Cardi B's 'Grammy-Winning Vagina'
To some, Billboard’s 2020 Woman of the Year is a symbol of decline. To others a champion of pussy power. But the real obscenity is in hypocrisy.
It is one thing to say, “God is great,” as Cardi B does in the profile blurb on her Instagram account. But anyone can say that. Only those who have faced some dark hour of need and found themselves gazing upward understand why God is great. Those three words come nowhere close to describing what they point to. But words are all we have. And as T.S. Eliot tells us, words strain, crack, and sometimes break.
That’s why the photograph on this page may be my favorite of all the Cardi B images I have ever seen. Those upturned eyes say more than words. Even if God is not on her mind at the captured moment, the camera sometimes has a way of telling the truth.
Like Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris, Cardi B is the child of immigrants. That much-maligned group of Americans whose collective cause was pushed to the brink in a most un-American manner during the last four years. Had those hateful policies been in place when her Dominican/Trinidadian parents found refuge in New York, Cardi B might never have been created, berated, liberated, and celebrated as she is today.
Her storied trajectory in this moment of triumph bears repeating. Kicked out of her parents house at age 16. Abusive relationship. Gang member. Fired deli worker. Stripper.
Stop there for a moment: And consider what happens in a strip club. Ever look into the faces of the women clinging to those poles? Alright then, in movies and TV shows if you’ve never actually been to one. Their eyes tell a different story than their bodies. Now look at the men in those clubs. Waving money, pushing dollars into G-strings, angling for a lap dance, using and using and using.
Satyrs of the night, many will go home to wives, children and well-paid jobs in America’s financial capitals. A few will get married in the morning to girls destined for a tidy life in the suburbs. The kind of girl you take home to mother. The kind who’d never step foot inside a place like this.
If there’s one thing I can’t stand — it’s a hypocrite
Now pick up Cardi’s journey after the strip club: Rapper. Reality TV breakout star. Recording artist. Numerous music awards, including a Grammy. Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World (2018). Billboard’s 2020 Woman of the Year.
We have known for some time now that she would receive the Billboardrecognition, the first time a Black woman has been so named since the title went to Beyoncé in 2009. Eleven years. Eleven.
But it was not until the December 2020 issue, featuring stunning images by AB+DM, that the world sat up and paid attention again.
You know how it goes: Hater’s gonna hate
And of course, they lined up as always for Cardi. In addition to the expected uproar about elevating vulgarity, there is this: How can she be Woman of the Year with only one song released in 2020?
As the Billboard profile and interview point out, that song was “WAP.” Cultural juggernaut. Feminist statement. Multi-platinum hit. Four weeks at number one. A record-breaking 93 million streams in a single week. Yeah, that song.
It was also a culture-wars flashpoint. A rallying cry for so-called conservatives who have no problem supporting obscene immigration policies and dog-whistle racism. But find Cardi B obscene.
Here’s the thing: It is obscene to foist middle-class morality onto people whose lives are anything but. It is obscene to exploit strippers. It is obscene that economic incentives for whites to move to the suburbs were denied to people of color, fueling a generational wealth-gap for Black Americans.
It is obscene for lenders and appraisers to apply different values to homes owned by Black families than those owned by white families in the same neighborhood. It’s obscene to regard ‘pussy’ as obscene while supporting policies that strip women of equal protections and deny them the right to choose what happens to their own bodies.
Here’s the other thing: I would not want my eight-year-old daughter to be caught dead singing about her WAP. Or my 16-year-old, either. That’s not the kind of world I want to live in. But I also don’t want the inequities that made it necessary for Cardi B to live a hard, nasty life before clawing her way to the kind of agency she has today. Like it or not, Cardi is emblematic of the dangerous chasm we face in the waning years of Western civilization. But who you gonna call?
The English-speaking world has had a long, conflicted history with ‘pussy,’ as I wrote about at length here & below.
Flap over WAP: A Brief History of ‘Pussy’ from Fairy Tale to Hip-Hop to re-Wars Flashpoint If we don’t want our children to be exposed to sexual vulgarity, let’s not teach them the vulgarity of hypocrisy and systemic racism
The issue is more complex than Cardi B
But she is the one who has focused attention on it. There is power in pussy. It exists in the lower-chakra near the base of the spine at the tailbone level — along with survival and physicality. But as we learn in kundalini yoga, spiritual progress depends on moving the energy of that lower region up through the body to the heart, mind, and God-head. It’s a long, arduous journey. Fully realized humanity does not exist in the soggy bottom, though the lotus springs from its mud.
The sacred is not separate from the profane but exists alongside it. God is great, says Cardi B on her Instagram. But in the next breath, she also says this: “I have a Grammy-winning vagina.”
Surely she knows by now that there is more to the story than that. If not, she will find out. As we all do sooner or later. Between the cradle and the grave.
© 2020 Andrew Jazprose Hill.