Second round

(3) Destiny's Child, “Bootylicious”
set right
(11) Jennifer Lopez, “Get Right”
214-73
and will play in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie at the end of regulation, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/13/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)

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.

DEANNE BATTLE ON “GET RIGHT” BY JENNIFER LOPEZ

Dance floor, now. It’s an emergency. The horns direct you with a giddy urgency. Loop. Slick and infectious—Jennifer’s voice almost inscrutable over the audacious arrangement.  
2005. The funk of a newly minted college grad still wafts off of me. The world lets me pretend I know things. During these days, I dress in business casual and shove a cute, sparkling top in my purse. This is New York: practical, sexy, and ready for an afterwork happenstance. With a degree on my wall, sequin-top in my tote, and cash in my pocket, anything is possible. In 2005, I run into people I know, randomly, regularly, on the street. “Rise & grind” isn’t part of my vocabulary, but I could identify it in a lineup. This first job is a rite of passage. I’ll figure IT out. I’ll make my mark.
The first time I heard Jennifer Lopez’s “Get Right” I was walking by The Iguana. 
So we rarely made it inside The Iguana. The midtown lounge had a Latin menu and playlist; all YOU needed was the will to be saved…and maybe an “in” with the bouncer. We joked about it being a type of sweat lodge to detoxify yourself from over fifty hours a week of repression. This time—way before the masks arrive, but only a blink since the towers fell—is ours. That’s how it feels.
Inside The Iguana, gyrations and steam build up; inevitably, a patron emerges for fresh air. Dabbing at clumps of wet hair. Fanning the combustion away from its source. Their perspiration scorches the sky in white bursts before they return to their pleasure cave. Loop. Alas. The Iguana is at overcapacity by about 6:15pm. Nevertheless, you can stand outside and listen to the DJ spin.

“So much we’ve got to say but so little time/And if tonight ain’t long enough, don’t leave love behind…”

“Get Right” is an invitation. Defined as: getting drunk or high, doing something accurately or correctly, or doing something that puts you in the “right” mood. Loop.
“I'm about to fill your cup, so we can get right/Before the night is up, we can get right, tonight”. The dance floor is your vision board.
Don’t you want to escape? Jennifer beckons. At her best, Lopez represents the fiercest and most ambitious aspects of a New Yorker’s soul. I’m in your face. I look damn good. Whatcha gonna do? Some might argue, she’s limited talent-wise. Who knew a humble, “vaguely Mediterranean (let Hollywood tell it)” girl from the Bronx could get so funky? Watch the video for the cane sequence alone. This is a song with goals and intentions. 
“Soul Power” was the original groove by James Brown and the J.B.s; however, Rich Harrison does the right amount of zhuzhing so the new song stands on its own. His production peacocks on this track. The saxophone tugs you in one direction, and the horns will get you dipping it low. Moreover, two of Harrison’s previous successes, Amerie’s “One Thing,” and Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” ensure you’ll experience at least one booty quake before it’s time for a fresh Mojito.
“Get Right” is a great dance song. It reminds me that bravado and repetition of ritual can be fun when you find your loop.

Deanne Battle is a writer and teacher who divides her time between Philadelphia and New York City.