Trina’s "Look Back at Me" is the sonic equivalent of a mid-blunt, post-cunnilingus orgasm, a series of pleasures that unravels itself in hazy, hypnotizing succession. "Look back at you for what," she scoffs. "I'm tryna concentrate on busting me a nut." And focus she does. The entire Trina discography is an aural exploration of her pleasure, a tantric meditation that spans the length of her career. Her debut album, Da Baddest Bitch, 15 years ago, creating a high water mark for the irreverent sexual freedom black women can exercise in their music.
Black women have been discussing—and demanding—pleasure for ages, on record and on stages of packed venues. The stakes of these odes to black women’s pleasure are high. Sex is both personal and political, the battleground where racist, sexist stereotypes most often create either disappointing neglect or explicit violence against us. In a world where we are imagined only as bodies to be acted upon and not active agents in our own sexual fulfillment, every syllable spent celebrating our own eroticism, our right to not just safety but also pleasure, is its own revolution.
"One minute, two minutes, three minutes/ Hell nah, to please me you gotta sleep in it," she raps on Missy Elliott’s 2001 hit "One Minute Man". The track features Ludacris "the maintenance man," but centers Missy’s and Trina’s sexual needs above all: "Break me off, show me what you got/ Cause I don't want no one minute man," warns Missy’s chorus.
Ludacris, and indeed all men, comes second to (and for) these women, merely the dull backdrop against which their libidos luminesce. They insist on an agenda of their own pleasure, refusing to accept subpar sex to satiate men who will inevitably disappoint.
Black women’s bodies occupy a contentious space in all facets of the music industry—from song to video to fill in the blank--forever posited as interchangeable accessories to male success and relegated to the margins in conversations about talent and agency. Successful black men are "self-made moguls"; successful black women are "gold diggers." Black men can gleefully count unquestioned sexual pleasure among the spoils of their fame, so long as they are unapologetic in their conquests. Black women, who are so often lensed through racist tropes of deviant hypersexuality, must navigate desire with gendered caution; music is one of few safe(r) spaces to articulate—or even actualize—our pleasure.
Black feminist scholar and crunk gawdess Joan Morgan, author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down (1999), pioneered a framework to engage black women’s relationships with hip-hop and sexuality via cultural criticism. Exploring the nuances and "gray area" of loving an industry that is quick to lust after you but reluctant to love you wholly, she read hip-hop as both indicative of a broader culture of misogyny and perhaps even part of the solution whereby that misogyny no longer defines black women’s sexuality.
"I think that a politics of pleasure—particularly for black feminists and brown feminists—is so incredibly important," Morgan said in a 2012 conversation with Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal. "Our sexuality is often written about in a way that is historically problematized for obvious reasons. But what we're less good at and have been less successful at is actually developing a language for pleasure and to assert the right to pleasure."
Outside the ivory towers where capital-F Feminism is defined, the front lines are black women who are singing and rapping about sexual reciprocity, demanding it: "See most of the time a nigga dick ain’t shit/ He need to go a step further and lick the clit," Trina raps on her "Tongue Song", a remix of Sisqó’s iconic "Thong Song". The act of remixing and re-imagining a song about your body as a site of someone else’s pleasure (visual or otherwise) into a cunnilingus mandate is a bold reclamation of power. The track opens with something of a bait-and-switch: "You hear the strings nigga," she says as the opening chords, the same from Sisqó’s version, lull listeners into a false sense of comfort. Then comes the punch: "But on the flipside to this thong shit this is what bitches talk about/ What niggas need to do with what’s in the thong."
Trina is by no means the only black female artist to extol the virtues of getting some bomb ass head. Khia’s 2002 anthem, "My Neck My Back" became a rallying cry for women who want their sexual needs attended to: “Suck it off til I shake and cum, nigga / Make sure I keep bustin nuts, nigga / All over your face and stuff.” The song is vulgar, straightforward, and unrepentant. Thirteen years later, it still plays in the club and the hair salon alike.
Khia also laid the foundation for the growing acceptability of lyrical references to analingus, the particularly taboo act rapper Kevin Gates caught some serious flack for naming as integral to intimacy. Nicki Minaj’s "Anaconda" shouts out a man who "toss the salad like his name Romaine"; on her verse in Big Sean’s "Dance (A$$)" she asks that "somebody point [her] to the best ass eater." Even demure whisper-singer Jhené Aiko is here for it; her syrupy line in Omarion’s "Post Ta Be" is a reference to Gates: "He gotta eat the booty like groceries."
Transgressing arbitrary lines of propriety, these women articulate their sexual desires with a kind of frank bravado most often reserved for their hypermasculine industry counterparts. The result is at once shocking and subversive, a powerful merging of erotic candor and electrifying chords.
Janet Jackson, whose creative innovation built the landscape on which modern black female artists’ rebellion takes root, stunned the world with her 2001-02 tour, All for You. Performing most often in black leather and latex, she dominated ticket sales and audience members alike. Several famous clips from the tour feature her strapping her (consenting) male audience members to an erect gurney as she climbs, gyrates, mounts, and teases while singing her classic, "Would You Mind". The song itself is focused largely on Janet giving, not receiving pleasure, but the visuals of her performing the song make painstakingly clear whose magnetic eroticism is truly being celebrated. The faceless men are rendered powerless, often screaming and writhing in delicious agony, the words "I love you" issued as both prayer and mid-exorcism plea. They worship at the altar of Janet, and their praise is the soundtrack of her climax.
And sometimes men are entirely unnecessary altogether. Black female artists also blend queerness and auto-eroticism in stunning symphonies of sensual praise. Nicki Minaj, who has openly identified as bisexual, alludes to experiences with women throughout her music. On "Boss Ass Bitch", she asks: “Pussy like girls/ Damn, is my pussy gay?" Me’Shell Ndegeocello’s unequivocal queerness "preceded [her] music for a long time." Her "Beautiful" (1999) is a lullaby whose lyrics are simple and celebratory, but still sensual: "Such pretty hair / May I kiss you, may I kiss you there?"
Tweet’s 2002 hit, "Oops (Oh My)", chronicles a night of spontaneous, scintillating masturbation: "Mmm, I was feeling so good I had to touch myself," the chorus repeats. "I looked over to the left/ Mmmm, I was eyein’ my thighs, butter pecan brown." That slow-burning, meditative sensuality is the kind of muscle black women flex most often when affirming ourselves and one another. This foundation of self-love (manual or otherwise) is the poetic eroticism on which more blatant, performative sexuality is constructed, the core from which we sing and sex and scream. Why look back when we can look within?