The record’s structure is bewildering, except to those of us who’ve ever practiced avoidance. What’s maddening is that lyrics like these are both insightful and beautiful but frustratingly rare on this album. New nigga tryna come around and play cleanĪnd my clothes fit tight, but my heart need a seamstress This dynamic is best summed on the album’s best song, “Circles,” the only one besides “Shots Fired” that feels remotely revealing:
Cartesian dualism, which is the idea that the brain and body are separate entities, though not mentioned directly here, feels like a main theme of the project. We are frequently given a rundown of physical detail (dick size preferences, levels of vaginal lubrication, “40-inch-long black weave like Morticia”) but not much else.
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The debut album - that portal into interiority and a rapper’s beautiful subjectivity - is instead boarded over in this case, like so many other windows this year. Surely there is some thematic space between reclamation and “repossession” between body positivity and a featured artist making questionable metaphors about a grown woman’s pussy.Īlthough Meg addresses her headline-grabbing shooting in July and mentions in passing the death of her mother, the sense a listener might get from this record is one of foreclosed emotion, of someone who has shut down right when they’re poised to open up and let the world know exactly who they are. But we don’t even get a middle ground in the track between the lofty idealism that she’s come to stand for and the escapism that’s fueled her so far.
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On “Girls in the Hood,” she tells us, “I’m sick of motherfuckers tryna tell me how to live.” Point taken. Maybe exploring a dynamic range of experiences is not what she’s after right now, and that’s OK. But perhaps the limited topics are the point. Popcaan, the featured artist on “Intercourse,” opens the song by crooning, “Girl, your pussy good from birth.” From birth? It’s frustrating that she relies on these cringey moments rather than pushing the envelope or even our understanding of the fuller contours of “real hot girl shit,” one of her catchphrases, or what she’s like when she’s alone, when it’s just herself and the elephants in the room. Surely there’s a more enticing metaphor for that position than one that invokes towing a car? Sometimes the ideas on offer in the album even appear contradictory to Meg’s fun-loving, woman-first persona. On “Intercourse,” Meg raps, “Let you put your hook in my bumper like a repo.” But on Good News, these subjects sound incredibly banal. It’s not as if any of what Meg raps about isn’t inherently interesting: Sexual agency and erotic pleasure is riveting material in her music generally, and her megawatt featured single “ WAP” in particular. But these songs feel like poor imitations of her earlier efforts. “Sugar Baby” and “Movie” focuses on women’s financial exploitation of men, and “Do It on the Tip” and “Body,” which has become a TikTok challenge, are both about bodily autonomy. On this album, there are songs about sex, of course, but they don’t feel particularly sexy - “Intercourse” features a hook that repeats “sexual intercourse” over and over again.
They explore repetitive sensory details, not sensuality, and a vague sense of “freakiness” rather than real transgression or eroticism. Instead, Good News feels like a baggy collection of songs that are limited in scope, even though they might have unlimited streaming potential. City Cole World: The Sideline Story all evince this tendency. Illmatic Reasonable Doubt The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill Good Kid, M.A.A.D. The debut album is supposed to be the coming-of-age story in song, the record an artist has spent their whole life making, an autobiography overstuffed with too many feelings and ideas. What we get with the Houston rapper’s debut album is more of the same - women’s empowerment, taking an operative role in one’s own pleasure, aka “driving the boat,” fun - but dialed up and concentrated further.
For better or for worse, Good News, which came out last Friday, does not deliver wholly satisfying answers. And in an era when lots of music made by women rappers has been derisively and reduced to “stripper rap,” this record might’ve offered another way for listeners to consider what it truly means to bare all. In the context of a tumultuous year of violence and grief - and joy - Meg’s hotly anticipated debut album, Good News, seemed to be implicitly set up to address more tamped-down emotions. As much as Megan Thee Stallion is known for her straightforward sex positivity, general outspokenness, and “explicit” lyrics, an intriguing part of her discography if unexplored by Meg herself is feelings she withholds and the things she doesn’t say.