Why we love Megan Thee Stallion
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard of the name Megan Thee Stallion. She's a 25-year-old rapper who entered the music scene in 2017 with her debut album “Make It Hot” and is now known for her hit single “Savage,” which catapulted into a viral TikTok dance.
The dance relieved thousands of people from the stresses of the impending pandemic and even landed in the consciousness of Beyoncé, who delivered a remix just as successful as its predecessor. It grabbed the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 and gave rise to a new dance routine on TikTok.
Stallion is a new albeit important force in the music industry. The Houston native started out as a teenager posting raps on SoundCloud and went on to launch social trends and garner hit singles like “Savage,” “Hot Girl Summer” and “Girls in the Hood.”
She's known for exhibiting her sexuality and inner confidence through impressive freestyles. But, her success didn’t come without personal loss. She lost both her mother, who had introduced her to hip-hop, and her grandmother in March 2019, just as she was reaching the brink of her success. Stallion said it was difficult balancing her booming career with such a grave loss that she and her family were shouldering, according to Rolling Stone.
Soon after, she coined the gender-neutral catchphrase “hot girl summer,” which was an ode to her fanbase, the Hotties, and signified loving who you are, living unapologetically and disregarding what anyone else thinks. Anybody, regardless of gender, can have a hot girl summer. The phrase was a declarative movement in 2019, inspiring Instagram captions and a collaboration with Nicki Minaj and Ty Dolla $ign.
This past summer, Stallion teamed up with fellow exuberant rapper Cardi B on “WAP,” a celebration of their bodies and female sexuality. The stars exchanged bars filled with sexual innuendos over a blaring beat. “WAP” was embraced by pop-music lovers, but critiqued by men who were offended by their sexual bluntness, which sparked yet another conversation about double standards that persist between male and female rappers.
Stallion had this to say in response to the backlash: “Although we have so many incredible women in hip-hop killing it right now and in the past, there’s still a shift (that needs to happen) around the perception of a woman owning her sexuality. Powerful women who have agency over their bodies aren’t something to look down on.”
We can’t recognize her impact on pop culture without the grievances she, a young Black woman, has experienced and witnessed in the past few months.
Stallion revealed back in July that she suffered gunshot wounds and had to get them surgically removed. She later alleged in an Instagram live that the person in question who shot her was rapper Tory Lanez, in efforts to dispel false rumors. She described it as the worst experience of her life and emphasized that Black women go unprotected in many situations in response to those that were mocking her.
What a lot of people don’t know is that Stallion is also a part-time student, studying health care management at Texas Southern University. She has had research papers intermingled with photoshoots on the same day, but she is determined to finish her degree. The singer is also outspoken about human rights. She’s fought hard for the Black Lives Matter movement, consistently posting information and resources on social media, attending protests and donating to bail funds to aid Houston protestors.
The voices of Black women have always been salient, but are now being more popularly acknowledged and celebrated. Their experiences have long been repressed or discredited, but the impact Black hip-hop stars have had on culture and empowerment is undeniable. Stallion is someone who has accumulated incredible loss, but also strength and influence with her catchy raps and loud platform, which echoes through the waves of the music industry.
