A Critical Reading of Mykki Blanco's Wavvy

This is a piece I wrote a while back... Enjoy and I will be sure to have some new ish up soon!

Note: I am not sure which pronouns Mykki uses. I was under the impression that Mykki, also known as Michael Quattlebaum Jr., uses she and he interchangeably. I will use she when referring to the performance artist, whose work is analyzed in this piece.

With the advent of the Internet, queer artists have become more accessible to the general public. But, more importantly, they’ve become accessible to other queer people. Enter Mykki Blanco, a multigendered hip-hop artist, who has already blazed trails for women and queer folx.

Mykki first entered my radar with her 2012 video Wavvy. The video can be found here.     

         

I argue that Blanco, as a contemporary artist, uses the aesthetic tropes of hip-hop and pop culture to illustrate a queer-subjectivity. She does this by using both words and images queerly, in addition to embodying various types of gendered performance. I will attempt to explain my perspective with a critical reading of Blanco’s video Wavvy.

What do I mean by queer-subjectivity? Queer can mean many things. It can mean slightly askew or bizarre. It can be a derogatory term for non-heterosexual presenting folx. But, when I use queer, it refers to a specific type of gender and sexual politics as well as a specific type of aesthetic politics. A queer frame of mind usually regards both gender and sexuality as separate, if at times mutually enforcing, spectrums. Both gender and sexuality can be regarded as fluid, with male and female simply representing different poles. Under a queer rubric, it is possible to be a transwoman who identifies as a lesbian, or a transman who identifies as a fag. It is possible to be a pussy-loving dyke (such as myself) who also identifies as asexual at times, but also identifies as an effete fairy at others. What I find personally so liberating about a queer politics is that it allows me to eschew the restrictions of the gender binary. Not that anyone ever escapes society’s impositions, but queer politics has allowed me to see the possibilities beyond the binary.

This is why I find the music of Mykki Blanco so resonant. Her strength and sex appeal as a performer and lyricist stems from the way she plays with language, imagery and persona.

In the opening scene of Wavvy we are taken into the harsh milieu of NYC, where Blanco is picking up drugs. She is dressed in what I refer to as boi-style; snap back, shirtless, off-pink pants. She mentions to the dealer how uncomfortable she is being on “the hottest block in Chinatown,” and is visibly nervous as sirens wail in the distance. The music kicks in when a cop finds Mykki mid-deal. Our protagonist must then run to evade the lock-up, which she does. She then makes her way into the cargo hold of a truck. She picks up the mic and screams the first lines, “Welcome to hell, bitches/This is Mykki Blanco/New World Order/Motherfucker, follow pronto.” It’s hard not to get attention with an opener like that! With her first two lines she not only invokes the site of hell, with all its attendant associations of sin and debauchery, she conjures  a larger geopolitical conspiracy. And in america, spiritual violence and political violence are often intertwined, especially where queer folx are concerned. In the heterosexual imaginary all ‘deviants’ are assigned to hell. Mykki takes that construction and throws it right back in the viewer's face. Mykki’s visual performance is angular and campy at times, but can still be read as masculine. Spitting lines like, “Maybe she was born with it/ maybe it was Maybelline,” Mykki maintains a masculine posture, but isn’t afraid to femme up her rhymes while doing so. It is this seeming discontinuity that I love about Blanco. Even in a more masculine- of-center register, Mykki still keeps it queer. A brilliant moment in the first verse is when Brenmar drops the beat, and Mykki describes all the hip-hop bros who listen to her prose and then gag: “Oh, this fag can rap/ Yeah they sayin’ it/ They listenin.’” Not only does Mykki shock us by playing with  specters of hell, damnation and political collapse, she speaks directly to her hip hop competitors and homophobic haters. And her message is simple: I do this rap shit better than you.

But where Mykki surprises us is in the chorus. Whereas the scenery from the first verse is urban, urbane, harsh and masculine, the party where Mykki sells wavvy is like something out of a Derek Jarman film on acid. All red curtains and candles, and a multiracial, multi-gendered cast of art-school hippies. Each and every one posed out like a Botticelli nude. Mykki is again shirtless, but with a red wig instead of a snap-back, a pair of gold laced black panties instead of pants and lipstick glossin’. She also stunts in heels. But, concurrent with this change of scenery and outfit, is a change in mannerism and speech. “I bite the, bite the, bite the head off a harpy,” Mykki intones. She invokes a mythical creature that is both feminine and terrifying. And in patriarchal america, one of the first things that we as a people have forgotten is the terrifying and dangerous power of the feminine. Mykki can femme it up, but it is still in your face. She shows young women of all genders that it is still possible to be pretty and powerful. In fact, sometimes it’s the pretty bitches who are the most terrifying in their prowess. She conjures spirituality again, “I cry blood tears/ Holy Mary, Holy Mother.” Violence directed at queer folx is often justified using spirituality. But yet again, Mykki re-appropriates spiritual imagery, this time turning to Mary Mother of God. For me an important part of queerness has been taking back the spiritual from those who would conclude that all queer folx are destined for hell. It is not uncommon for feminist re-appropriations of spirituality to concentrate on the forgotten stories of the female prophets. What is so powerful about Mykki’s work is that she summons the feminine and the masculine with her words playfully and effortlessly. And during the second verse we see Mykki blow out a votive candle, while her posse gets up to gender bending high jinks in the background. Oh, and all of the confetti, all of it! The rest of the video cross-cuts beautifully between Mykki's femme performance, and her boi performance.

The chorus, “We make love to the night/in the back of the club/yeah we feelin’ alright,” portrays the still secret world of queers, who are often relegated to the back of the club by a homophobic politics that demands that gender-non-conformity never even be seen, much less “tolerated.” But Mykki is of course a poet by trade. In the back of the club one can "make love to the night," itself. Indeed, the very metaphorical essence of Wavvy seems to be about poetry and mysticism. And that combination, judging from all the different bodies partying it up in the video, packs one hell of a liberatory wallop.

Francesco Carrozini and music producer Brenmar all of course contribute to the greatness of the video and track. This piece is simply my interpretation of Mykki Blanco’s art. I have noticed aesthetic similarities between all of Mykki Blanco’s videos thus far, which is why I am focusing on her as emcee and visual artist. This particular use of mise en scene, lyricism, gender presentation and gender performance represents a queering of pop-music that is fiercely intellectual, as well as inspiring for queer and LGBTQ communities. Especially those of color.

When her shit drops and hits the six-million circulation…….