One minute in, and you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd stumbled upon a relic of C-grade, straight-to-video movie trailers. The pronounced opening of MYKKI BLANCO's 'She Gutta' music video is fresh out of a 90's Blockbuster: complete with rich, dramatic narrational overdub and 6 o'clock news style stage-setting.
One-and-a-half minutes in and the featured film begins.
What follows over the top of BLANCO's track (yes, over the top: this is the kind of video that makes a backing track of the original song) is a cinematic music video in the vein of JAY Z and BEYONCE's recent 'RUN' pseudo-film—albeit with a lot less tongue-in-cheek cheese and a lot more blood-in-the-teeth grit. It's a vision of post-apocalyptic horror set in Cali's South Central, built on crumbling debris and populated by face-painted 'locos'. Think 'Escape From New York' meets 'Surf Nazis Must Die'.
The clips are short and sharp, a bombardment on the optic lens: a dark pastiche of subversive sex and street violence. The lines between the two are blurred. Gender lines are blurred. Phallic symbols are licked. A whole lot of shit goes up in flames, literally and symbolically. And all of it is crudely underlaid by BLANCO's unfettered flow and dick-clamping lyrical hook: "Y'all wanna be damned? So come fuck me."
It's that crooked marriage of sex and violence that seems fundamental to BLANCO's angle, and it's manifest in the 'She Gutta' video: where homoerotic soft-core meets video-graphic horror-core. This particular blunt lyric is loaded with the middle-finger-in-the-air aggression that gives steam to her mighty musical persona: a coax at once seductive and hostile; a sequin gauntlet thrown at the Timberlands of the modern misogynist 'gangster'. Basically: if you want to be thug, if you want to dine with the devil, then this 'sinful' sodomy is just about your quickest way to it.
Sex and violence; an invite and a threat. BLANCO could be buttering us up, or she could be showing us the knife.
Words by Gavin Butler
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