on the topic. can we talk about how megan's music videos have cornered the market on the genre of like, absurdist erotic horror.
Thot Shit is the most obvious, its essentially a short film in which a powerful white man politician who enacts misogyny to women like megan while getting off to their bodies, is forced to go about his life unable to escape black women shaking ass in a hostile manner, and the video ends with a shot of the man having had his mouth surgically turned into a realistic sfx vulva. similarly, BOA is a short film clearly parodying creepypasta about haunted video games; three teens play a clearly haunted copy of "Curse of the Serpent Woman," and meg kills each of them, including killing a guy by literally crushing his face with her ass.
in Mamushi (probably the least absurdist), she's a shape-shifting serpent woman who seduces men at a sauna, kills them, and then her partner turns them into an undead army (in a scene inspired by a story from Akira Kurosawa's film Dreams). Roc Steady is a direct reference to Jennifer's Body, and it shows Meg being a quirky cheerleader who graphically kills and dismembers men. most recently Whenever is a music video that is literally set in a Salvador Dali painting (The Persistence of Memory), & while its less horror it is very absurdist in a specifically erotic way, with megan and her eroticism being associated with the strange, shifting room the music video takes place in, and is contrasted with a older woman who watches everything in quiet confusion. and that is accompanied by the repetition of "it's whatever, bitch," brushing off the need to make sense to other people.
commonality in all of these is how she blends horror, absurdity, and eroticism. her being sexy in these videos is not incidental to the horror or absurdism, and the horror isn't softened by her being sexy. the final shot of Thot Shit is genuinely unsettling; its a man with a vulva for a mouth, done with very realistic sfx makeup, clearly in horror himself. in BOA the deaths are depicted in a cartoony but still visceral way - the guy's face literally crushed by megan's ass, the girl's head blown up by being constricted by a snake. in Mamushi, megan swims through the water of the sauna, using her arched back to imitate a snake's movement in water. but when she turns into a giant snake, its just a Fucking Giant Snake. its huge and scary and a snake and it kills the guy who was admiring megan's beautiful human body. and then her victims are depicted as helpless bodies dragged away and repurposed, made into an undead thing for megan to order around.
erotic art isn't taken seriously as art. and incidentally, neither is/was horror and comedy for the most part. because all of these genres seek to create and explore certain felt experiences (desire, dread, humor) and historically art that "appeals to the base senses" is associated with the lower classes and "low culture" while art that "appeals to the mind" is associated with "high culture" (& there's plenty more to be said about all of that). megan's art specifically as a Black woman whose art is very Black and very erotic is often seen as shallow and "base." when people can't deny her obvious lyrical and performance skill, they try to separate her ability to write hard as fuck bars and deliver incredible flows from her identity as a freak bitch. so i find it really interesting how her music videos explore eroticism through horror and horror through eroticism and unites those two forces through absurdity, playing in the face of those who don't take her art seriously by actively making it a mindfuck that serves her own artistic purposes.
romaincrisis
vaporwave
annaxmalina
theartofmadeline
pixelskylines
stormborns
