Song of the summer: Cardi B and Megan’s bold provocation
The song lasts just three minutes, said Tom Breihan in Stereogum.com. But “in a summer that’s been hopelessly devoid of crowd-pleasing spectacle,” Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s new single and music video are “the closest thing we have to a new Avengers movie.” A raunchy celebration of female sexual prowess and pleasure, “WAP” became an instant No. 1 Billboard hit recognized by The New York Times as “almost certainly the most graphic and explicit ever to reach the top.” And of course the song and video triggered a mini culture war. One Republican congressional candidate tweeted that the lyrics “made me want to pour holy water in my ears.” Another wrote that Cardi and Meg had “set the entire female gender back by 100 years.” But that was expected, said Cassie Da Costa in TheDailyBeast.com. And the two rap stars are “taking all handwringing in stride, carrying on with the kind of self-confidence that a politics of respectability cannot supply.”
“WAP” is shorthand for “wet-ass p----,” and “the lyrics get even less Shakespearean from there,” said Spectator.us. When conservative radio and podcast host Ben Shapiro recited a censored version on air, he was widely mocked by liberals who missed the intentional humor, said Matt Purple in TheAmericanConservative.com. Instead, he was labeled a puritan by “the same people who spent the last two months trembling in front of Gone With the Wind” and whose only complaint about the “WAP” video is that it includes a cameo by Kylie Jenner, who isn’t black. The greater irony is that “WAP” is “the least sexy song and video that have come around in a long time,” said Libby Emmons in TheFederalist.com. Just as when guys brag about their penises, women explicitly bragging about their vaginas turns out to be “banal, trite, and dull.”
The video is actually hilarious, a “goofily over-the-top” romp through an Alice in Wonderland mansion filled with tigers, snakes, and erotic sculptures, said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. But what’s so new? “Vulgar sexuality is a hallowed aspect of American popular culture,” routinely renewed by youthful rebellions against the puritanical side of our national character. The “dirty blues” singers of the 1930s passed the tradition to Elvis Presley, who passed it to Prince. If there’s a difference this time, it’s that with “WAP,” it’s “not just a woman but a black woman— two black women—singing about the joys of sex with unapologetic glee, and ‘WAP’ shows you what it looks like, more and less, when a woman of color takes charge.” That dynamic, alas, is “still taboo in many corners of this country.”