I ain’t scared to get freaky wit cha – “Hey There Girl,” Yo Majesty

Listening to Yo Majesty feels like Missy Elliot and Peaches running a train on Lil Wayne on the dancefloor of a Miami club. Their shit is raw, its dirty dirty, and it blows the sides off the hip hop genre box. It’s fuckin’ radical – it pulls your hair and intervenes all over your dominant narratives. Yo Majesty is also as explicit as they come (their latest EP was labeled Kryptonite Pussy), spelling their aesthetics out for us in case we just didn’t get it.

“Hey There Girl” (hot off the presses from their October 7, 2008 released album Futuristically Speaking…Never Be Afraid) is a perfect example of the sexy subversive signifyin’ these ladies do. I just don’t know why not a single review mentions it – maybe because they can’t figure it out. I think it’s reppin the complexities of the female sexual subject without letting your ass miss a down beat.

a couple notes of context

Yo Majesty hails from Tampa, Florida, a small town that they say still doesn’t appreciate their talent and range (plus they were royally screwed by some early producers there, pun somewhat intended.) Although people don’t always consider Florida a part of the South, much less the Dirty South, Yo Majesty’s music is being judged by critics as a part of the body of crunk work. Matt Miller writes, quoting Wikipedians, that, “Dirty South Rap is largely characterized by its bouncy, upbeat, exuberant, club-friendly tunes and simplistic, heavily rhythmic lyrical delivery.”

But their album spans a whole range of genres, with “beats that, from track to track, swing unapologetically from dancehall to bootybass/ghetto-tech to housey to darkcore to minimal, and of course being Floridians, Miami Bass” (Subba-Cultcha). They work with UK-based electro duo Hard Feelings UK. No matter, some listeners want them to be just about that ‘simple’ crunk party stuff. Nate Patrin, of Pitchfork media, thinks their upbeat club stuff is good but that their, “stylistic digressions like the furious, violent punk rock tirade ‘Fucked Up’, downtempo funk cut ‘Get Down on the Floor’, and the semi-acoustic R&B slow jam ‘Buy Love’ feel so out of place it's actually kind of hard to tell that they're not actually bad songs.” Try listening harder next time, Nate.

In this genre-fied world, reviewers have become too lazy to look at the intersecting practices to see why a “funk cut” or an “R&B slow jam” might actually not be out of place at all. The Afro-diasporic practices in Yo Majesty’s work are apparent all the way through. I mean Lil Jon, quoted in Miller’s piece, realizes that “crunk music is something parallel to…punk rock because of the energy it gives you.” Maybe we should leave the writing about the music to the musicians….

Shunda K talks about this aesthetic of collective energy, both in its power and in the need for abandon noted in both Keyes and Miller’s work. She says, “Yo Majesty is a forum where people can get real love, and release all that bullshit, dancing they asses off for like 45 minutes to an hour. And then they’re empowered by the time the show is done.”

The duo both come from strong Christian backgrounds, and they talk often in interviews about the relationship between them, their music, and God. They are well aware that, as Keyes highlights Michael Eric Dyson quoting Cornel West, “the rap artist combines the potent tradition in black culture: the preacher and singer, [who] appeal to the rhetorical practices eloquently honed in African American religious practices.” Jwl says she is a “minister of music,” and Shunda that she is doin it all for God.

But they’re not all about the religion, they’re also about the raunch. A reviewer from Metrolife, a UK paper, writes, “A 'clean' version of this album seems inconceivable - even without lyrics, the beats and basslines sound thrillingly filthy.” It’s true. Can’t get much more “dirty dirty” than that.

Yo Majesty is a duo of out lesbians, something writers are quick to point out. Zach Baron, of the Village Voice, dismisses their sexuality and their music in one fell swoop by reducing it to novelty: “As rappers, they’re poor-to-fair, which means they’re better than Kid Sister and a bit worse than Saigon: If not for the fact that both of ’em are gay, that’d put Yo Majesty right around Pitbull in the Florida rap hierarchy.” Damn. Then again this is the guy who wrote that he “[doesn’t] think M.I.A. is really a rapper in any meaningful way.” And I haven’t read a single positive piece by him about hip-hop, so why the fuck is he still writing about it?!

Other reviewers just don’t know how to talk about Yo Majesty’s sexuality. Black Book Mag writes, “Finally, The L Word has its own Salt-N-Pepa,” which, I mean really? I guess I gotta thank them for letting us know the lack of common cultural currency for lesbians because I’m not sure what the fuck that bourgie-professional-controlled-overly-styled-nails-painted-mostly-white-passing-for-straight version of gay female has to do with Yo Majesty.

hey there girl, can I rock your world?

I think “Hey There Girl” is one of the most fun, badass, signifyin’, and ingenious tracks on the record. There is so much to talk about, Ima focus in on the representation of sexuality, with a brief mention first of some of its core aesthetics.

“Hey There Girl” utilizes many crunk and Afro-diasporic practices, some of which I mentioned earlier. There is the call and response in the numerous repetitions of “hey there girl” throughout the song, and there is the challenge/counter-challenge as each of the rappers responds to the other’s “hey there” with wassup or another greeting. This is also used as part of what Keye’s calls the tonal semantics, which is the voice rhythm/flow of a piece.

Yo Majesty’s use of voice, the timbre and texture, the straining, also calls to mind a whole range of Afro-diasporic traditions, from the singin’ of some blues to the grunts in contemporary rap. There is a guttural quality to the voice that is super intense, it’s gritty and grimy, hard but liquid smooth like a silicone strap-on coated in Astroglide . They punctuate their lines with sharp inhales that give a sense of how much of the body is involved in the production of their sound and, of course, makes you think about sex. They holler, pant, sing, chant, moan, draws out their essesssssss and shout at cha, sometimes in unison, sometimes layered, and sometimes just over the beats.

“Hey There Girl,” like many Afro-diasporic influenced songs, plays with the idea of outer and inner time (Keyes). It’s got that slow tempo, the heavy deep steady bass (so prominent in Miami), the pre-written beats, and then its got Shuda’s and Jwl’s crazy fuckin flows that move at the speed of light one verse and slow down to talking speed the next. Sometimes you can’t even catch their words you just know you want them to be talking to you.

Yo Majesty plays with gangsta trope of hip hop hardness, rapping “I aint no gangsta/ but best believe I will sing ya/ I’m not afraid to bust back.” They seem to be signifyin they know something you don’t: that you don’t need to sing about violence or selling drugs to be a rapper. In their interviews time and time again they say things like, “Why rap about selling weed on the corner if you never did? Just be real.”

Yo Majesty get real on a lot of things, but often their sexuality, which makes sense because crunk is so much about sex and “often relies upon the display of the female body for male consumption” (Miller). Females are objects in so much of hip hop, Yo Majesty’s work included. But in Yo’s work they are not just the objects, nor just the subjects, they are both. WTF?!

So for sure, hollering at girls in the club through a hip hop song is nothing new, but it is when another woman is doing it. Yo Majesty takes one of the oldest tropes (and one of the most subtly oppressive tools of misogyny I might add) and busts it to pieces. Because the song intervenes in the traditional man picks up woman narrative at an entrance point we may have never even seen, it acts as a powerful counter narrative to the dominant heterosexism of hip hop (and American) culture.

Hall writes, “To reverse the stereotype is not necessarily to overturn and subvert it.” So a woman hollering at man or a woman shutting a man’s hollering down might well wind up reifying the very representations it is trying undo. This song works as a counter-strategy because it is doing what Hall calls contesting it from within. “Instead of avoiding the dangerous terrain opened up by the interweaving of ‘race’, gender and sexuality, it deliberately contests the dominant gendered and sexual definitions of racial difference by working on black sexuality.”

It “contests from within” both by using one of the tools of misogyny and by dealing directly with the issue. Although hip hop is by no means the origin or the primary site of misogyny in America it is, for better of for worse, one of the most recognizable and popular spaces of it (see Don Imus hearings, Miller’s work, Greg Tate, and Patricia Hill Collins for more on this.)

But Collins, in her book Black Sexual Politics, helps us to see why rap might be the perfect site for this. “Because rap revolves around self-promotion, female rappers are able to avoid accusations of being self-centered or narcissistic when they use the form to promote Black female power.” Yo Majesty is doubling this effect by promoting not only their own female power, but other women’s, in that particular way that only women-loving-women can.

So “Hey There Girl” “de-familiarizes” a once familiar notion of the black sexual body. It’s over-sexed, so it must be male, common sense goes. (And I can definitely hear this coming out of a man’s mouth: “hey girl wanna smoke some trees/ we can get high/ and fuck all night.”) Oh, but it’s female, so it must be a jezebel out to get a man’s money or power. But, they rap, “I don’t do boys/ but I might get your sister/ that is if I like her.” So where does Yo Majesty fit into the stereotypical image of black sexuality?

Are they womanizers, re-objectifying women? (like “I wanna see some ass shake in my face” and “bitch.”) Or are they feminist pleasure givers? (“Can I rock your world?” and “I just made that pussy purr.”) Are they doing a bit of both? I mean, I would argue a little bit of objectification is necessary to experience the full physical pleasures of sex.

“Hey There Girl” is complex. It is problematizing binaries – man/woman, subject/object, pursuer/pursued, hard/soft, feminist/sex symbol – and gender norms. It is returning agency to women in a form (world) that would often take it away. But it’s doing that while celebrating many of the things that have been used against women, like rump shaking (a core crunk aesthetic), dance floor seduction, and sex for sex’s sake.

I think Stuart Hall would be impressed.