Dear Nicki,

I watched your Anaconda music video the other day, and although most of the soundtrack was drowned out by the cackling of the pack of nine to eleven year-old jackals at whose insistence I’d watched the thing, unfortunately it’s the visuals that I can’t unsee. So help me Nicki, I have been trying to forget what I saw on YouTube that day, but at night, when I close my eyes … your arse is burned onto my eyeballs. The lesson I learned from that iPad Mini clutched in the sweaty paws of an eleven year-old is that some people won’t think twice about giving you nightmares forever if there’s a quick buck in it for them. But I will have my revenge: That Nicki, is what blogs are for. Oh how you will rue the intrusion of your preposterous buttocks into what was my last asylum from this fucked-up world.

Now, Nix, I realise you shot it and are therefore reasonably well acquainted with the video, but let’s take a moment to deconstruct Anaconda anyway:

There you are in the jungle, where presumably the anaconda lives (your references aren’t as subtle as you may imagine), licking your lips while eyeing us through slitty lids. I was already feeling nervous – those slits are themselves rather reptilian, aren’t they? – before you squatted like a frog and began pulsating your grotesque arse. Jesus, I thought, it’s fascinating, in the way that a car crash is. I waited through shots of coconut cream bubbling (really?) over the rim of a coconut shell and also some bananas (three, if you’re counting, which I was) for you to do it again. But alas, I still had to watch the fake lezzie scene with your backing singers-cum-dancers and more writhing around, before we finally cut to a set where you and the gals have swapped your thongs for frayed denim hot pants in which to thrust your bum cheeks at us in a more frenzied and no less repulsive manner. Then we cut to the gym in the jungle where your workout consists mostly of “pissing dog” leg lifts (I think that’s the technical term) and pelvic thrusts – into the floor – before your sweat pants slip down a bit to reveal some more bum floss, this time in bubble gum pink, and you treat us to some more pulsing of those gluts. You dry hump the chair, the floor, the other girls in the gym, then it’s back to the jungle for you to maul one of your backing singer’s boobs and arse, while snarling and lip licking, before snacking on a banana (there is no end to the subtle innuendo with you, is there?) and squirting whipped cream on your tits in the jungle kitchen. Finally, and rather bizarrely (although I appreciate that your scenes are logically connected by a sincere effort to maximise the number of opportunities for you to degrade yourself in porno stock takes), you leave the jungle and find yourself in some sort of strip club giving a lap dance, which you end by crawling backwards across the floor in your vinyl and stilettoes, your arse heaving, into the sweaty groin spread-eagled in the chair.

Now Nicola (you don’t mind if I call you Nicola do you? Just sounds so much less icki, hey?), I pulled on my big girl panties a long time ago. I know you’re nothing but a boil on pop culture’s bum, ‘cuse the pun. Pathetic as it is, we have to have our tropes: when we look back down the long dismal course of human history, someone always has to play the Madonna (think Kate Middleton) and someone’s gotta play the … yup, you got it. And I get that you rely on the tweezered lips of us decent folk.

The main point of you for cable TV is to show that frankly Sodom was a joke next to MTN these days, what with all the fornicating and general depravity going on – because while everyone in the Youth Ministry can see how hard the Devil was at work on the set of the serpent’s video, and is supposed to be thinking, Boy oh boy, I’m glad I’m not that oke, lolling around on that chair inside the devil’s lair – I wouldn’t want to be him, man, when the Lord starts the smiting, but is actually thinking about their anaconda, everybody else gets to congratulate themselves on not being in the Youth Ministry and being so sexually liberated – and it’s cha-ching for Nik-Nak and her bosses. Everyone’s a winner.

You’re probably shaking your head right now and thinking, You know the profits on flesh are endless, you poor, dumb mare, and that it’s never occurred to you to exploit either your boobs or your boom-boom fills me with a mixture of pity and disgust. Even if you like suckin’ up the pay gap, why can’t you just be happy for me? Jesus.

Well no, Nicki, I have not forgotten the line of boys wrapped around the boy’s toilet at second break when I was in Standard 5, especially since I got curious one day and stood in the line. When I got to the front Mitchell Tomlinson just shrugged and gave me the tattered Playboy. Two dollars it cost me, “no wanking”, he said. Jisis, I felt gypped afterwards. It’s best not to think about it, I’ve found.

Nevertheless, in the untold gigabytes that have been devoted to hip-hop’s place in our cultural lexicon, none of which I give a damn about, those that try to sell you to me as a coup for feminism are a real slap across the face (and surely the evidence we’ve been seeking of the propaganda conspiracy being waged by the right-wing in its backlash against Jane Fonda) – because, in the end Nicki, it’s personal:

I do not want my sons looking at women as raw meat, and I don’t want them even knowing that there are still women who want to be looked at as nothing but a big, juicy hunk of rump. But there it is: you’ve come crawling – literally, slathered in grease – out of the lonely backlit wank alleys of the internet and into the mainstream. When my sons and their friends hear the jangling noise that passes for your music on the radio, they can’t help but hear the endlessly repeated refrain to look at your butt and then they go and look at it on YouTube – when you should’ve stayed where you belong, on YouPorn.

And then I have to do damage control, which FYI, involves a lot of Shame, we have to feel very, very sorry for anyone so thinks so little of themselves and have you ever seen even Justin freaking Bieber in this pose blah blah blah. But still, because you’re out there on mainstream media with your music video, they’ve seen it before they’re twelve – a woman selling herself as a sex toy for men. And you know what else they’ve seen Nicki – and I wince when I say this – a black woman sellin’ herself dirt cheap. I guess you’re okay with that.

But I’m not, which brings me to the real point of my letter:

Be warned, Nicki Minaj, because (and I’m pointing here with a finger that isn’t polite) this shit is over. Come the revolution, I will unleash the pack of hyenas that I’ve trained to attack on command – “Sic ‘em buns girls!” – and Mumbo, ChaCha and Rumba will take you down. Bam!

After your “trial” you will be dispatched to one of our focus camps in the suburban Gulag where, together with Rush Limbaugh and all members of the Family Policy Institute at present still lodged inside Parliament Building in Cape Town, you will be made to recite from The Female Eunuch until you geddit:

In the war against misogyny, while some women are actually fighting to close the pay gap, even as some of their sisters are still fighting against being raped as spoils of war – and don’t pretend you can’t lift your field of vision beyond your skin flick (sorry, music video) set to see that we all fall on that continuum – you, sweetheart, are the black cop under Apartheid.

Sweet Dreams, Nicki.

Love,

Lauren

photo credit: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/cobalt/419717103/”>cobalt123</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>cc</a>

Comments

comments