Her Hips don’t Lie, Her Tongue Doesn’t Either: Nicki Minaj, Twerking and Feminism

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The twerk mania has invaded music videos, clothes (even underwear) and (pop) culture in general. By doing so, the originally African American dance move has been stripped off of its original cultural significance. This blog post will look at the phenomenon of twerking and the struggles that non-white women in the music industry face. We will do so through a case study on rapper Nicki Minaj who is notorious for her uncomfortable and subtly subversive approach to feminism.

While VH1 and Fuse writers identify the origins of twerking in the New Orleans bounce scene of the early ‘90s, Christiana Mbakwe traces the roots of the dance, “all in the ass and hips [...] rhythmic and complex, the footwork’s intricate and even though the body is blending different rhythms, it all manages to flow like water” in West Africa, specifically in Côte d'Ivoire. For Mbakwe it’s natural that the dance move is known where there is a high concentration of people with African descent, as twerking “existed in black global culture for years.” In his 1992 song Baby Got Back, Sir Mix-a-Lot raps: “Take the average black man and ask him that / She gotta pack much back” while the dancers around him perform something similar to twerking.

When Nicki Minaj samples Baby Got Back and releases Anaconda in 2014, she is riding the twerk wave and makes the dance move pivotal in the music video. The Trinidad born rapper debuted with her first studio album, Pink Friday, in 2010, with Super Bass being the most successful single. Her aesthetic, that of an Harajuku Barbie, is inspired by the Japanese street fashion popular in the Harajuku district. She retains the same fun aesthetic in her second album, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, and especially in the single Starships: colorful wigs, adherent colorful garments, funky editing effects. Her 2014 album The Pink Print brings a change in her image and in her music style (but the pink wigs aren’t history yet, see Hey Mama). One thing has been consistent with Nicki Minaj and that’s her feminism. Among her feats, she encourages her fans to complete their education first, is pro-choice and advocates for better salaries for women and equal treatment in the bedroom (in the same interview!). But her feminism is also uncomfortable and controversial, as seen in Lookin Ass. From the promotion art for the single, a picture of Malcolm X that the artist removed and apologized for, to the lyrics, that a Jezebel editor called a “rapey waste of time” and “spectacular misuse of her talents.” But especially in the world of rap, the song and video can be seen as progressive, despite the use of the N-word and the gun imagery. Nicki Minaj owns her looks and sexuality while she invites the male gaze, she is literally seen in the eyes of a man.

At the same time, she is calling out leering men and stating she is better than them as rapper: "Look at y'all sharin' one bottle in the club / One bottle full of bub' ass [N-word]" and "No dick in the pants ass [N-word] / I be damned if I fuck a non-man ass [N-word]." The words "lookin' ass [N-word]” are often used to make one's point in an argument, and by repeating them, Nicki Minaj shows the men watching her and listening to her that she is winning the argument. The video finishes with her firing bullets off screen and thereby destroying the male gaze. With Lookin' Ass, Nicki Minaj shows that she is not only resilient and able to overcome the disadvantages of being a woman; she is also able to go on the offense (James, 2015).

The already mentioned Anaconda was at the center of a similar controversy, especially since it was released after the soulful, tame Pills N Potions; the promotion art was called almost pornographic, and the artist replied to the accusations in her own way, by posting similar pictures of white models (acceptable) and then her cover shot (unacceptable). And with the song the artist wanted to celebrate curvy women in a sexy and playful way. The video of the song mixes a lot of twerking with eating cream, spreading cream on her body, performing fellatio on a banana and then chopping it. To GQ, Nicki said that the video is one big girls slumber party, and the banana segment “was important for us to show in the kitchen scene, because it’s always about the female taking back the power, and if you want to be flirty and funny that’s fine, but always keeping the power and the control in everything.”

On July 21 the nominations for the 2015 VMA came out and Anaconda was missing from the nominations for Video of The Year. In a tweet string, Nicki complained that if she was a different kind of artist and had she celebrated women with slim bodies, she would have been nominated. Remember the predominant twerking in the video? It was made viral and pop by Miley Cyrus during the 2013 VMA. The same Miley Cyrus who, asked about Nicki Minaj’s tweet reaction about the missed nomination by the New York Times, focused on the tone of the rapper and not on what she said; the interviewer hinted at Miley’s Wrecking Ball video, in which a white slim girl got naked and nominated. Miley Cyrus once again criticised the harshness of Nicki Minaj’s tone. So when Anaconda won Best Hip-Hop video, Nicki didn’t hold back.

As Everydayfeminism writer Maisha Johnson comments, when Nicki called out Miley Cyrus on stage, asking her “What’s good?”, she was calling out the practice of tone policing: the focus on how things are said instead of what is said. Nicki Minaj was calling out the racism in the music industry, and the struggle to be a female rapper when she was tweeting about the missed nomination.

Twerking became really mainstream after "Miley Cyrus became the conduit that brought twerking to the mainstream consciousness. This is unsurprising. The world is enamoured with black culture and corporations know this. However, they’d much prefer to sell and explore the black cultural experience using white faces,” as Mbakwe wrote. When scholar Kristen McGee talks about male creativity prioritized in Oriental studies and her focus on female dance, a parallel can be drawn with rap, the focus on male rappers and the minimization of female rappers as twerking props (McGee, 20). When McGee links belly dancing to a reputation of sex work, she implies that everything foreign to white culture can be exoticized, and twerking has followed the same fate.

Pop culture is far from simple. The multi-faceted rapper Nicki Minaj is an example of a successful black artist still struggling in the music industry: tone-policed, unrewarded, taken seriously only after a drastic change of image. But Nicki isn’t silent about it. Her hips don’t lie, her tongue doesn’t either. So, what’s good?

Thesis: Appropriating aspects of a culture, white washing them, stripping them of Otherness and tone policing the Other is something we can’t escape.

LD, NS, DL, EH, KH

Further reading:

James, Robin. “Look, I Overcame!” Resilience and Melancholy: pop music, feminism, neoliberalism. London: Zero Books, 2015. Print. 78-124.

McGee, Kristin. “Orientalism and Erotic Multiculturalism in Popular Culture: From Princess Rajah to the Pussycat Dolls.” Music, Sound and the Moving Image 6.2 (2012): 200-238. Print.