Pitchfork staff and regulars weigh in on the juiciness of Lil Mama’s "Sausage", her first single in years, and ask Is this metaphorical breakfast meat jawn enough to feed us all summer long?
Molly Beauchemin: Despite the fact that the way Lil Mama growls "sa-sa-sa-sa-sa-sausage" does kinda make it sound like she’s going to cut yr dick off, this video is extremely fun!! It’s cartoonishly overstuffed, but endearingly so—like that "SNL" skit where Stefon talks about "New York’s hottest club" and all the random, seemingly contradictory things that can be found in it—only in the case of "Sausage" all the spinal-tappy excess is real (and occasioned by crotchless leotards). This video has everything: breakfast puns, pyrotechnics, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle letterman jacket, beetle-wing Ferraris, trampolines…On paper this video was a wannabe Flipmode B-side destined to choke on its own glut of ideas, but with this many 12-year-old girls double-dutching, there’s no way it wasn’t going to be awesome.
Doreen St. Felix: I’ll admit, when I first watched "Sausage", my sardonic take was that the song and the video were the unironic incarnations of a Kidz Bop compilation spanning the last twenty years. I still think that, but now I feel a compulsion to support the too-obvious-to-be-artful Internet virality component to it, because it’s been way too damn long since I’ve seen such a bare and adoring homage to hip-hop’s women. There’s a sweetness to her corniness. I like her and damn it, I like this song. It’s cookout music, it’s take-down-your-hair music, it’s inoffensive enough to be played at a church youth gathering. Jamie xx produced a timeless song of any summer, but Lil Mama gives us a fun artifact with an expiration date—all types of sausage go bad at some point—that is #so #2015.
Eric Thurm: There are so many different kinds of meat going into "Sausage" that there is no way it should go down this smoothly. But, somehow, the combination of old-school hip-hop influence, calculated brashness, safe sex preaching, and meme swaggerjacking all work together to be delightful. Maybe it's just because I really love Lil Mama, but I'm hoping that, somehow, she and Missy Elliott make a joint comeback album and blow everyone's mind. I want to live in a world where it feels like the Queen Latifah from the "Ladies First" video could reemerge from the clouds at any moment—everything would be just a bit brighter.
Hannah Giorgis: This video is like having your crush ask you to the middle school dance by 'proposing' to you during lunch with a Ring Pop for every finger: It's undeniably surreal and overwhelming, almost nauseatingly colorful, and somehow still mad exciting if you're under the age of 14. There's so much about this video I don't understand and probably never will, but the kids on my block will be bumpin' it all summer.
Corban Goble: I gotta say, between this and Beyoncé's album, it's been a wild past 18 months for breakfast sex imagery. There's so much going on in this video that deconstructing its layers is gonna take a fucking paleontologist; for me, I can't get past the TMNT varsity and Mama ghostriding the car Homer designed.
Jessica Hopper: While I can live with Lil Mama’s current roll of stinting catchphrase hits that lend themselves to endless remixing and thus, summerlong-dominance, she’s been begging to be moved past novelty-phase and into omnipresence since 2008. While so much of this video dazzles—she’s really only made one video that wasn’t basically a straight up Missy-homage and doesn’t heavily feature squads of children dancing in the street (and that one was openly indebted to Mary J. Blige as this one)—and flaunts all her triple-threatness, she’s not merely tributing everyone who has mattered to us from MC Lyte on forward, she’s rightfully drawing out a place for herself in that self-same lineage.