Bad Bitches Have Bad Days Too
I wanted to write a very serious album review. It had a killer title: Megan Thee Stallion’s trauma is not up for discussion. I wove the themes of each track, from “NDA” to “Gift & A Curse” to “Budget” to thread Megan’s personal experiences to contextual women’s issues, equal pay, telling our stories and abortion access. I highlighted the influenced genres in her songs, house, R&B and southern rap. I compared her to other rappers, Lil Kim and City Girls to demonstrate how she used cadence, bass and melody to say, this is it ya’ll. This is my story and this is how I wanna say it. Period.
Until she got to this line from “Flip Flop”: “If yo momma and daddy are still walking this earth then you probably ain’t feeling my pain.”
The song follows a slowed down bass line emblematic of the style of Southern rap music. Megan raps on a tilt, more concerned with getting her point across than making her lyrical lines pristine. She slips the “momma and daddy line” in the middle of the song much like grief slips into one's body. One can hear the longing for home, for mama as she sings the hook on “Flip Flop.” One stops in my thoughts to listen, really listen, to what she was saying.
Megan registered this loss in an interview on Apple Music “I really realized that my Momma was really driving the car for a long time. I didn’t even have to think about too many things when my Momma was with me. It’s recently that it's been clicking for me. Who can I ask anything to?” Who can I trust?”
Losing a mother can feel like being chopped from earth. Your ephemeral life becomes a simulation. Existence is futile, the surrounding world derealized. My mother built my world, taught me my first words, held my hands as I stirred my first batters for cakes, pies and cookies, and played the first tunes I learned. If my creator is gone, where does that leave me?
Grief rolls over you like a long reverie. It hits me when I cook, because of the calls I’ve made to her on how to properly roast a chicken “Turn the oven up to four hundred twenty five degrees for twenty minutes then down to three fifty, and make sure it’s on a rack, because it allows the air to circulate”.
Or it smacks quick in the face. I cried last week over a puzzle. Yes. A puzzle. I was visiting my friend’s parents and her father put together a one thousand piece puzzle, and it reminded me of when my mother sat at our dining room table and allowed my sister and I to find all the “end pieces”, then we would leave her alone to finish the rest. Upon completion, she protected the finished puzzle with plastic and it would lay like a flat exhibit for days.
We are not feeling Megan Thee Stallion’s pain. But the internet believes we do.
On August 18, Nicki Minaj released “Super Freaky Girl” where she says the line “Tell that goofy get a chair, she was cocky, I could swear 'Til my old tape sold more than your album, drop a tear”.
Many of us understand that grief is nonlinear. It’s not dramatic wailing for weeks. Sometimes it’s laughing with your sister when she says the exact same things as your mother. “You sick because you ain’t drank no water!” Sometimes it’s watching others with their parents and tearing up a little.
Tears are a small part of the process.
I reflect back on some of the things I wrote because I had not processed my experiences in the moments or years following. I later understood by writing in a narrative form. In “Black Lipstick” I discovered that I really did have a kinship with my sister, even though we weren’t close at the time of her death. In “Stuff”, I discovered I had been blaming myself for the condition of my childhood home, both when I was a child, and in the years afterwards, and I had been blaming myself for the choices of the adults around me.
Megan Thee Stallion wrote Traumazine in the same way I write these essays. She chronicled her experiences in a timeline, piecing together fragments of memories and incidents and words said to her, words said about her, to reconcile her feelings with the surrounding world. She has her internal struggles, grief, anxiety as she alluded to in her song “Anxiety”.
Megan was forced into a timeline not her own.
And this wasn’t the first incident Megan lived and relieved online. In July 2020, we learned that Megan was shot by an unnamed assailant. While Megan previously provided many young Black women with words to speak up about what we needed from sexual and romantic relationships with men, ranging from flowers, gifts, and paid rent, to voicing desired sex acts. Conversations women held in group chats and at weekly brunch were now public, and Megan was our pastor, ushering our lives out loud. But after she was shot, Megan returned as a silent participant in a pew.
Her reticence felt uncharacteristic. But she witnessed others speak up about their respective assaults and watched the subsequent discrediting and excoriation of their very voices. She wasn’t exempt. Her fears were two fold: as a woman she knew people wouldn’t believe her, and as a Black woman, she feared police involvement could prove deadly.
Megan finally revealed her assailant, Tory Lanez, in August, a full month after the assault.
As expected, after she revealed it was Lanez, a maelstrom of tweets ensued, directed towards both Megan and the Black women who spoke up for her ensued. Some simply expressed doubt. It escalated. She was accused of lying. It got as far as reducing Megan to her sexuality, calling back to her own stories she shared on her previous albums, and justifying their abuse because any woman that talks about sex needs to be demonized.
The title of Megan Thee Stallion’s latest album title, Traumazine, suggests the Houston-born rapper’s trauma has been available to flip through, tweet by tweet, chatter by chatter, like a magazine in a grocery store checkout -- gossip and innuendo for casual viewers with unwarranted opinions.
The audience muzzled Megan. In the moments after her huge traumas, losing her mother, her shooting, her own personal anxiety. Now that she’s had a minute to take it all in, she gifted us with her own store.
Traumazine reset the process. It reclaims her timeline. This is Megan’s journal entry, her bulletin announcement, her zine, her Traumazine. And we don’t have much more to say.