Cardi B ft. Megan Thee Stallion – ‘WAP’

28 August 2020

A warm welcome to any of you who don’t know what the title stands for. I’ll give you a minute to look it up. [A minute later] Welcome back.

There’s a long lineage of bawdy chart-toppers from male rap acts—my mind summons up The Outhere Brothers—so an all-female duet doing likewise is progress of a kind. Come to think of it, most pop and rock songs in history have been about men getting their way with women, often then dismissing them as no-good little girls or whatever. In that light, two strong women rapping about their wants and appetites, with spicy language, shouldn’t be a big deal. I suspect the people who may have got het up about ‘WAP’ would also be the same people disgruntled at tampon ads on TV.

Aside from it serving up plenty of overdue chart-topping female attitude and pissing off the right people, I wouldn’t make too many other big-talk claims about ‘WAP’. There’s a fine line between trap minimalism and nothing happening at all, and ‘WAP’ as a piece of music feels particularly meagre. Also, Megan Thee Stallion covered a lot of this ground only a couple of months earlier with her sensational ‘Savage’—the best single of 2020—so by comparison ‘WAP’ is a lesser artefact. True, her and Cardi B come across as strong, independent women beside the puerile juvenalia of The Outhere Brothers, but ‘WAP’ is still a bit of an anti-climax.