This Megan Thee Stallion Video Undermines Heteronormativity in Hip Hop Brilliantly
By: That Human Over There
Tags: Hip Hop, Music, Rap, LGBTQ, BlackLivesMatter

This Megan Thee Stallion Video Undermines Heteronormativity in Hip Hop Brilliantly

Megan Thee Stallion and Young Thug via Wikipedia

I am unabashedly, a Hot Girl stan

Megan Thee Stallion is one of the most impressive cultural icons of my lifetime. She is a fierce advocate for Black people, Black women in particular, and is an overt queer ally. I’ve always thought Megan Thee Stallion was a badass, but it was really the moment she dropped this video of her learning to dip, for me.

It goes without saying, Megan is an open supporter of the queer community, most explicitly demonstrated recently by being a part of the cast for HBO Max’s ballroom reality show, Legendary. Her latest video single, “Don’t Stop,” is a lyrical collaboration with Young Thug that delivers something akin to an Alice in Wonderland meets Edward Scissorhands looking, industrial metal soundscaped, fully hip hop, mini-ball. “Don’t Stop” weaves scenes of Meg and her ballroom staple Hotties voguing and doing hand performances in formation and down the runway, in and out of a psychedelically whimsical visual adventure.

The music video is an amazing example of undermining heteronormative rhetoric through pop culture; despite hip hop being a traditionally homophobic space, this video is permeated with queer representation through the ballroom elements showcased throughout the production — likely incorporated due to Megan’s newfound awareness of the ballroom community.

The contradiction between a rigidly heteronormative hip hop industry and the visibility of queerness — despite the latter elements arguably being appropriated — supports the idea that hip hop stands to benefit in appealing to the minds of a more open-minded, accepting Gen Z, as well a high spend, highly engaged queer market.

Ballroom is an inherently Black, queer space

Ballroom was birthed from the shadows of NYC nightlife in the ’80s. These performance competitions were primarily a space of refuge for Black and colored queer folks who were often rejected by society and left to fend for themselves. With increased odds of being deserted by family, stripped of a home or support to lean on, queer people of color considered balls to be safe, escapist spaces that placed a high value on cultivating community.

Ballroom has, over the decades, made its way to the top of mainstream culture, getting boosts over time from moments like Madonna’s homage via “Vogue,” to the early ’90s documentary, Paris Is Burning, to FX’s TV series, Pose, launched in 2018. While the latter two dive into the background of ballroom’s socio-economic implications, Madonna’s single reads more like appropriation, and so too does Paris is Burning, when you consider how Jennie Livingston’s production did not tangibly benefit those within the world she exposed.

Unfortunately, what becomes lost in ballroom’s transcendence into the mainstream is the background of what ballroom actually represents. People see a lively dance competition on the surface, but woven beneath that lays a strong network of community-building fibers that serve as its foundation. Ballroom is nothing without the realities of discrimination and marginalization that cultivated these pop up manifestations of havens. The appropriation of ballroom has inevitably started to strip it of its initial purpose; to create safe spaces and community for those who have none. On the flip side, the popularization of ballroom has inherently meant the visibility of queer culture, which in turn gives people the opportunity to learn about the history of this artform, consequently normalizing queerness.

While appropriation can be damaging, I believe representation in whatever form still proves effective, and in this case, still has the ability to encourage knowledge transfer around the important background of this once taboo world.

Hip hop though, is extremely homophobic; Young Thug is well aware

Where queerness is in the very DNA of ballroom culture, it is largely absent in mainstream hip hop, save for the likes of Lil Nas X and Young Ma. Young Thug, a featured artist in “Don’t Stop,” is outwardly wishy-washy on his stance about queerness. In fact, in 2019, he stated that Lil Nas X “shouldn’t have come out,” not necessarily due to Thug’s homophobia, but more due to the stigma within the hip hop community around queerness.

“Once you found out he was gay, as soon as the song come on now, everybody like, ‘This gay-ass n*gga.’ N*ggas don’t even care to listen to the song no more…I just feel like he young, and backlash can come behind anything. [His coming out] wasn’t a bad idea […] I dealt with this shit before. […] So I was like, ‘Fuck, he should have never said that, never should have told them.’” — Young Thug via Consequence of Sound

On the flip side, Thug has made publically transphobic comments around Dwayne Wade and Gabrielle Union’s transgender child, Zaya Wade, which have since been deleted off of Twitter, though not quickly enough for screenshots to immortalize his words:

This Tweet specifically, completely contradicts his own efforts to normalize gender fluidity, having notably been featured wearing a dress on the cover of his album, Jeffries:

Young Thug’s, “Jeffries” album cover.

The back and forth around the sanctity of queerness on Young Thug’s end illustrates a clear public struggle with understanding his own comfortability with queerness and the fluidity of gender expression when faced with public scrutiny. Perhaps incorporating queer imagery in his visual productions is a means to implicitly disarm his fans and the greater hip hop community, despite the fact that his homophobic words imply otherwise. Where Megan Thee Stallion openly advocates for all black lives mattering, Young Thug’s contradictory stance on queerness only serves to exacerbate fissions within this same movement, exposing the hypocritical nature of hip hop as a genre advocating for black lives, since it only seems to create space for heterosexual Black lives.

In spite of hip hop being a largely homophobic community, at the time of writing this piece, “Don’t Stop” has amassed 33,727,621 views.

Which means, 33,727,621 impressions of queer aesthetics have been made on the world since this video came out. Of those 33,727,621 views, surely a few of them were from folks who are queer, but see very little positive representation of it in their daily lives. The mere presence of queer cultural elements in this music video then, proves to be immensely powerful. It means that tens of millions of people are seeing representation they seldomly find in mainstream entertainment, especially when it comes to hip hop, regardless of the main actors’ stance on equality.

Hip hop would benefit from embracing queerness; it’s good for business.

Music videos are in essence, marketing materials for artists, who are brands in and of themselves. Considering that the queer community has $3.7 trillion in purchasing power (what’s called the Pink Dollar), and are understood to be early adopters and influencers, queer representation in the media is a solid money move. Neilsen’s 2015 LGBT Consumer report found that,

“Across all music channels, LGBT music fans show higher levels of engagement than their non-LGBT counterparts. For example, LGBT music fans over-index on spending on tickets to attend music festivals (index 123, or 23% more likely), subscribing to streaming services (126) and going to see a DJ they know perform (150).”

Proudly Setting Trends: The 2015 LGBT Consumer Report (Neilsen)

Whether or not “Don’t Stop” was intentionally geared towards celebrating queer aesthetic, the stats go to show that artists benefit greatly from queer visibility, which means hip hop in general would be better off stripping itself from its own homophobia.