Now, when white pop stars with flat butts jokingly position themselves next to twerking black dancers for comparison, it’s presumably at their own expense, drawing attention to their own lack of ass. It’s hard to imagine that an exercise video called Buns of Steel was once popular. We live in a world where the appeal of a large, plush booty has long since been mainstreamed, and where Kim Kardashian’s ass is more recognizable than her face. The thesis of “Baby Got Back” - that some men might not appreciate a large ass, but Sir Mix-A-Lot certainly would (“pull up quick to retrieve it,” even) - feels charmingly old-fashioned in a post–Jennifer Lopez world. The song is a tribute to women with large asses, but it’s also implicitly a song about shifting racial standards of beauty. It was banned from MTV for a brief period for its overt sexuality, but it was quickly reinstated because people fucking loved it. Seattle rapper Sir Mix-A-Lot’s video for his 1992 hit “Baby Got Back” took female objectification to its absurdist logical conclusion, with dancers standing on a giant statue of a butt. The trope became self-parodic, but it was still de rigueur. 2 Live Crew pushed the envelope to its limit with the “Me So Horny” video, which featured dancers in g-strings. Swift didn’t invent the rap video tropes that she’s riffing on the focus on women’s bodies as a series of sexualized parts came of age in ’80s rap and metal videos. ![]() Or maybe nothing’s a coincidence, and everything is culturally conditioned. Maybe it’s a coincidence that we don’t see the faces of the black female dancers, that they are reduced to just a vibrating ass. But the twerking setup is also the video still on YouTube, so when you search for it, you see Taylor crawling through a tunnel of legs, with a muscular black woman’s thighs and kneecaps in the foreground. Taylor’s “what?” faces as she fails at each dance setup in the “Shake It Off” video aren’t overtly mocking to the dancers if anything, the video more directly mocks interpretative dancers than twerk teams. Taylor has riffed self-deprecatingly on her whiteness before in a video with T-Pain, in which she rapped and flashed a grill. Which is why it felt tone-deaf when Taylor Swift put out a music video for her new single that featured a couple of scenes in which she used black dancers as props to offset her own clueless whiteness. Maybe they didn’t, but somebody around them at some point should have. Pop stars traffic in symbology, so when white girls like Miley, Katy, and Lily Allen hide behind the claim that they just didn’t know any better, it seems insufficient. ![]() She was treated as a literal object, meant to sit on display like the Willendorf Venus so that white people could pay money to gaze at her, money Baartman would never see. A s she has with all criticism in this vein, Perry once again denied any culpability by claiming ignorance. The white fascination with Baartman’s black female body was clinical and dehumanizing she was described as “savage,” likened to an animal, and studied by doctors. Baartman’s large buttocks and long labia, normal for members of her tribe, the Khoikhoi, were considered exotic. ![]() You can’t talk about music in America without talking about race, implicitly or explicitly.Įarlier this summer, repeat offender Katy Perry came under fire for a tour performance of “Dark Horse” that involved mummies who looked uncomfortably like Sarah Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus.” Baartman was a South African woman who was sold and toured through Europe as a freak-show attraction, where white Europeans came to stare at her body. It is the dominant narrative in American music from its inception, and any fantasies that America is a “post-racial” country were dashed against the rocks of realityagain this week anytime you turned on the news. The history of white artists adopting a black sound and gaining mainstream popularity with it is much older than Elvis or Benny Goodman. It was only a year ago that Miley Cyrus twerked on Robin Thicke at the 2013 VMAs and kicked off a long public conversation about the appropriation of black musical culture by white pop artists.
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