on fka twigs, biracial celebrity + erasing Blackness

Still from "cellophane" music video. 2019.

Some years back, I published this article on Blogger, and it hardly got any online traffic. The writing itself was terrible in this writer’s opinion: laden with typos, lacking a clear sense of direction, and then the recent news that a biopic about Josephine Baker is in the making. Who else was chosen to play the lead? FKA Twigs. Having some space and a more developed sense of opinion, the timing felt right to give this some new life. Some parts of the original post were left as is, to stay true to the initial intention for writing about this,  and also in recognition of how much perspective has changed.  

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 Firstly, credit is due to the podcast Heaux in the Kneax and its hosts, Selena the Stripper (IG: @prettyboygirl link: https://www.patreon.com/therealprettyboygirl), and Cori (IG: @thegoddesscori cashapp: $spcori venmo: @hcore https://linktr.ee/thegoddesscori), who, back in August of 2021, along with their guest Sandy Cheeks, featured a discussion about the Grammy-winning performer, FKA Twigs. More personally to the writer is discourse over social media they came across some time ago. Those elements inspired the writing of this article, a which I hope to help better illuminate the rift between art scene influencer culture and the SWer community it has exposed. 

In 2020, FKA Twigs, or Tahliah Barnett, posted on Instagram with a caption detailing her past work as a hostess. Within that, was a soft launch for  a fund to support SWers, the impetus of which seemed spurred by criticism she (duely) received for her recent projects. 

  Generally, the post was met with a groundswell of positive attention in uplifting marginalized communities, however uncritically, even while co-opting the culture of said communities that remain largely criminalized. 

The status I came across was written by an NYC- based scene DJ and multi-hyphenate creator, was made in reference to Twigs starring as a cam girl in the music video for “Sum about U”.

 Interestingly, the comments on the status revealed a divide in the responses: some were made by SWers giving their observations and often unconsidered points of critique around the efficacy of what she was doing, as well as transparency, while others pushed back. Summarily, what awareness some had which others hadn’t is a needed reminder that hierarchy has regulated SW as a criminalized industry. How digitally-entrenched the world has grown, that separation is reinforced in many ways, especially in issues of safety protocol and what tools remain untouched by legislative oversight.

  

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

While Twigs has been a professionally-trained dancer throughout her life, has built her career on how seriously committed she is to her athleticism, at times, candidly sharing her experiences with her audience over social media.

While she has cultivated a loyal and vibrant fanbase of a largely Black and Brown creative and artistic audiences, her celebrity status does not necessarily preclude her from critique: how she has built her image has also demonstrated power dynamics between her image and the communities that she takes inspiration from.  

Just as well, her palatability, as in her pull, on mainstream music and media,  is often praised for her “abstract” or "elevated” aesthetic, rather than the cultural contexts she has taken from, or from which the communities often erased. 

Some years back, FKA Twigs, or Tahliah Barnett, announced over Instagram of her promotional tour of the U.S.  As a prelude to this, she shared her experience working as a hostess in London years ago, as a heart-hearted attempt to show a greater sense of personal relevance. The two destinations for the tour were two strip clubs, one in Atlanta, and the second in Los Angeles.  Along with this visit, was a link to an advocacy organization.

Rather than use the moment to promote the organizations, or sex workers themselves at these clubs, the impression left showed predictable but disappointing lack of awareness of power and privilege: what differences between hostessing (wherever grey areas within in that field of work arise pertaining to sexual services), Twigs has not engaged in sex work since, but has so clearly used the aesthetics of pole dancing specifically, in her more recent performances, such as in her single, “cellophane". 

What further gray exists within the varied world of sex work--especially with concerning power and safety—  for Twigs and her experience, what does, or did, the fact of privilege, and how much self-possession she can claim, within the context of safety even mean? What does it mean to work in a club in London, rather than remotely on a camera, or being in the streets? 

Another critique is in how Twigs chose to collaborate with three organizations, and to donate proceeds raised to, but beyond including official statements of each, no further explanation was made of why they were chosen, over highlighting individual SWers. (It is notedly tiring how respectability politics creates a clear challenge as middle men standing in the way of people that need support from actually receiving wealth redistribution of actual use.)

Despite these valid points, other comments showed skepticism, and called these concerns “reaches”. I could sense the frustration growing within me and, however naively, felt called to speak up: to paraphrase, why was there so much praise for a celebrity, (who is no longer doing SW but is using the aesthetic), and not for the people who are actually are being exploited?

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

The effect which the presence of celebrity recognizing an audience of a marginalized population may to increase that community’s visibility to the wider public, and also vulnerability, and, arguably, detectability. Celebrity remains a force for distraction from.  

Following Biden’s election, what damage the first Trump administration had already administrated to criminalize online SW came in its enactment of SESTA-FOSTA. Thinly blanketed as an effort to combat sex trafficking of minors, the bill limited crucial protections such as screenings of clients, a safety measure for those working online. 

Twigs was already known for co-opting voguing from the ballroom scene. Similarly to Madonna’s hit “Vogue” being on the heels of Jennie Livingston’s documentary, Paris is Burning.

Other more recent mainstream fascination with queer community and sex work, like the release of the film Hustlers, to Ryan Murphy’s Pose, the politics of representation saw a brief period of “celebration”. 

 It has been disappointing for this writer to see the trajectory Twigs has oriented herself to, as someone who admires her career as a dancer. There could have been further effort on her part made to invest in actual dancers and others engaged in sex work, and being less predictable in their outcome. 

 Blue Flame, which is based in Atlanta, and the second, L.A.’s Cheetah’s, which would host her album release party. 

Atlanta and it’s Mecca-level reputation as a major city in the Black South, Barnett’s visit to the notoriously Black Blue Flame held a strong reminiscence to early colonial exploration. For Twigs to choose the States, over the UK, for her tour, speaks to a notable fascination that non-American, and often British Black celebrities have with Black American culture. (Barnett is half Afro-Jamaican through her father, who came from parents part of The famed Windrush generation of Black Caribbean folks that emigrated to Britain to rebuild what was lost to the Second World War). Whether she identifies specifically with Black British culture personally remains unclear in her own work. 

 With questionable curation her image in adjacency with American queer community and sex work,  how Twigs relates to, or distances from, her Blackness, showed a painful misstep, particularly in the video accompanying her "thank you song" off of her Caprisongs album. 

Sat on a late night bus, arm in arm, with her head of loose blonde curls resting on the shoulder of/with a black (or blackened) figure, dressed in dark feathers, Twigs contrasts with an innocent,  “angelic”appearance. More online information revealed the actor as being a lighter-skinned Black person whose skin was painted black for the video. Twigs’s choice response to outrage that ensued from Black viewers was that this beast-like creature was painted black to represent "a cosmic being". 

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

At best, it was a tone-deaf and knee-jerk response to serious criticism, at worst, it was a moment long overdue to show the fragility in Twigs as a biracial woman whose genuine claim to Blackness in her personal experience was void. 

Viewers, both Black and non-Black, who chose offensive or defensive positions to the controversy speaks to how antiBlackness is a maintained constant. 

Since our social spaces have undergone a sea-change of being digitally regulated, how art and culture  inform community, and how it all gets co-opted by celebrity keeps on with changes in our public terrain. 

Yet, as atomizing of an experience having an online presence can be, what happens to the integrity of a culture when a mainstream artist like Twigs, who representatively as a “serious" artist, can not only take from it, but outsource while we backslide into acquiescing with global fascism?

Where Blackness, as an identity marker rather than its political tradition, has given way to group tribalism, being overwhelmed by the gross level of power and capital that celebrities hold without principle resistance to it, helps to stoke our own confusion and disjointed behavior in recognizing it.  

With the recent announcement of Twigs being cast as the lead of director Maimouna Doucore’s upcoming biopic of Josephine Baker, it felt right to breathe some new life into this old and messy post. 

Paraphrasing Selena’s thoughts on the episode about Twigs and her sense of responsibility: 

"I am finding myself asking some of the same questions, about [Twigs and her] artistry, [about] where her responsibility in honoring what and who inspires her, lies. We have fallen back into a trap of fawning over celebrity, as conduits for our emotional infiltration and manipulation, on how we choose to engage with art.” 

As further the hosts Cori and Selena further express in the episode, Twigs’s constant changing of her image is a performance in and of itself of her soul-searching: like most other performers, when getting down to the individual person, the impact of that self-evasion extends the problem of appropriation to the unwell and confused behavior which whiteness seeks to maintain. 

Oftetimes, the description of performers as “shapeshifters” is synonymous with their authenticity: in depicting this constant changing of an image or avatar, it heightens what makes them seem so superhuman and keep us commoners locked into the hierarchy. More recently, Twigs also spoke before U.S. officials on regulating artificial intelligence to safeguard artists’ (her) work. Yet, she remains insulated from the unfortunate and avoidable, consequences she was directly responsible for creating for others in the past. 

This otherworldly image that Twigs possesses seems to be part of a arc completing itself. Like Madonna in previous decades, 

"The shift in representational politics of the last decade has placed mixed people on pedestals relegated as ‘Black' as means to usher a brave new (beige) world,  that erases what impact political potency of assertions of Blackness have broken its seal some dozens of times."

I did once admire Twigs and her artistry. Now, with some time past, a failed uprising, the state’s express erasure of trans people, and its gross mismanagement of a global pandemic, peoples’ spirits have been crushed in new ways. Still,  I return to these questions I had originally shared:

“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, [or at least] less of a shock to the system? I don’t care to answer.

“I’d like to think that [sic] we wouldn’t be here. She wouldn’t have made this weak defense of a clearly offensive choice for creative direction, with a creative process behind this ‘Pan-like’ or "mystical protector", that do without, or maybe even interrogate, the enduring through-line with the non-human with Blackface.

The general expectation forced on dark-skinned Black people to prioritize the comfort of those who are lighter skinned, and/or nonBlack people in general, [to perform neutrality, without wavering to the pain of self-betrayal] is how to be spared. Any shape of complexity in character; irresolute, vain, shrewd, messy  in any capacity, [is eroded] to maintain order. "

still from "thank you song" music video

As it was revealed online that the actor in blackface was not already a dark-skinned person, Twigs's defense about being inspired by mystical elements, spoke to me as a false appeal to her childhood. Having grown up in the U.K., with what subliminal and opaque displays of blackface was she confronted with at a young age? What was any child living in its borders exposed to, in popular adverts, in characters on children’s shows, how you were treated by adults while on your way to school, or out with friends, simply existing in the mundane? What sort of racist fantasies was she inculcated with, about beauty, about health,, about love within the art world? How heavy is the veil for someone like Twigs to decide that the pain that that inevitably leaves someone holding, is somehow of no creative relevance or interest? 

Here, we arrive at what were my closing thoughts: 

"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 abuse almost always endured from a white upbringing. 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. 

I want to draw attention to how vividly this was expressing how I was beginning to recognize the potency  of group dynamics and popularity. There is a sense of self-deprecation I am leaning into here with a bleak sense of humor. Of all the light-skinned jokes that I’ve laughed at over the years, as something important and healthy to do, I felt that that anxiety ended up consuming more of my attention as was necessary. I recognize how I conflated it with a common sense around shame, but I took it as a self-imposition to wear as a kind of armor.  If I could shrink myself down, it might help keep the dialogue going, and better help it evolve around Blackness and being. What that didn’t recognize was whether something would remain to be talked about in circles, or lead to something generative. All of that undermining of myself did was undermine the significance in making that distinction. 

To digress:

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 [power dynamics that exist between you and] who inspires you?

As Toni Morrison asked, on what remains of whiteness, if whiteness were stripped away from white people: what happens if we strip away these layers of our [parasocial relationship with celebrity], what can we do beyond it?"

I can appreciate provocation being a tactic to pull people out of their shells, and confront their own fears, but that then requires a shared sense of conscience to do. Twigs has not shown a sense of care to be accountable and self-correct. We remain in a place where full accountability has fully realized examples.