Not to bypass the obvious—this review eventually ends up there, volitionally—but what if this trax isn’t about booty pluralism? It’s about a confidence in the reality of things (no Photoshop, please). And a kind of self-assertion premised on excessively gratifying your lover just through sheer embodiment. (The politics of the self and active debasement are fascinating here, though too mutualistic to serve any political purpose.) It’s also concerned with how to voice the lower end from those with lower ends. In a way, Trainor inverts the “lower frequencies” of Ralph Ellison by removing the dread implications (for the listener) of really letting (it) go. With 50s homage, things may be too clean here (or to hear). Q-Tip, on The Low-End Theory, would say that successful communication needs “floss” to get to “the grit and the dirt.” Maybe that’s the difference between transformation and (white or self-?)adulation: the desire to get shitty about it. A thong through it all, then, splitting the muck of the center.

 

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