on twigs and biracial fragility.

Still from "cellophane" music video. 2019.

Firstly, I have to credit the podcast, Heaux in the Kneax, specifically its hosts, Selena the Stripper (IG: @prettyboygirl link: https://www.patreon.com/therealprettyboygirl), Cori (IG: @thegoddesscori cashapp: $spcori venmo: @hcore https://linktr.ee/thegoddesscori), and their guest Sandy Cheeks, for covering this topic in an episode from August of 2021. I also want to credit a Facebook status I came across three years ago, and the subsequent points that were made, which showed the rift between art scene influencer culture and the SWer community. 

In 2020, fka twigs made a (timely) candid reveal on her Instagram about her past work as a hostess. The launch of  a fund for SWers following criticism she received for her recent projects was linked. 

  Following this open-ended move, a groundswell of fan jeering and praise, and along came this FB status made by a scene DJ and curator and designer I was following at that time. The status maker was in support of twigs, who at this point has gone fully mainstream, an unstoppable constant. But scrolling towards the comments section, some actually SWer were piping up,  asking I’ll-considered points: about the efficacy of what she was doing, questions about transparency, crediting where credit was due, hierarchy in SW, and twig’s massive celebrity status. 

  

Still featuring FKA twigs cosplaying as a cam girl from 645AR's "Sum Bout U" music video. 2020.

Uncertainty and disappointments about this motivation to help, the conversation was pushed more- even as she was working girl, being a hostess offers more protections and privileges, compared to working in less regulated areas, like the streets and now increasingly, for camgirls. There was a lazy way her team handled the criticism was like so: firstly, as announced on her socials, three organizations would be recipients of the donations, but beyond including official statements in quotes, no clear explanation provided of the motivations of these orgs are for SWers. (I am also particularly wary of this idea of having organizations be there holders and givers of needed funds especially those which the very populations they serve are negatively impacted by the system.) 

Seeing that some other comments were showing skepticism and calling concerns “reaches”,  I piped up: why so much praise for a celebrity, (who is no longer doing SW), and not for the people getting exploited?

Photo taken at launch of 'We Are Womxn' launch, at Atlanta's Blue Flame strip club. July 2020.

Hollywood is notorious for shafting it’s inspiration it once it’s taken what it wants, as an the extension of white supremacist capitalism into story-telling into celebrity idolization.   

Lately, the scavenging has been covering two historically vilified communities: ballroom and SW. It’s why we’re seeing films like Hustlers and Pose appear, media that “celebrates” the beauty and the ugliness of holding multiply marginalized identities, but still copying and pasting from history, and pussyfooting around addressing how internal communal issues reflect the external oppression. But let’s get to the meat of this, as twigs is her own situation. 

 FKA twigs's recent descent into pole dancing, culminated in her US bi-coastal takeover of two strips clubs: the first, called Blue Flame, an Atlanta strip club, and the second being L.A.’s Cheetah’s, her subsequent base for her album release party at a club in LA. 

 Of course, I will always shout out Black folks who have and have not gotten their comments removed by twigs's team following the release of the video for "thank you song" on her latest project, Caprisongs, a 'mixtape' of new songs and videos coveting a DIY aesthetic. 

twigs appeared on the scene when I was in high school. I remember watching her first music video: a genre-divergent aesthetic, her fish-eyed blown-up head, to the effect of being a humanoid, extraterrestrial being, balanced on her thin neck, like a pendulum or punching bag thumping and cracking to and fro to, if not creating, the beat to the song.

Still from "I'm Your Doll" music video. 2015.

Even with all her superhero traits, in a superficial way, twigs has a relatability to her. Her upbringing, persona, and style felt resonant to the awkward, angsty and defiant. Fame will always complicate that charm. 

On the outside, she is shapeshifting mutant babie, leading a following of Black and brown alternative scene fans into her world; but, really I think her image is a mirage of co-option, from art and styles of communities she cursorily interacts with for personal gain, a new layer of "complexity" added to her character.

 In fact, what exactly has twigs contributed to Black music that has not already been done by a Black person before?

I wasn't sure about writing about this, and if it warranted my time. At this point, most of us are tired of her. Ina way that she’s exhausted all faculties, has barreled through all trends and their communities that are hot for opportunism of visual representation. 

It’s clear, however, that her and her team work to promote an ever-changing aesthetic, and feed a voyeurism of hers, instead of hearing out valid critiques and questions about her politics. twigs seems pretty apolitical, is working for an aesthetic, not discussing the politics of skewed power dynamics in who she is accruing cumulative loot from. 

From deleting comments concerned about these things  on her IG, to co-opting voguing, and now skirting around the seriousness of putting a black person in blackface, it's futile to defend her. 

While I eventually realized that I was unnerved by her, I took it as fascination, not an obsession, but a distanced curiosity. She spoke to me, offered some catharsis in ways that mainstream pop don’t afford artfully inclined weird Black kids. She felt more liberated than what and who she ultimately represents, and for what that is worth, it does make her indefatigably incomparable. 

Pass all the glamour, her water-slick baby hairs, digital manipulations and bondage wear, there’s a definite sadness about her which plays out her themes; female objectification, some apparent and elusive nods to infantilism too, with men and without men present. 

 Her traumas and social commentary made into a high-art edible arrangement. And there are other Black artists who are riding this wave , of de-layering a thing of its social contexts for mainstream aesthetic-setting. Museum-level or curation. 

As she has gained mainstream status, her recent projects Mary Magdalene, mixed martial arts and sword work alongside gilded baroque theatrical tableau.

Many go so far to defend her as a "Black woman"; 

never that she’s mixed race, and looks like it. 

Questioning the caliber of antiBlackness she’s faced growing up the UK, training in a predominantly-white schools, and likely primarily being around white people. The many significant privileges one has while being in the belly of that colonial beast.

twigs is enamoring to millions of people; her vulnerability about past traumas, the racism faced growing up in the UK, haters directing their racism towards her, experiencing very publicly made intimate partner violence, while being a multi-disciplined female dancer and artist in a male-dominated industry. All of it comes out in her work. When it comes to her politics, her gargantuan obligation to shape-shift into a new aesthetic, does not allow it. 

So then where does her responsibility as an artist come in? The she, too, as a Black woman statements, as though Black people can’t exploit other Black people. 

As Cori and Selena say in this Heaux in the Kneaux episode, twigs is famous enough that her soul-searching surpasses appropriation, rather it is the active pipeline of colonization white celebrities like Madonna life on. 

And now, it seems, the circle is completing itself.  

We know Black capitalism exists, that many of us walk around holding multiply marginalized layers in our identity, and exist within Blackness. 

We see how mixed people are being made into giants, be it superfluous subliminal messaging in media representation and signaling, with fulfilling the ultimate goal of becoming a brave new beige world, erasing Black existence and liberation. 

There violence of that messaging balloons when it comes to celebrity; we're culpable in becoming agents to white supremacy. We have our own muck to tustle in, to stop acting like we’re some viral cluster, set adrift until we can find Black people to latch onto. 

I’m not sure if I ever fell for it, but it being her artistry happening in quick succession, with a new thing, and new chance, to come out and do better. But those chances have gone and went. 

This recent stint with Blackface is an escalation, but could it have been predicted? 

The contrarian in me wonders, if twigs were queer, would that make that phase (let's call it what it is) less problematic? If she had worked in less regulated forms of sex work, would her pole dancing debut be even more exceptional, less of a shock to the system? I don’t care to answer.

I’d like to think that if she held these identities, we wouldn’t be here like this. She wouldn’t have made her weak defense of the clearly offensive choices made for makeup artistry and costume design, that this ‘Pan-like’ creature, a mystical protector, would not be an instance of beastial Blackface.

And to that point, it sounds a lot like a visual manifesto of how dark skinned people are expected to act nonstop, for the comfort of light skins and nonBlack people: to be calm, sturdy, and dependable to the rest of us, so they are spared. Any shape of complexity in character, being irresolute, shrewd, messy and vain, is quashed to maintain order. 

still from "thank you song" music video

There’s a spectrum of mixed people on this spinning rock: those that ignore and revel in our internalized antiBlackness, searching for approval from the wider whiter world, even for the killing game that that is. Those of us ignoring responsibility for harming and ignoring Black pain while seeking Black acceptance. 

And those of us who hate ourselves as a consequence of that, the mental and emotional abuse from a white mama. Some of us hate ourselves for Black liberation; for our own good, and really, we’re all due for a beatdown, but only some of us will get one out of love. 

What I want to ask twigs, as an artist, is this: instead of inviting critique, you allow censorship of feedback and public response rather than critique of your work: what kind of artist does that make you? How do you then relate and maintain an audience? Do you truly care to connect authentically, while avoiding imminent discussion about politics of derivation from who inspires you?

As Toni Morrison famously asked about what remains if whiteness be stripped away from white peoples' identity, what happens if we strip away these layers of twigs, what do we uncover underneath?