The article examines two recent music videos by Black female artists, Nicki Minaj's Anaconda (2014) and Beyoncé's Formation (2016), and the heated online discussions around them about whether they are feminist or not. These shifts in themes found in popular music may both influence cultural norms and reflect a cultural shift toward acceptance of sexuality outside of love relationships. Themes of lust in the absence of love were especially prevalent in hip-hop/rap music, although music genre did not account for the changing themes over time. In contrast, there was a significant increase in the proportion of songs with a theme focusing on lust in the absence of love. There was a linear decrease over time in the proportion of songs with a love theme and in the proportion of songs with a combination of lust and love themes. The study sample consisted of the top 40 songs of Billboard Year End Hot 100 single songs for every 5 years from 1971 to 2011 (N = 360). We examined whether there have been changes in the prevalence of lust and love themes and changes in how these themes inter-relate in music lyrics over time. We explored themes related to sexual desire (lust) and romantic desire (love) in the lyrics of popular music over the past 40 years. While some praised Beyonce's risqué lyrics and images as a ‘feminist manifesto’, others critique the implicit reinscription of historical sexual violence against (and objectification of) black women through a hypervisualised medium. Drawing from popular discourses on Beyoncé and women in hip-hop, the paper aims to offer an alternate perspective on notions of performativity and emancipatory possibilities of the performer’s hypervisuality through visual representations and strategies.Unlike commercialized ideals of (white, Eurocentric) beauty and femininity which objectify the female figure (and sexuality) as either Madonna or whore, the visual album utilisies provocative sexual politics to denote contesting and lived female experiences that refuse easy categorization. The paper argues that the performer utilises bodily notions of excess and control through her physical body ie. These songs explore different facets of sexual experiences in its corporeality as well as psychosexuality. Specifically, I examine the deployment of risqué content in the music videos for “Yoncé/Partition”, “Blow”, “Mine” and “Grown Woman” ,Beyoncé. The paper deploys concepts of risk through an exploration of African-American pop superstar, Beyoncé’s, visual album released in 2013 - ' Beyoncé'. This paper was submitted as part of a Ideas & Exposition Module - Risk and Popular Culture, at Tembusu College, NUS. Nicki Minaj successfully unsettles the narrative of male control over women’s bodies in the hip- hop music video, thus securing a space of empowerment for women within the hip-hop community. Using queer theory, established by Judith Butler, the author argues that Minaj’s over-performance of exaggerated signifiers of femininity, referred to as ‘hyperfemininity,’ brings awareness to the socially constructed nature of gender. This dissertation provides semiotic analysis of two of Nicki Minaj’s songs, “The Boys” (2012), and “Anaconda” (2014) to exemplify Minaj’s engagement with feminist discourse from the second and third wave.

Instead, the author argues that Nicki Minaj successfully embodies empowerment and femininity simultaneously. Reflecting on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the author challenges second wave feminism’s anti-feminine sentiment, suggesting instead that in an age of postmodernity, the reductionist equation of femininity to passivity is no longer sustainable. As the most successful female rapper of her time, Minaj challenges the stereotype of male domination in the hip-hop music industry. This dissertation explores the methods in which gender performativity can interact with and subvert the expectations of the hip-hop artist through an analysis of rapper Nicki Minaj.

Anaconda music video white girls