “dark place.” Among the folks she has leaned on are Jay-Z, who signed her to his management firm, Roc Nation, and Beyoncé, whose friendship feels like a “wild dream” to a woman who grew up admiring the superstar with whom she shares a hometown.
“Being from Houston, Beyoncé means everything to us,” she says. “I’m pretty sure Beyoncé means everything to a lot of people. But when I got to do a song with her? Oh, my God.”
Megan has kept remarkably busy over the last few months, penning a widely discussed op-ed for the New York Times about the need to protect Black women and taking the same message to “Saturday Night Live,” where she gave a powerful performance of “Savage” that explicitly criticized Kentucky’s attorney general, Daniel Cameron, for his handling of the investigation into Breonna Taylor’s death.
At the Grammys ceremony, Megan says she’s in talks to perform “Savage” with Beyoncé, who will compete against her for record of the year with her song “Black Parade.”
She’s also looking beyond January’s ceremony to what next year might hold. She’d love to collaborate with Rihanna or maybe with her fellow best new artist nominee Doja Cat.
Juicy J sees “icon status” in Megan’s future — “like Diana Ross,” he says, “doing movies and running businesses.”
First, though, Megan needs to decide which song from “Good News” to shoot a video for next. She’s put the question to her so-called Hotties, so far without any consensus.
“They’re battling, but it’s so positive,” she says of her fans. “If I can get the whole world to interact with each other as positively as they do, I’m doing a … good job with my music.”