first round
(3) Destiny's Child, “Bootylicious”
BOUNCED
(14) Girl Talk, “Bounce That”
156-81
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/3/24.
We’ve Been Ready for This Jelly: destiny’s child “Bootylicious” and the Pursuit for Sexual Sovereignty by avery ferin
Picture it: icy rain spits on the window beside my head as my mother drives me home from swim practice sometime during the slushed winter of 2010. I'm sitting in the backseat of our 2004 Saab with my scabby knees propped up on the seatback in front of me and a library copy of The Twilight Saga: New Moon clutched in my hands like a crucifix. I’m chewing on the lip of a bottle of strawberry-kiwi Propel when the introductory notes of Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen” filter from the car stereo. I bob my head along to the familiar strum pattern as I flip the page. It’s not long, no more than 7 or 8 seconds, before the percussive scratch intersects what I’d assumed to be an ordinary song for the evening car ride home. If I had to guess, within the next few moments a woman’s honeysuckle voice would fill the cabin as the song fades, reminding us that we were listening to Delilah on Star 105.7.
Kelly, can you handle this? My eyes drift up from the page.
Michelle, can you handle this? I’m hanging on every word. Who’s Michelle? Can she handle it, whatever “this” is?
Beyonce, can you handle this? A name I recognize, and I’m not even fully certain I can handle it by this point.
I replay the hook over and over in my head, determined to remember the lyrics so that when I arrive home that evening, I can look it up and listen to it again. I make a mad dash to the family computer and type “I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly” into the search bar. A video pops up. The video pops up. I hover my mouse over the play button, and I am immersed in a sort of pop excellence I’d never experienced before.
“Bootylicious” serves as the fourth and final #1 hit for the power group Destiny’s Child, a sort of au revoir before the three women split in separate yet triumphant directions. What makes this song so incredible lies within its layers. Upon first listening, it’s easy to write it off as just another earworm-heavy dance track, and this is not to say that it isn’t, but I beseech you to consider it on a grander scope.
Looking past its superficial veneer, “Bootylicious” functions as a narrative that punches upward from a place of fierce sumptuousness—a sense of self-empowerment that women, namely black women, have been coxswained away from for centuries. Though much of the world exists under the supposition that we’ve come far enough as a society in terms of body acceptance, the problem is enormously prevalent and subsists right there in plain sight—in the very words themselves.
See, body acceptance is all well and good, and is a baseline requisite. It’s one thing to merely accept one’s body, but the suggestion of such is that this is the pinnacle of self-love. This standard is exactly where the song pokes holes. Is “acceptance” the utmost bar for which women are expected to reach? Just contentedness? Destiny’s Child certainly didn’t think so.
Peering through the rubble left over from years of derisive body negativity imposed by the 90’s high-fashion industry, with its Kate Mosses and Naomi Campbells, “Bootylicious” shone through the cracks (no pun intended) and proposed an alternative narrative. What if women were encouraged to not just make peace with their bodies and instead given the conviction to celebrate them?
I wish I could say that I was too young to understand the context of the song, that the sexuality of it all sailed right over my head, but I was a thirteen-year-old girl in 2010; I already knew what it meant to exist in a sexualized body, in this objectifiable framework. What I didn’t know, however, was the power such an anthem could hold or what sort of hand that song could play in what can only be described as a sexual revolution. At thirteen, though, I had already started feeling the ache of expectation on my back as my body began to swell in new places and my hips no longer fit into clothes I’d worn not even a year prior. But in that video, I saw bodies that didn’t just look like the ones I was used to seeing in my mother’s copies of Elle or Glamour. I saw bodies of various shapes, colors, and genders – a completely novel concept for what I’d previously known to be “fabulous”.
I acknowledge that I am a White woman writing about Black women singing about Black love and, moreover, the celebration of Black bodies. I do not know what it felt like to hear “Bootylicious” for the first time as a young Black girl in the early 2000s. I do not know what it is like to be a Black woman, nor will I ever pretend to. What I do know, however, is what it is like to feel as though I am a product of own body, self-worth equated with my figure and frame. I know what it feels like to toss the dice of self-opinion each morning, wondering how I am going to feel about the woman in the mirror when I finally get out of bed. And I do know what it feels like to try and navigate a culture that favors figures I have tried and failed to embody. I was young girl hearing a song about body-love for the first time and it sounded something like the unlocking of a cuff.
The pervasive cultural obsession with thinness bears a steep history embedded in racism that stems as far back as the Renaissance period. Most of us are familiar with the term “fat phobia”, or the compulsive fear of fatness, in the contemporary sense and the detriment it has on the mental health of those targeted. But fat phobia, as it relates to Black women, was not derivative of medical outcomes or perpetrator’s concern for the physical welfare of others, but rather with the belief that fatness was indicative of racial subsidiarity that dates to the Enlightenment era. It expressed itself in the medical industry with the genesis of the body mass index, which levies white male body standards on the world. In the 1940s, the ideals for the Miss American beauty pageant boasted strict obligations for participants, stating that they desired “slender bodies of good health and white race”.
In the book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Sabrina Strings writes “Slavery was an incredibly lucrative enterprise and so it was so important to race scientists, who were invested in slavery, to keep a hierarchy in which Black women were not deemed to be the equivalent of white women.”
The conversation surrounding human sexuality has historically omitted the voices of women, muting us into submission and annulled of opportunity to express our desires. When we dare to speak about sex, even in terms of our own bodies, we are branded with labels, scarlet letters, reputations, and ostracization. The censure of avowed sexual desire makes it so that sex is able to be employed as a weapon of power, status, and even manipulation. Further than this, the enforced proclivity to evade conversations involving women’s sexuality can lead to feelings of insecurity and discomfort with any critical health concerns that may correlate.
So how does a singular, inconspicuous dance track from 2001 become a purveyor of bodily and sexual autonomy for women, namely Black women? The answer lies right there in the question itself. “Bootylicious” offers itself as a simple club anthem in the ilk of TLC and The Pussycat Dolls, skyrocketing to the tops of charts and wriggling its way onto dancefloors everywhere while concurrently opening the door for a larger conversation about sexual autonomy. It’s the demonstration of power through joy and celebration and an outrageously catchy chorus, daring to confront the racially charged idea of “beauty”.
Did “Bootylicious” unanimously cure the modern world of body negativity? Probably not. Did it diminish all cynics who attempt to tell women what we are allowed to feel confident about when it comes to our own bodies? Hardly. Did its raucous declaration of self-confidence intimidate, nay, defeat every single person who sought to impose shame upon women for asserting their desires? Not likely. But perhaps this is entirely beside the point.
The power of a song resides within the individual and their singular set of experiences. What “Bootylicious” means to me will always be different from what it means to, say, the woman standing behind me in the CVS self-checkout line. What might be just another Top 40 hit to one person could be the reason behind the self-freedom of another. Everything we create holds the ability to endorse change, and everything we create possesses the power to inspire. So yes, the world is ready for this jelly; we always have been, we just needed the lyrical influence of one of the best girl groups of all time to remind us.
Avery Ferin is a teacher and fiction writer presently residing in Chicago, IL. She attended DePaul University, where she graduated with her BA in English and MFA in Writing & Publishing, and served as the Editor-in-Chief of its art & literature magazine Crook & Folly. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including Kitchen Table Quarterly, Motley Magazine, and The Grand Rapids Press. She is the recipient of the 2022 Story Studio Master's Award and the 2024 AWP Scholarship. Her short story, "Summer on Lloyd's Bayou" was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart prize. She currently teaches Creative Writing at The Chicago High School for the Arts.
Miasma: "Bounce That" by Girl Talk as the Tipping Point by brittney uecker
The same spring that you died, my sister, Shayla, and I had tickets to see Girl Talk at the Wilma Theatre. The night of the show, I met her on campus and we drank at her dorm before I drove us and her friends downtown. I didn’t have many friends of my own at that time, so I glommed onto this group of eager, naive freshmen. Though they weren’t much younger than me, the canyon of age between legal drinking age and not made them seem immensely so, and gave me legitimacy in their friend group as the one who could always bring booze. I was never sure if this should make me feel cool and wise, or desperate and pathetic.
After too many drunken screaming fights, I had promised you that I wouldn’t drink that night, that I’d give up alcohol for Lent. I clung to the lasting dying vestiges of my religion this way, in the ease of its hollow, quantifiable binary. But I had no actual intention of abstaining that night, a fact we surely both knew. To me, the only thing a promise meant was that I would make sure you didn’t find out.
We were at a rocky point in our relationship. I’d just transferred to school at the University of Montana and moved to Missoula, and you had just left your job across the state to be there with me. I had just turned 21 in a new city and was eager to go out and experience nightlife, something that you, at 24, were already over. You were ready to settle down, to entertain the prospect of being an adult, while I was still aching to sow my wild oats. Our age difference, our difference in upbringing, and our widely differing desires of what we wanted to do right now was beginning to show, and it was beginning to piss me off, make me feel entitled and antsy. Maybe if I knew that in less than a month you’d be dead, maybe I would have slowed down. Maybe I would have stayed home when you asked me to, soaked up the last of our relationship while I could. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Shayla, her friends, and I drank cheap blueberry vodka mixed with red Gatorade, drinks that stained our lips and tongues and burned all the way down, a violence in pursuit of intoxication. Beneath the Higgins Street bridge, the theater right above us, we took pull after pull from bottles in the trunk of my car and felt the vibrations of the traffic passing above and the chill of the river thrashing against the banks next to us. When we were thoroughly giddy with alcohol and anticipation, we made our way to the street above and shoved our way to the front of the line with no regard for the angry comments of the concert-goers behind us or the disappointed looks of the bouncers who nonetheless scanned our tickets and let us inside. The show had already started.
In the Wilma, my limbs were starting to get that heavy yet weightless feeling, my lips becoming loose rubber bands. The harsh lights and farty popcorn scent of the old-timey lobby made me fearfully nauseous, but I bought another round of drinks and barreled through, Shayla and her friends following like a line of drunken baby ducklings behind me. Giant solid-wood double doors gave way to the enveloping darkness of the theater itself, and a sloped walkway beckoned your body to break into a run that led right into the snarl of the pit. Just being in the place had an intoxicating effect, and as the show began, all sensations blurred into one amalgam of stimuli. Lights flashed all around, blinking and blurring and bathing everything in color. Objects flew through the air—bodies, beer cans, beach balls, an occasional toilet paper roll like a comet shooting through the sky. The crowd was a writhing, squirming mass of bodies, moving and breathing as a single being, something like maggots on a corpse, eating away, giving off incomprehensible amounts of heat, melting in a mass of decomposition, part living and part dead. A crowd like that presses against you in all directions at once, overwhelming to the point of numbness, so intense that you don’t even feel it anymore. For every other body, their sweat becomes your sweat, their voice becomes your voice, your breath becomes their breath, rising and falling as one rib cage. The music itself wasn’t so much music, but deafening, unrecognizable noise. There was no differentiating songs—it was all just dissonant noise and vibrations in your bones. I wasn’t even sure if I was listening to Girl Talk or one of the half-dozen opening acts.
Shayla got kicked out before Girl Talk even came on, and then multiple times after, the bouncer catching her wristband-less and double-fisting drinks I’d bought her. I didn’t go looking for her, but she somehow found her way back in. I’d like to imagine she climbed a fire escape, picked a lock, snuck in through some hidden entrance or secret passageway, but she probably just batted her eyelashes at a different bouncer and sweet-talked her way back. In a few weeks, that same sister, the one that dissolved Jolly Ranchers in Everclear and climbed a fire escape to sneak back into a concert she got tossed out of, would draw a picture of a rainbow with a set of crayons a nurse gave her as I’m saying goodbye to you for the last time in the ICU. It’s one of the purest things anyone has ever done.
At this point, I was beyond drunk, and beyond caring. I could feel holes being poked in my awareness, my memory leaving me as it was occurring. Time squished and stretched and didn’t really happen and it didn’t matter. I’d later wonder if someone spiked my drink or if it was an absurd contact high or if I was really just that drunk. I never reached that level of intoxication again and I never found out why.
Time jumps, spanning the chasm of a giant plot hole in the night, and suddenly we’re deep into Girl Talk’s set. I’m soaked in sweat, my senses are fucked, and I’ve lost Shayla and her friends, but it all barely registers. Though I’ve been pressed up against strangers’ bodies all night, suddenly one pushes up against me with distinct, targeted intention and I turn to look at a man, a boy really. He’s shorter than I am and shirtless, with a patchy beard and gap teeth, a beady distant look in his eyes. His skin is pale white and the undulations of his ribs and the sheen of his sweat glisten in the flashing lights.
Without pretense and without objection, he kisses me aggressively. It’s a welcomed force, his immediate probing tongue and pawing hands. His mouth is wet and sharp, each kiss like a bad shot of well booze. We are both so sloppy, the entire scene nonsensical. I know I have a boyfriend at home across the city, I don’t forget that for a second, but I’m consciously making this choice. I know my limits, and I’m willingly choosing to exceed them. I’d repeat this line all the time in those days and in the years to come, as if my intentionality made it a valid excuse, gave me some illusion of control. I know I’m breaking every promise I made—I’m drinking, and not just drinking, but self-annihilating. I drove drunk here, and I’m going to drive drunk home. I’m going to continue to kiss this boy I don’t know, this nameless, faceless not-you, over and over and over and over.
We kiss and we dance for who-knows how long. I’m facing away from the lights and noise emanating from the stage, because I haven’t cared all night what’s happening up there anyway. At one point, the boy lifts the glow stick he’s wearing on a cord around his neck, bouncing against his sweaty chest. It catches in his dirty blonde curls as he removes it and puts it around my neck. I don’t know why he does this, but after that night I’ll save it and put it on my rearview mirror. There, it will lose its glow, fade to a pale yellow, the same syrupy puss-yellow as the sample of your spinal fluid that the nurse will show me, rich and cloudy with white blood cells, indicative of the meningitis bathing your brain and very swiftly and efficiently killing you. Here it will hang until after your death, one of many objects spanning the massive, gaping void between the before and after of my life. Here it will bang relentlessly against the windshield like I’ll bang against the hospital walls when they declare you dead, when the doctor says the swelling in your brain is, in his calm, clinical words, “incompatible with life.”
I don’t remember leaving, don’t remember seeing Shayla again. Time just hops along like it has all night. I’ll drive home drunk after the show, aimlessly circling around town, just killing time avoiding going home to you because I’m ashamed and I’m sloppy and I’m a total mess. I’m not enough for you and maybe part of me knows that in less than a month you’ll be dead and the preemptive guilt is already manifesting, taking up all the space in my whole entire chest.
When I finally get home, you’re asleep on the couch, the muted television casting a pulsing glow against your open, snoring mouth. In retrospect, I hate that I am relieved by this but I am, relieved that it’s less time I have to spend with you, less time that I have to hide and lie about the whole night. I’m glad that you don’t have to see me drunk, and naive enough to believe that you’ll think I wasn’t. I go quietly upstairs and strip off my sweaty clothes and get into bed. I’ll spread out over the entire mattress and wrap myself in all the blankets and I’ll revel in what it feels like to be alone, a temporary but exhilarating freedom, not knowing that in less than a month you’ll be dead, and alone will be an endless, terrifying state in which I won’t be able to escape.
I only knew you for two years, but your death changed every day of my life afterward. I’ll quickly forget about Girl Talk and Shayla’s friends and the glow stick and the patchy-bearded boy like I’ll forget about a lot of things from that time, spots blacked out by self-protection and grief, lost in the mess of trying to reassemble my life after experiencing a death of this magnitude at the heartbreakingly young age of 21. But I won’t forget about coming home that night and leaving you alone on the couch. That memory is forever seared in all its infinitesimal and retrospectively agonizing detail. I still don’t think I’ve forgiven myself for it.
Somehow, this is the first time I’ve written about you.
I’ve learned a lot in the thirteen years since your death. I’ve grown up, and down, and up again, and sometimes down. I’ve learned to hold my alcohol a little better, and that I’m not all that good at drinking. I’ve learned to keep my promises, or at least which ones I need to keep and which ones warrant breaking. I’ve learned to take ownership of my mess, to forgive myself for my youth, for my grief, for all the things I did before I knew better. I’ve learned that your death doesn’t negate that I deserve forgiveness for not preventing it, for not treating you better while I still had the chance. I’ve learned I couldn’t have known.
I’m still scared of Girl Talk. I’m scared of this song. I can’t hear its jaunty introduction, its chaotic rhythm and schizophrenic singing without being violently thrown back into that fear, into the merciless sting of heartbreak at its most raw, the nausea of my shock, the shame of all the things I did in the throws of grief—the impulsive tattoos and the men I recklessly fucked and the copious amounts of alcohol I drowned myself in, anything to blur myself into an oblivion in which I could forget about you, could distance myself from all the ways I hurt you before you fucking died.
I’m scared of this song because it is an undeniable marker of when I knew my life was going to change, and I was about to dive into a miasma of pain. It was the moment when I knew things weren’t going to get better. Even though it would be weeks before I came home from class and you stumbled down the stairs in delirious pain and I drove you to the urgent care clinic that turned you away so I drove you to the emergency room and you begged the nurse to save your life and I watched you shit yourself in the hospital bathroom because your entire body was turning on you and the doctor stuck a needle in your spine and another doctor shaved your head and cut out a piece of your skull and I had to guess at your phone’s passcode so I could call your mother to tell her you were dying and I’d never see you conscious again, the night of the Girl Talk show was the tipping point. They are inextricably and forever linked.
I’m still scared of the potential of my recklessness. I’m still scared that no matter how deep and for how long it's been buried in the past, no matter what circumstance buffers its badness, that given the right alchemy of conditions, I’ll become someone I cannot trust.
That time of my life is like this song—a deluge, a blur, a million voices coming at you from every direction, so you aren’t sure what is real and what is a nightmare, what is your fault and what is fate’s. There is no structure, no certainty to this song—it just continues moving with no predictability, no purpose, giving you no indication of a beginning, a middle, or an end.
I’ve learned that everything is temporary, that like this song, it can change out of nowhere and cease without warning.
Brittney Uecker (she/her) is a school librarian and writer living in Great Falls, Montana. Her fiction and poetry can be found in Pithead Chapel, The Bitchin’ K, Taco Bell Quarterly, Long Story Short, HAD, and elsewhere. She’s currently working on a hybrid manuscript about divorce, desire, and the insatiable yearning for attention. She is @bonesandbeer on the internet.