Megan Thee Stallion Got Through Her Trials in Spite of Us
The Houston rapper has spent much of her time in the spotlight playing defense. In her new documentary, and on her new album, she grapples with a culture that does not believe her truth.
At her best, Megan Thee Stallion is a rap technician. She finds depth within the limiting and condescending label of “pussy rap,” unashamed to contend with the topics of sex and how they play into different aspects of her life, both in reality and fantasy—not just sex as self-empowerment, but sex as escapism, release, as a shield and as a site of self-destruction. In this respect, she’s not much different than Pusha T, who has carved out a lane in fine-tuned homages to the narcotics industry, or Rick Ross, who has mastered selling aspirational luxury into a fast-casual operation.
With all of her technical proficiency and massive popularity, however, Megan Pete still sounds best when she is leaning into her Texas roots. “I’m at the top of my game, I’m who they hate/This shit come with the fame, that’s how I knew that I made it” she drawls in the opening moments of recent single “Bigger in Texas,” flowing in the pocket of a syrupy-smooth groove and a symphony of snares and hi-hats. The video harkens back to the local charm that made her immensely popular with her breakout 2018 mixtape Tina Snow: Scarface, Slim Thug, grills jeweler Johnny Dang, Paul Wall, Lil Keke, and Sauce Walka all in lockstep with Megan from Houston, as she pays homage to the cultural and regional landmarks that molded her, as sensual and braggadocious as ever.
With such a triumphant moment dedicated to her hometown, it is heartrending to discover via the new documentary Megan Thee Stallion: In Her Words that until recently, she had largely left Houston in her rearview. While surprising, the reasons are obvious: To her, Houston represents grief just as much as it represents home, having lost her father, mother, and grandmother before she turned 25. In the film, she details the journey of recovering from a high-profile shooting and the racialized abuse she took for coming forward, from fans and the press alike, and how she recovered from navigating life-altering loss just as her career began to take off—before “WAP” and the “Savage (Remix)” topped the charts. The answer: Not that well, an observation that should have been obvious to even casual fans of her fast-paced lifestyle at the time. She not only lost her family, but a mother who was invested in protecting her rise and her success at every step, a cherished support system gone too soon.
As much as the contemporary documentary project can often revert to a sanitized form of self-mythology, Megan Thee Stallion’s film succeeds at shedding the veneer of the superstar to showcase the person within, and how destructive the celebrity machine can be in the midst of a personal low. When you are booked and committed to a sea of international tour dates, grief can only be engaged in 30-minute increments, creating a pressure valve that only releases when indulging in vices. When you are surrounded by a team whose prime focus is making sure that Megan the business is uninterrupted, there’s little space to attend to the real-life crises of the person outside of the brand, crying for help—there’s only push harder, strive to be better, dig deep and keep doing more. While not stated explicitly in the film, that pressure only escalated as she broke away from her original label to go independent—now a self-sustaining operation, the young rapper had to contend with the near-inescapable grind to take up every brand deal and paid opportunity to sustain a celebrity lifestyle at immense personal cost. The two elements she needed to heal—time and space—became a premium commodity just as she craved them the most.
The public fracas hurts her emotional healing, and it has inevitably affected her artistic development. A deadly act of assault has become a matter of public speculation consuming her life for over four years. Her last three studio albums, including her debut, Good News, have had to address the public scrutiny in some way. Creating from a defensive place is a hard position to be in. Not only does it limit the subject matter that Megan engages with in constant response to an audience that will never be interested in vindicating her, it restricts discussions around her art to a referendum on public misogyny and anti-Blackness—a conversation that offers little value to an artist who clearly takes the craft of rap seriously. This encapsulates a frustrating paradox that has enshrouded her level of celebrity as she continues to build her legacy in the hip-hop canon: Any conversation on Meg has become a meditation on her worthiness of her celebrity, a validation or rejection of her victimhood and all that it represents. Defending her is a righteous, moral position; critiquing her art, in turn, can only be rooted in misogyny.
A step away from the furious discourse of stan accounts will reveal that no one is a harsher self-critic than Megan Pete, a woman who cut her teeth with mind-blowing and incisive freestyles. In interviews with trusted press, including a recent conversation with Shannon Sharpe, she freely admits that she needs to work on writing less wordy and catchy hooks. Her flaws are common to any polished MC—she often finds herself trying to showcase too many skills at once in a single, leading to a result that feels more overwhelming than a mosaic that is greater than the sum of its parts, such as on “Captain Hook,” her 2020 that that at points feels like a dizzying rollercoaster despite the playfully bodacious subject matter. (It’s a constraint from which she frees herself in freestyles, which is why they continuously stand out.)
On this summer’s Megan, the H-town hottie seeks to break that trend with a self-titled project that purports to shed the skin of the last few years and look towards the future. Structured around the themes of metamorphosis, the album is intended to be Megan’s own meditation on where she is at present—refocused, renewed, reinvigorated. The work reads as a closer approximation of what metamorphosis tends to look like: not a radical transformation, but the shedding of a layer of pain, fully informed by the remnants of the past.
Megan Thee Stallion has many signature sounds—her memorable ad libs, cocksure lyrics, and proud country swag—but one exceptional pattern is the way she bares her teeth on the opening tracks of her albums, a habit she has stuck by since her 2017 EP Make It Hot. Several of those cuts have become highlights of her catalog—the laconic defiance on Tina Snow’s “WTF I Want,” the snarling hi-hat and matching lyrics on Fever’s “Realer,” the thinly-restrained fury on Traumazine’s “NDA.” “Hiss” is an unexpected, yet highly welcome, addition to that oeuvre: Her raps are unrelenting, aggressive, and defiant, with a cheeky glint in her eye in all the ways that Meg does best. At her most potent, she packages the disgust and dismissiveness of a turn-of-the-century Lil’ Kim in with the punch, vocabulary, and verve of a Trill- era Bun B—churning out powerful moments like her knockout single, “Plan B.”
On last month’s deluxe edition Megan: Act II, that voice is more aptly honed. The bravado has more finesse, the subject matter is largely removed from the traumas that have informed her last few years, and the overall tone is more celebratory. Megan is no longer asking to be understood or defending herself from criticism; she is breaking out of the assigned box she was given and making sure to have fun while doing it by reminding herself exactly where she comes from.
The documentary concludes with the 2022 announcement of Tory Lanez’s guilty verdict. Megan, surrounded by her cousin and Roc Nation’s Desiree Perez, releases an extended sob at the news that a jury of her peers believed her. In many ways, this stopping point reflects her choice to close the chapter on any further public conversation from her around such a troubled time in her life. But I can’t help but feel that her final cry was also an acknowledgment of the weight of the scrutiny she has had to endure. Its fade to black felt like an exit from the internal bubble of Megan’s emotions and trauma—an implicit announcement that she would never feel comfortable baring herself to the world again, as evidenced by her highly curated social media presence. There’s a world where she remained a Southern darling with massive cultural impact in the lineage of the female rappers she drew from, from Gangsta Boo to La Chat to Trina, but ultimately, Meg didn’t have that choice. Her biggest traumas helped catapult her to massive celebrity against her will, cornering her into litigating her value as an artist in hand with adjudicating her right to her humanity.
It is easy to wistfully speculate on what could have been, had she been allowed to grow away from the dehumanizing lens of superstardom—until you are hit with the harsh reminder that many of our regional legends have not had it easy either, from Gangsta Boo’s recent passing to La Chat’s criminal under-acknowledgement as a hip-hop icon. There is no trusted path to protect our artists from the albatross of visibility, nor has there ever been; if Meg’s documentary and music is a testament to anything, it’s the fact that the only way out is through.
