A year after Miley Cyrus’s twerking at the VMAs incited a national debate about a dance culture borne from the Bounce scene in New Orleans, ass worship has become a form of cultural currency. This is the year we reached Peak Ass.
Lyrically and choreographically, booty was ubiquitous in 2014: Nicki Minaj’s "Anaconda" sampled Sir-Mix-a-Lot’s "Baby Got Back" while Minaj undulated in a thong amongst five twerking dancers in the video. Big Freedia’s "Explode" video commanded the masses to "release their wiggle." Beyoncé was twerking and smacking the asses of two dancers in a cheerleader pyramid in "7/11". Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea were rubbing their butts together like a weird take on an eskimo kiss in "Booty". The list goes on. People in opposite corners of the popular milieu—men, women, the queer community, people of color, white people, old people, young people—were engaged with the trend on some level over the course of a year in which ass (and shaking it) became omnipresent.
The ass fixation of the last year was due, in part, to lingering debates that were never resolved (are they ever?) after the Miley incident of 2013; some saw it as a triumph, others a travesty. Her ignominious VMAs performance was criticized by many who claimed—rightly so—that she was capitalizing on an aspect of a culture that didn’t belong to her—an argument that often fell along racial lines. Others claimed it was a class issue, and yet others (including a slew of pop stars) still embraced twerking willingly, feeling empowered that this kind of movement was a liberating, rebellious act. Some argued that since nobody "owned" twerking, everybody had a right to it. Ass-bearing jean shorts became an unofficial uniform of backup dancers, and music videos leaped to their embrace regardless of the outstanding tension still associated with this fad. If in 2013 ass reached its political zeitgeist, it was never digested, and the abiding fascination paved the way for our renewed obsession with butts to reach peak visibility in 2014.
Women who never relied on overt sex appeal or muckraking were engaged with the obsession satirically: the twerking in Taylor Swift’s "Shake It Off" video’s "spoof" on the Miley trope; Lily Allen’s lamentable "Hard Out Here" video. The irony with these videos is that they ended up exploiting the dancers just as much as the videos they were designed to mock. Meanwhile, the nuance and inertia behind this trend in popular music laid the groundwork for correlated developments in culture writ large: Kim Kardashian’s ass made the cover of Paper Magazine; Instagram coined the "Butt Selfie". Unadorned close-ups of ass across all mediums are partially why another big song of the year—Meghan Trainor's "All About That Bass"—felt so ridiculous in 2014: Trainer sings "I’m bringing booty back" when it’s obvious that booty never left us, and she is hardly the Madonna of posterior. At one point this past October, six out of the Top 10 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 were ass-themed or discussed butts.
While ass-praise has been front and center in hip hop for decades (Wreckx-N-Effect’s "Rumpshaker", 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Becover, Pitbull’s early crossover "Culo", Juvenile’s "Back That Ass Up", LL Cool J’s "Big Ole Butt" are all landmarks), female pop artists largely address ass through indirect metaphor. In Destiny’s Child’s case, it’s the "jelly" for which we were not "ready"; in Missy Elliott’s case, it was the "ba-bump ba-bump bump" and its "ga-dunk ga-dunk dunk". Until the last few years, ass-bearing as a form of artistic expression was primarily a man’s game.
Meanwhile, Big Freedia was pioneering a movement that welcomed twerking as an emphatic accompaniment to the Bounce scene that was coalescing in New Orleans. The dance aesthetic of Bounce hadn’t yet broken on the national scene even after her 2011 hit "Azz Everywhere". You weren’t seeing this kind of dancing in every music video; it wasn’t a dominant force on social media or a spoof on late-night television, nor was it an omnipresent hashtag. Twerking and the lyricism that canonized cartoonish ass-shaking as both a tool of empowerment and an agent of shock were established, but not ubiquitous. Miley’s VMAs stunt in 2013 seems to have been a watershed moment breaking the barrier (for better or worse) that gave performers removed from Bounce culture permission to embrace twerking as their own, regardless of their proximity to its origins. Few people could reconcile the fact that Miley’s dancers were black, and that she was seemingly reducing them to a commodity that was sold, metaphorically, to the masses. The people who pioneered the trend—like Big Freedia—also weren’t attributed proper ownership of what they’d worked hard to establish. This controversy—which has never been quelled—sparked renewed questions about race, class, originality, taste, and ownership—but the new wave of ass everywhere also forced a desensitization. Twerk-gate forced us to observe a long-standing exploitative aspect of how we view the feminine form, and to think about who has the right to appropriate and harness it for entertainment (and profit from it). Is it a form of creative expression? What does it tell us about culture? Did Becky ever look at her butt?
None of these questions were answerable, partially because women’s emphasis on this part of their own bodies also seemingly greenlighted more excess from male artists. Hip-hop videos a decade ago, including Ludacris’ "What’s Your Fantasy" or Nelly’s "Hot In Herre", used sex appeal as social branding, wherein women were trophies to be pursued and grinded on. Videos like A$AP Mob’s "Hella Hoes" and YG’s "Left, Right" have brought a renewed level of objectification-for-shock-value. The women in these 2014 videos aren’t just writhing in a club—they’re on all fours. Asses aren’t lingered over; they are slapped. Instead of spraying alcohol into the crowd, alcohol is poured directly over gyrating body parts. Comically, almost every contemporary video that depicts twerking contains close up, slow-motion footage of an ass jiggling, like an American flag rippling in the wind; it can be hypnotic, or straight-up clinical. The sheer viscerality and carnality of the experience dominated this trope in 2014, if only because it was allowed.
We saw some extreme manifestations in 2014, as the drive to hit next-level assploitation resulted in videos like Mastodon’s "The Motherload". Unlike "Anaconda" or "Big Booty", which have an element of candor, there’s a distinctly flat, cynical, male gaze in "Motherload"; the depiction of no less than 20 women participating in some kind of extreme twerk competition (for the band?) while Mastodon plays turgid, macho music in the background. The "Motherload" video isn’t pretending to be fun. It mocks a culture without engaging with it, as the artists are smack in the middle of—yet comfortably removed from—the activity that gives the video its hook. The band’s thinly veiled condescension and the lessening of moral outrage that comes with reaching Peak Ass made exploitative narratives like this one uniquely possible in 2014. As a result, Mastodon—a progressive metal band—made the most "outrageous" ass-themed video of the year.
For better or worse, ass obsession now exists at the nexus of queer culture, white privilege, popular music, underground hip-hop, twerking Vines, teen girl aesthetic, and crossover trend. In their own way, butts are one of the most democratic aspects of music today, presenting daily opportunities for both outrage and endearment, depending on your perspective. It’s a trend that felt inevitable because there were no boundaries—and there aren’t any now. Still, the power that this body part holds over us is alarming—tits have always been political, but never as demanded as much discussion as ass was in 2014. Pop culture is simply saturated with butts—ass has become standardized, whether we like it or not.