episode 5: Megan Thee Stallion vs. Misogynoir

[00:00:00] CRISTEN:
Welcome to Conspiracy She Wrote, the podcast where Big Sister is always watching. I'm Cristen Conger.

At the end of the last episode, it was early pandemic days. In pop culture news, Beyoncé had teamed up with rapper Megan Thee Stallion for a charity remix of Megan's viral single "Savage." This remix made sense—Beyoncé and Megan Pete, aka Thee Stallion, share a hometown pride for Houston, Texas, where the "Savage Remix" profits were being donated. Megan and Beyoncé are also connected in the music industry since Megan is signed to Roc Nation by Beyoncé's husband, Jay-Z. All of this—the remix and the donation—was on brand for Megan Thee Stallion.

[00:01:33] SIDNEY MADDEN:
I became a fan of her in 2018 when she dropped her Tina Snow mixtape. Young Tina Snow, still hard on the hoe.

[00:01:48] CRISTEN:
Sidney Madden is an NPR music reporter and co-creator and co-host of the Louder Than A Riot podcast.

[00:01:55] SIDNEY MADDEN:
From that mixtape, they started to push a single called "Big Ol' Freak" in 2019. That's when I really, really became a fan of everything Megan was about.

[00:02:30] CRISTEN:
Sidney was the one who booked Megan Thee Stallion's Tiny Desk concert back in October of 2019. It was Megan's first time performing with a live band—not that you could tell.

[00:02:48] CLIP - NPR TINY DESK CONCERT:
Ay, now don't be scared to get ratchet. Ay, turn up, turn up, turn up. Ay, ay, say n***a I don't wanna talk. Meet me at the bank, show me what you got.

[00:03:03] CRISTEN:
Sidney also had excellent timing. After "Big Ol' Freak" came "Hot Girl Summer," and within a year, Megan was bigger than ever. But she was also at the center of a much darker season, and neither her good deeds nor her superior talent could protect her from it.

[00:03:26] SIDNEY MADDEN:
Everyone having a microphone, everyone having a voice, everyone thinking their opinion is a statement of fact, magnified it and exacerbated it in a way that it had never felt before in the hip-hop world. So it was surprising that it happened at all, but what surprised me most is that so many people were loud, vocal, staunch, consistent with this, and really were proud to put this Black woman's reputation on trial in this way and slut-shame her as if that had anything to do with the events of the night.

[00:04:18] CRISTEN:
Grab your red string and follow along.

[00:04:24] SIDNEY MADDEN:
Megan's backstory is really a true hip-hop come-up story. She is the daughter of a rapper. She came from Houston, which is a huge hip-hop city. She was freestyling and doing a lot of grassroots cultivating of her fans while she was in college. It sounds like an oversimplification, but she really just has it, you know? Like a lot of people love to entertain or want to be entertainers, or people can be talented, but you've got to have that—you really do have to have that mixture. You’ve got to have that je ne sais quoi, and she has all the building blocks of a superstar, especially in the hip-hop sense.

For one thing, she can really rap. It sounds like a basic priority or a basic starting point, but a lot of people now in hip-hop and entertainment can't actually do what they market themselves as being able to do. Like, she's really a rapper—from her vocal tone to her delivery, her syncopation, her charisma, her comedic timing. Everything about her raps is just entertaining.

Going back to the Tina Snow mixtape, I remember her being like Uzi in my ear over and over, hitting you over the head with jokes, one-liners, or Instagram captions relevant to the time we live in, and just delivering fire so repeatedly.

[00:05:46] CLIP:
For everything. By me popping face, I got body. You name it, I got it, n***a.

[00:05:55] SIDNEY MADDEN:
And then you see her, and she backs that up. She’s got face, she’s got body, and she truly is popping. I think that's really why she shot up so fast. You can talk about having a cosign, or you can talk about using your sexual agency, or your own body politics, or just, you know, being a baddie. But she also had real skill and real talent to back it up, and she had that perfect mixture of both.

[00:06:22] CRISTEN:
How was her mom instrumental in her early career?

[00:06:27] SIDNEY MADDEN:
Yeah, I mean, her mom instilled it in her very early—that you can be confident, you can be upfront, you don't need to apologize for any portion of who you are, and you can translate all of that confidence into music. Her mom, Holly Thomas, was a Houston-area rapper for a long time. She was always in the studio. She would bring Megan to the studio a lot of times. It was just an automatic career path for Megan—she saw the power, she saw the confidence that her mom had, and she wanted to emulate that still. Having so much exposure to how to make a hip-hop song, how to structure it, how to get it done in a studio very early gave Megan the trajectory and the path to really pursue it.

[00:07:19] CRISTEN:
As she was breaking out and really becoming a household name, how was she received?

[00:07:28] SIDNEY MADDEN:
I would say in 2019, as she's having this wild, fun, meteoric rise, she’s kind of credited with spearheading this female renaissance in rap. A lot of other rappers were coming into prominence around that time—whether it be Flo Milli or Lotto or Doja Cat—but Megan, in her talent, her aesthetic, and her personality, really encapsulated what a hip-hop superstar could be as a woman in the 21st century. Even things like the early cosign with Nicki Minaj and the "Hot Girl Summer" song.

She was truly an “it girl.” Like, a lot of people professed their love for her. She had a lot of male fans who were big rappers that were fans of her. It was like one of those things where every girl wanted to hang out with her, every guy wanted to date her, you know? I interviewed somebody a few years ago, and we talked about Megan a little bit. That rapper, also a woman, said, “She gave head cheerleader but in the best way—like, she wasn’t a mean girl, but everybody gravitated toward her.” She was an “it girl.” There’s even that quote she’s famous for: “If you know you’re that girl, you have no choice but to be that girl,” and that has gone down as one of her biggest.

[00:08:55] CRISTEN:
I know this is an audio medium, but I just have to say how fun it is to see your face light up when you talk about her.

[00:09:02] SIDNEY MADDEN:
I mean, I'm a hottie, like, I’m a fan. I’m a fan. She just infused hip-hop with so much more fun and more room for conversations around what a woman in hip-hop—the space she could occupy—because again, this is Megan. Besides being young, fly, hot, and talented, she was also a college student. She also stood for something, wanting to give back to her city and create assisted living homes in Houston. She was also a big anime nerd, which she was very vocal about and professed a lot. I feel like we got so much more out of her personality than we had in previous iterations of women in hip-hop, specifically because nothing about her felt predestined or manufactured, you know what I mean?

[00:09:56] CRISTEN:
2019 was the year of the stallion, but for Megan the person, the daughter of acclaimed Houston rapper Holly Thomas, 2019 was also a year of loss. In late March, Megan posted a mother-daughter pic from childhood on her Instagram. It was a sepia-toned Holly and a little Megan cheesing for the camera. She was even wearing her signature purple back then. The Instagram caption read, "The best mom in the whole world. The strongest woman on the planet. I can't even put complete sentences together right now. R.I.P. mama."

Holly had died suddenly from brain cancer. Two or so weeks later, Megan's grandmother died as well.

[00:10:55] SIDNEY MADDEN:
Megan did say that she works so hard as a legacy to her own mom, too, because this is what Holly always wanted for her. This is always what her mom saw for her. Every collab, every number one, every brand deal, everything she does is an actualization of the dream that her mom had for her.

[00:11:25] CRISTEN:
This is where we take our first very brief dip into conspiracy land. Later that year, in the fall of 2019, she's signed to Roc Nation, and she responds to a conspiracy theory that her mom's death was a "blood sacrifice" in order for her to join Roc Nation and become in league with Jay-Z. Is it surprising at all that she directly responded to that?

[00:12:00] SIDNEY MADDEN:
Um, I'll say no because Megan at that time was very online, and she seemed to have more time for the haters. She was very active on social media around that time. It didn’t really surprise me that she responded to it.

[00:12:19] CRISTEN:
Was she being singled out in that way, of having such a gross lie lobbed at her, or is this just kind of the territory of being famous?

[00:12:32] SIDNEY MADDEN:
Megan is not the first person to be accused of losing a parent or sacrificing their parent for entry into the Illuminati. And I’m trying to say this with a straight face, truly. But there have been rumors that Kanye West did the same thing when he lost his mom because so much of the pain that he spilled in his music. Some of his most successful albums, and people released conspiracies that he sacrificed his mom for that. I think Jay-Z, as the marquee name who runs Roc Nation management, has always been associated with the Illuminati. Beyoncé has been accused of being associated with the Illuminati because of her marriage and her association with him.

It’s a long-running thread that hip-hop is full of conspiracy theories, whether it’s Tupac being alive still or record labels having inside deals with the prison-industrial complex. There are so many different layers of conspiracies. But I think in Megan’s case, we have to factor in that she was a victim, like I said, ushering in a new era for what it meant to be successful and a woman in hip-hop, running hip-hop as a woman on your own terms without any cosign or a leg up from a prominent man. And I know we’re going to get into this more, but there was a level of misogyny in play with that attack specifically, I think.

[00:14:18] CRISTEN:
Before we move into the summer of 2020, in general, how do you feel about revisiting Megan’s shooting assault and the whole Tory Lanez trial? Because it was a lot.

[00:14:33] SIDNEY MADDEN:
Yeah, I mean, it was a lot. Thank you for asking. But I think this is essential analysis to do often. We can't just let these moments pass by in hip-hop because, to borrow language from Elizabeth Méndez Berry, culture is not static. Culture—you can’t cede this time to culture being one way and being written into the history books as one thing. It needs to be dissected and critiqued in order to have it last another 50 years. You know, with hip-hop celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2023, you need to critique it so that it can be healthy and grow more. And so I think revisiting that time, even though it might be painful for certain parties, is truly essential to renegotiate our own power dynamics and our own preconceived notions that we hold with us when it was all unfolding.

AD BREAK 1

[00:15:55] CLIP - NEWS 1:
Wow. Really dramatic testimony there. And what did Tory’s attorney tell you that their goal was for the cross-examination today? He said, “We’re going to show how she lies.” And you could certainly tell, sitting in that courtroom, that that was their goal.

[00:16:14] SIDNEY MADDEN:
I do remember when we were covering the trial and we were in the courtroom as members of the media. There were a lot of bloggers trying to get in there and live stream immediately—not in the courtroom or in the courthouse, but immediately during all the breaks. It was kind of like, get the information out first and twist it to your will, twist it to your narrative.

[00:16:32] CRISTEN:
We’re back with NPR music reporter and Louder Than a Riot co-creator and co-host Sidney Madden.

[00:16:40] SIDNEY MADDEN:
There were a lot of instances when I was in there, and you would hear testimony, and then you would go out on a break, and this person would be live streaming and interpreting the testimony to whatever their prerogative and what their motive may be. There were people who were aggregating this information and feeding it to their followers, running polls about what do you think is going to happen and monetizing those polls. And it was truly—it felt like a lot of scavengers coming in at the time. That was part of what was so hard to process about this because you can try to be covering it journalistically, but because of the fascination with the details of this case, and depending on what your opinion is on the case, you’re going to go to the source that further entrenches you and your opinion. And a lot of those sources were monetizing that attention.

[00:17:39] CRISTEN:
Let’s rewind. That courthouse circus Sidney is describing was the outcome of what happened in the early hours of Sunday, July 12th, 2020. Megan Thee Stallion had gone to a pool party at Kylie Jenner’s house. Megan and Kylie had recently met on the set of the "WAP" music video. At some point, Megan left in an SUV with Daystar Peterson, who goes by Tory Lanez, and Megan’s then-best friend Kelsey Harris. A little while later, Los Angeles police responded to a disturbance call in a Hollywood Hills neighborhood. Witnesses told the police people were arguing inside an SUV, shots were fired, and the SUV took off. It didn’t get very far, though.

At 4:40 a.m., Tory Lanez was arrested and booked for carrying a concealed weapon. By lunchtime, he’d posted the $35,000 bail and was out of jail. TMZ caught wind of it first. The headline: "Tory Lanez Arrested on Gun Charge, Ends Night Out with Megan Thee Stallion."

[00:19:08] SIDNEY MADDEN:
Earlier in 2020, you know, when we were all inside, her Instagram lives were some of the best free entertainment you got, you know? And then all of a sudden, this news breaks—at first it was she was involved in a shooting, I remember. It was her and Tory Lanez both being involved in a shooting. And then TMZ released a video showing that she was one of the people injured.

[00:19:45] CRISTEN:
Megan had also taken to Instagram to clarify the details about the traumatic night without naming names. She explained that before the LAPD showed up, found Tory Lanez’s gun, and arrested him, she, Megan Thee Stallion, had been shot. Police officers then drove her to the hospital, where she had surgery to remove bullet fragments from her feet. Megan called it a “crime that was committed against me and done with the intention to physically harm me.”

[00:20:21] SIDNEY MADDEN:
And I just remember trying to get facts verified during that time was very difficult to do. People in both artists’ camps closed ranks very, very fast, and a lot of stuff started flying on the internet. A lot of misinformation, a lot of gossip and blogs, and a lot of just ridicule. Like, I remember seeing a lot of memes about a small man running away from a giant or a Bigfoot because Megan is like a—she’s a stallion. She’s a big, beautiful woman. I think she’s over like 5'10" or something like that, and Tory Lanez, compared to her, is just stature-wise smaller. I remember when the details broke that she was injured in her foot, there were a lot of Bigfoot memes and Bigfoot ridicule. And there were even people who were saying it was a lover’s dispute. It was a lover’s quarrel. And people were saying, “Oh, I wish a guy loved me that much that he would shoot me at my feet instead of me walking away from him.”

[00:21:27] CRISTEN:
Meanwhile, "WAP" came out a few weeks later. Cardi B’s single that she’s featured on debuted at number one on the Hot 100, notching yet another career milestone for Megan Thee Stallion. But people wouldn’t shut the fuck up about her foot. In late August, she posted and deleted photos of her injured feet before and after the surgery. She wrote, “I got hit at the back of my feet because when I got shot, I was ALL CAPS walking away facing the back. Why would I lie about getting shot? Why are y’all so upset that I don’t want to be in the bed sad? Why y’all upset that I can walk? I usually don’t address internet bullshit, but y’all people are so sick.”

A day later, Megan was done covering for Tory Lanez while she got devoured. She went live on Instagram and said it: “Tory shot me.”

[00:22:41] SIDNEY MADDEN:
She said, “You shot me. You know you shot me.” And I said whatever I said to the police in order to protect you because, again, you need to think of the backdrop where all this is unfolding, which is just a few months after the world had seen that George Floyd was killed on camera by police. So there was a lot of distrust of the police at that time. 

And as soon as that IG Live went out—I remember that IG Live—she had blue hair, she had her... The ridicule, the way people switched up on her in the hip-hop media space—or I should just say the media personality space—was immediate. It was a recoil. A lot of people cast doubt; a lot of people just slut-shamed her. And the doubt was always laced with vitriol. It was never just doubt that the story was being played out the way that one of them said it was. It was always laced with underlying doubt—just doubt for her in general, doubt for who she is—as if that would justify her being shot at. And that would continue on from 2020 all the way up until the trial in late 2022.

[00:23:55] CRISTEN:
And also, all the while, the case itself was The People versus Tory Lanez. Megan was never on trial.

[00:24:02] SIDNEY MADDEN:
She was never on trial. She didn’t even file against Tory Lanez. But yeah, it felt like there was a campaign to take a Black man down and to victim-blame in the entire process. When, yeah, that’s again the irony of the situation—it was the city of Los Angeles versus Daystar Peterson, aka Tory Lanez. Megan truly did not want to be involved in it a lot of times. You could even see it in the trial. She was very reserved. She was calculated. She was clearly prepared for it, but you could tell with every fiber of her being that she did not want to be there.

[00:24:46] CRISTEN:
Like Sidney said, Megan never pressed charges. On October 8th, 2020, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office charged Daystar Peterson, aka Tory Lanez, with felony assault for the shooting. Then, in early December 2022, he was tried and ultimately convicted on three felony counts: carrying a concealed weapon in a vehicle (that’s the charge that got him arrested), felony assault, and discharging a firearm with gross negligence. The whole time, Lanez’s legal and PR strategy was basically one and the same—Megan made it up. She can’t be trusted. He claimed the slut-shame defense.

[00:25:41] SIDNEY MADDEN:
We interviewed people outside of the courthouse during the trial, and a lot of people said their reasoning for not believing Megan is because she was “low vibrational,” i.e., she was a party girl who liked to twerk and liked to have fun and was very comfortable in her sexual agency. That was their main reason for not believing Megan. Again, these are personal attacks. These are attacks on her personhood, her personality, her reputation. It has nothing to do with the events of the night themselves, but what did surprise me is it’s never been like this before—the sheer force of how many people loudly, vocally, repeatedly came down on her, waiting for a downfall. 

She was the “it girl” in 2019, and the recoil was just so immediate, like people had been waiting for it—people in hip-hop media, in hip-hop spaces—and it was just really hypocritical because we were living in a time of people saying “Black Lives Matter” and “Protect Black Women,” and then how quickly we forget that when it’s a Black woman who maybe turned down a sexual advance of yours or turned down an interview or didn’t want to play by hip-hop’s misogynistic rules that have seemingly been set in stone. How quickly we forget that rhetoric that we really wanted to tote.

Hip-hop doesn’t have a great track record of believing and protecting Black women. You know, the term misogynoir was coined by the sociologist Moya Bailey, and that really is what misogynoir is—it's the attack on you as a Black person, as a Black woman, moving through this world.

[00:27:54] MOYA BAILEY:
There is this overwhelming sense that if you are a Black woman in public, then you should be open to any kind of investigation by anyone who's curious about you and what's going on with you.

[00:28:08] CRISTEN:
Moya Bailey is a communications professor at Northwestern University. Last episode, she connected the dots between Beyoncé conspiracy theories and misogynoir. And since everything is connected in Conspiracyland, Illuminati hip-hop truthers put a predictable spin on Tory Lanez’s felony trial for assaulting Megan Thee Stallion: it was all a Roc Nation setup. He knew too much about Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s evil caballing, so they puppet-mastered Megan Thee Stallion and sicced the Los Angeles DA on him.

[00:29:08] CRISTEN:
Do you see any key similarities or differences in the ways that conspiracy theories and misinformation have come for Megan Thee Stallion versus Beyoncé?

[00:29:18] MOYA BAILEY:
I would say that there are a lot of similarities in the sense that Black women are not believed. So in Meg telling the story of what happened to her, there’s such a level of disbelief that I think we can see mirrored in the way people responded to Beyoncé’s pregnancy with Blue. Whatever you say doesn’t matter because I already have a belief in my mind about what the truth of this issue is. So that’s something that’s similar.

One thing I would say that’s different is that Beyoncé had positioned herself as somebody in, I would say, a different class—social, financial class—than Meg. And so there’s a way that Beyoncé, I think, in some ways, can be protected from some of the more outrageous and slanderous types of misogynoir. And I think that has everything to do with how people are reading the social class of Meg and Beyoncé, particularly at this point in their relative careers, how they were introduced to the world, and how people understand their music.

[00:30:28] CRISTEN:
What is the relationship between class and misogynoir?

[00:30:33] MOYA BAILEY:
Class is such a huge part of misogynoir because so many of the stereotypes that surround Black people are also stereotypes that are built on class grounds as well. It’s not just that we’re thinking about racism—it’s definitely a racism that’s born out of a classed understanding of who Black people are. And this is what we were talking about a little bit when we were talking about the difference in how Megan Thee Stallion is treated versus Beyoncé. There’s a way that Beyoncé’s class privilege protects her from some types of misogynoir—not that she doesn’t experience it.

There’s something about the way that classism remains a topic that we don’t discuss very well in the United States that undergirds misogynoir, and I think people’s desire to perpetuate it if they are in community. So, you know, one thing I think about is Beyoncé’s early Destiny’s Child days, and she had a song "Nasty Girl."

[00:31:51] DESTINY’S CHILD CLIP:
It’s the nastiest, trashiest, sweatiest, classiest, nastiest of the world.

[00:31:57] MOYA BAILEY:
Which to me is a very kind of classist anthem where, you know, Black girls championing a very respectable image, and Beyoncé and the girls of Destiny’s Child are, you know, separating themselves from who they imagine as classless, trashy Black girls. And so one way that misogynoir operates is by doing that push-pull—like, I’m in a position to say that I’m separate and different from these Black women. And so classism becomes its own tool within the community to manage misogynoir by saying, “No, this is really for those Black women over there, not for me.”

[00:32:48] CRISTEN:
It sounds like you have class and then respectability politics and misogynoir.

[00:32:54] MOYA BAILEY:
Absolutely. So if I can, you know, cast this misogynoir to another group, then I am somehow protected, and then that’s not me, that’s not mine. But unfortunately, that separation, that distinction, doesn’t really exist. And we can see how everyone is really dealing with the realities of an oppressive system, even when they think that class is the thing that will kind of move them out of this denigrated category. And that’s one of the things that I think is so important about thinking about conspiracies and some of these issues, is that they do have material consequences. They do impact the way that people are able to move through the world.

[00:33:52] CRISTEN:
What kind of material consequences do you think it has had for Megan Thee Stallion?

[00:33:57] MOYA BAILEY:
I think that Megan Thee Stallion has a real challenge to deal with when it comes to misogynoir because, in some ways, Meg is also not protected. She’s positioned as somebody who is kind of this quintessential caricature of Black women—as hypersexual, as somebody who is not making choices that people think are appropriate. There’s a bit of respectability that Beyoncé is afforded because of her husband and her kids, etc., that Meg is not afforded. And to me, that’s its own manifestation of misogynoir—this idea that being a single Black woman, or a Black woman who’s very in touch with her sexuality in certain ways, but a sexuality that again isn’t tied to the safety and sanctity of heteronormative, you know, long-term relationships makes Meg a threat in a way.

[00:35:11] SIDNEY MADDEN:
Women in hip-hop have been pushed into or have been convinced that they need to occupy certain roles in order to be successful. You can see it as soon as—as soon as you step out—and I’m saying you as the rapper—as soon as you, as the rapper, the artist, the creative, step out of the box that you’ve been put in, you are vilified for it. And in some cases, you are disciplined for it. And in some cases, you are pushed out of the industry completely for it.

So Megan was clearly upfront, forward-facing. She was very strong, and she did not let misogynoir kill her because she said during her testimony there were many times when she was seeing these things written online about herself or about the details of this. People didn’t understand, at some points denying or doubting that she was even shot. That was also another point that was seeded by Tory’s defense throughout the course of the trial, like if she was even shot at all. When doctors came in and testified and showed the jury and people in the gallery X-rays of the bullet fragments in her feet, in her body, it’s just always about control. It’s about power. And Megan, as a very powerful woman in hip-hop, it felt—I don’t want to overgeneralize—but a lot of the time, it felt like, “Nah, we need to knock her down a peg—her too. She thinks she’s too hot, and this is what she gets” type of vibe.

[00:36:45] CRISTEN:
What do you make of Black women who kind of rooted for Tory Lanez and also kind of piled on against Megan, calling her a liar?

[00:36:59] MOYA BAILEY:
Yeah, I mean, you know, internalized sexism, internalized misogynoir is not new. I think that’s one of the key points about patriarchy—you don’t need a man for patriarchy to exist and for those ideas to actually move forward. And unfortunately, I think we have to start to think about the way society sets people up with these ideas that really give men a lot of freedom and always then end up passing the blame back to the person who was harmed. It’s much easier to blame Megan Thee Stallion for whatever happened between her and Tory Lanez, even though he is the one who shot her—it’s much easier to put that blame on her than to think about all of the ways that society really creates a situation where women aren’t believed, where men are told and taught that kind of their only recourse, the only emotions that they have access to are anger and rage. Those are acceptable emotions for men. So I do think that we have learned to blame the victim, and society really has to shift for us to get out of that particular pattern.

AD BREAK 2

[00:38:50] SIDNEY MADDEN:
Yes, hip-hop was created as an art form and culture and a liberatory source for Black people, right? But as it became more and more commodified—really, since the beginning—it also perpetuated a lot of the patriarchal, misogynistic, white supremacist ideals that our society really just runs on in so many overt and covert ways.

[00:39:20] CRISTEN:
We’re back with NPR’s Sidney Madden. She’s also the co-creator and co-host of the podcast Louder Than a Riot.

[00:39:28] SIDNEY MADDEN:
The shooting occurred in 2020, which is when we were actually finishing up episodes for season one of Louder Than a Riot. And season one was all about hip-hop’s connection to the carceral state and the criminal justice system and perceived criminality. In season two, we knew we didn’t want to continue on that theme because we didn’t want to perpetuate this idea of a connection of criminality with the art form and the culture. We saw this shooting and everything that happened in the aftermath as a turning point in hip-hop. And then we saw it as the way in to talk about the broader historical and contemporary power imbalance in hip-hop when it comes to misogynoir, when it comes to the racist sexism that’s compounded against Black women in this culture—even though Black women have very much been the architects of this culture and at present are creating the most exciting and forward-thinking visionary art from the culture.

[00:40:34] CRISTEN:
In August 2022, Megan Thee Stallion released her second studio album Traumazine. The Tory Lanez trial was still three months out at that point. Sidney says Traumazine is an apt album title that you can hear the pain Megan is trying to process in her music—pain from the assault, the disbelief, the mockery. And maybe most of all, the pain of going through it without her mom and grandmother. But overall, Traumazine sounds a little rushed, disjointed. Megan was emotionally raw and ready to get the People vs. Daystar Peterson way the fuck behind her.

[00:41:32] SIDNEY MADDEN:
The trial became the climax of all of this—really like a sociological phenomenon that was propelled by social media and hip-hop media at the time, but it became the jumping-off point for the season to cover all the ways in which hip-hop has perpetuated inequality and inequity when it’s—like I said, ironically—it was created to be liberated from all these social ills that bear down on Black people, but at the same time, now, as it’s a capitalist force, it perpetuates a lot of that.

And each episode we kind of fashioned it around a commandment—that, you know, it’s, if you’re a Black woman or a woman of color coming into hip-hop and you want to be successful, these are the rules you have to play by. These are the commandments you need to follow. So for Megan’s episode, we fashioned the rule of “Being exceptional doesn’t make you the exception.” Meaning you can be the hottest rapper out, you can be the it girl, you can be a millionaire, popular, you can fit into the mold of what a cishet Black male fantasy might be, you can be a highly skilled tactical lyricist—but don’t think you’re better, and you’re exempt from the prejudicial practices of this culture at this point.

[00:42:54] CLIP - HISS:
I just want to kick this shit off by saying fuck y’all. I ain’t gotta clear my name on a motherfucking thing. Every time I get mentioned, one of y’all bitch-ass niggas gets 24 hours of attention. I’m gonna get this shit off my chest and lay it to rest. Let’s go. Let’s go.

[00:43:07] CRISTEN:
In late January 2024, Meg released yet another number one debut with “Hiss.” It’s the first single from her third album that could drop any day now. Sidney says that compared to Traumazine, Megan the person sounds worlds away on Hiss in a good way.

[00:43:31] SIDNEY MADDEN:
For one thing, Megan is getting back into her alter ego that really, you know, popped her off—Tina Snow. Going back all the way to 2018, that tape was just a bombshell in the music industry, in the hip-hop world. And she’s rapping—she feels more clear-eyed, level-headed, and truly ready to close the chapter of what all this trauma has done to her—the trauma of the shooting and the trial itself—and ready to put all the haters to rest. Truly close this era so she can go back to being the artist that so many people were introduced to and loved in 2017, 2018, 2019.

And I think this is the first single off of her new album that’s still forthcoming. I don’t think we have a date on it, but it already feels so much more poignant, pointed, and just clear-eyed. It feels like she has a vision again, and that’s what I’m really excited for.

[00:44:47] CRISTEN:
You mentioned that hip-hop is really rooted in liberation, and you described Hiss as pointed and clear-eyed. Do you hear some liberation, a little bit of liberatory spirit, in Hiss as well?

[00:45:08] SIDNEY MADDEN:
That’s a good question because in Hiss she really is addressing the large swath of haters who’ve doubted her, come for her, not done deals with her, dropped subliminals against her. But I don’t—I feel like she needs to just say her piece in order to be liberated from it. So I don’t know if it’s full liberation—it’s definitely a step to it, but I don’t know if she feels fully freed from this narrative yet. I think time will tell.

I do feel that as a person, she should be allowed to move on, although I understand people’s curiosity, maybe bordering on obsession, of still asking her about it. But I would love to have a life story of Megan Thee Stallion where I look back on it in 10, 15, 20 years and that’s not the brightest highlight of her life and her career. That might take some time, but I do think as a community, we’re seeing how thinly veiled those jabs are. We can take Nicki Minaj, for example, and Nicki Minaj dropped that diss to her. People were like, “Okay, so you’re really making fun of her being shot and then surviving and having the strength to move on from it.” We’re still talking about her, but the crux of the conversation is not about this traumatic event.

[00:46:45] CRISTEN:
Well, is there anything else that we have not covered, or that I haven’t asked you about—Megan, hip-hop, conspiracy theories—anything that you want to make sure listeners know?

[00:46:58] SIDNEY MADDEN:
Black women in hip-hop, as they are in many spaces, are so much the backbone of the longevity of what this does as an art form, as a societal predictor, as a culture, as an American export. And so I just truly hope that in examining all this, we’re also celebrating everything that Megan has done, everything that she’s continuing to do, everything that women in hip-hop are continuing to do. Because we’re the future, and like I said, if you know you’re that girl, you have no choice but to be that girl. Period.

. . .

[00:47:42] CRISTEN:
And you have no choice but to listen to Louder Than a Riot. Thank you so much to Sidney Madden. You can follow her on all social platforms at @sidmadden. And if you want more Megan Thee Stallion, you should listen to her 2019 NPR Tiny Desk concert that Sidney booked. 

Huge thanks to Moya Bailey as well. And guess what? We’re not quite ready to say goodbye to Moya because there is still some misogynoir left to unpack.

Conspiracy She Wrote is an Unladylike Media production. It’s executive produced, written, and hosted by me, Cristen Conger. Lushik Lotus-Lee is our producer, music is from Blue Dot Sessions, and our theme is RGift by Tarana.

Coming up next time: we’re going from Megan Thee Stallion to Megan the Duchess, and the royally rabid conspiracy community that makes Beyoncé pregnancy truthers look polite in comparison.

[00:48:59] CLIP - ELLIE HALL:
Really, we start seeing the tinfoil hat conspiracy theory stuff when she got pregnant because almost immediately, this theory started that she was faking her pregnancy, and this was based on people literally going frame by frame, looking at her stomach, looking at pictures of her stomach, looking at videos of her stomach, and saying that it was a moon bump—that she was wearing a prosthetic belly.