LC Thread 2020: What the PUNK? ROCK.

A truly great lyric. It comes at you so fast you can easily miss it, but I’m going to add this to my list of reasons why Nelly is a 100% authentic country musician. His idea of being megaballer was having a good credit rating and having a plane seat next to Vanna White, that celebrity he saw on a gameshow.

As a middle-aged white guy, I’m befuddled as to why WAP is such a huge deal. Women having ever more freedom to be sexually explicit in pop culture has been a thing for the past 100 years? Like, we all watched Shoop on MTV 30 years ago, and also they had much better lyrics. Cardi B seems like she’s only been pushing the boundaries a little bit?

PS: Can we go back to talking about bluegrass, though? It’s phenomenal stuff, absolutely sublime artistry. Celtic-Afro-American music, it only happens in a nation full of refugees/forced laborers.

PPS: special shout-out to that dude in the Shoop music video with the three-piece suit who immediately strips down into a cut volleyball-playing hunk, you’ve made me feel deeply insecure about myself for decades. Kinda like how women have been feeling about themselves since forever.

skydiver8 · August 16, 2020, 5:07am

Shoop was fine, but we weren’t allowed to request Push It at our high school dances.

To me WAP is a big deal because it shows exactly how far we haven’t come.

Trolly · August 16, 2020, 5:16am

If you had asked me in 1995 to imagine 2020 and whether it would be scandalous if female artists in the deep future explicitly rapped about the pussy, I would have had a good long laugh.

skydiver8 · August 16, 2020, 5:18am

The puritan roots run deeeeeeeeeeep in this country, and they are like the fucking stinkhorn mushrooms we can’t get rid of from our yard and our dog keeps digging them up and bringing them inside and making our house smell like death.

the use of that comparison is very deliberate (if you know what a stinkhorn mushroom looks like)

fuck those things

All-InFlynn · August 16, 2020, 5:22am

I mean, sure? This ad was recently banned from Irish television:

microbet · August 16, 2020, 5:23am

That’s good, but left me wanting

suzzer99 · August 16, 2020, 5:28am

The way I see it from limited exposure - Cardi B is different from earlier generations of feminist-ish “owning your sexuality” in a couple ways:

She’s flat out explicit - there’s no euphemism going on.
Stuff like “I was a ho” and the chorus of WAP “there’s some whores in the house” reminds me of rap taking control of the N-word 30 years ago. She’s taking one of the the worst traditional insults for women, turning it around around, and taking ownership of it. I’m calling myself the word, you can’t hurt me with it anymore. I’m sure she didn’t invent the idea modern street-ish black women proudly calling themself a ho. But she is the first artist afaik to take it to the top levels.

Combine that with a pretty fresh sound. I can see why she’s huge.

zikzak · August 16, 2020, 5:36am

Her persona is leaning in hard to stereotypes of a low class woman and shoving them in your face with no apologies. I love her for that even if her music makes me want to puncture my eardrums.

microbet · August 16, 2020, 5:45am

prana · August 16, 2020, 5:51am

She was a stripper before a rapper.

microbet · August 16, 2020, 5:53am

She was a Blood (gang member) before a stripper. She credits stripping with turning her life around in a good way.

Trolly · August 16, 2020, 5:54am

I remember once as a 20-something dude I ran to my guitar teacher senpai and told him how crazy good Eliott Smith’s Coast to Coast album was what with its layered sounds and shit and he patted me on the head and told me he’d heard it all before in his prog-rock days and also the Beatles were doing that shit in the ancient times with Sgt Pepper before I was even born. I think that’s kinda what’s going on here. The envelopes get pushed much more slowly than we realize.

prana · August 16, 2020, 5:57am

I haven’t even watched WAP yet but I’m just saying her lyrics don’t seem inconsistent or hypocritical with her previous lifestyles. She’s not horrible at rapping either from previous videos I’ve seen.