Cover art for “Anaconda” single.

2014 has been proclaimed the year of the booty. This is, in part, due to the onslaught of butt songs, like “Booty” by J. Lo and Iggy Azalea, “Wiggle” by Jason Derulo and Snoop Dogg, and “All About that Bass” by Meghan Trainor. Even “Shake It Off” by Taylor Swift seems to be about shaking your rump, as a cast of multicultural characters join Swift in shaking it through the video.

One of the most popular songs is “Anaconda,” by Nicki Minaj. As you can see in the cover art for the single, she is squatting down in a thong, bra and some blue Air Jordan’s, looking over her shoulder and inviting the male gaze in a textbook example of to-be-looked-at-ness. The “Parental Advisory” label on her rump centers our focus on her derriere, a visual symbol of this song’s central motif: Minaj’s butt. “Anaconda” is an homage to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s 1992 song “Baby Got Back,” and samples Mix-A-Lot’s lyric, “My anaconda don’t want none unless you got buns, hun” as part of her chorus. Let’s forget that the music video presents a visual montage of Minaj’s butt from many angles to demonstrate that indeed, she does have “buns.” Minaj tells us through this song that the men she encounters and pleases with her sexual prowess can tell “I ain’t missing no meals,” that they “love this fat ass,” and dedicates this song to “my bitches with a fat ass in the fucking club.” She then dismisses slim ladies with the anthem “Fuck the skinny bitches! Fuck the skinny bitches in the club!” Beyond these lyrics, the synthesized bass line, also sampled from “Baby Got Back” works as an aural keynote that connotes the booty throughout this song.

“Anaconda” and “Baby Got Back” are two examples of the plethora of songs about ladies’ behinds. Popular music has been explicitly telling “Fat Bottomed Girls” to “Shake Shake Shake” Their Booties since at least the 1970s. Looking at lists like VH1’s Booty Booty Booty: 15 Greatest Songs About Butts, Buzzfeeds’ 10 Of The Best Songs About Butts or Shape Magazine’s list of Booty Tunes: 10 Tracks to Get Your Rear in Gear, there is a lot of butt music out there. Trace Adkins country song “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” reminds us that white people like booties too. For the most part, however, booty songs are hip-hop songs performed by male artists. Which brings me to the racialized and gendered nature of booty music.

Sarah Baartman on display in London.

Singing about butts is culturally significant, and exoticizing the bodies of women of color dates back centuries. African woman Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman was exhibited in London and France as the “Hottentot Venus” in the early 1800s. She was dressed in minimal tribal garb that emphasized her “primitive” background and distinct physical features, but most specifically on display was her bottom. Baartman’s exhibition functioned to reinforce cultural ideas of racial difference between Caucasians and Africans, as well as a gendered-racial hierarchy in which blackness became articulated with the body, primitivism, and hypersexuality.

The exoticization and fetishization of non-white female bottoms is thus nothing new. However, songs like LL Cool J’s 1989 “Big Ole Butt,” or Mos Def’s 1999 “Ms. Fat Booty” are not cut-and-dry misogynistic objectification. In many ways, these songs reject hegemonic white beauty standards and celebrate the beauty of African American women. Take, for instance, the way Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” begins with the irritating  white valley girls criticizing a black women. The song uses this as as spring board to lampoon and dismiss white beauty ideals, mocking Cosmo and pop stars like Madonna.  Mix-A-Lot tells us “You can have them bimbos, I’ll keep my women like Flo Jo. A word to the thick soul sisters, I wanna get with ya.” However, inherent in many booty songs is also an unequal power dynamic between the men performing and the women on display. In most booty songs by male artists, they describe what they want in a woman – a fat ass, bubble butt, bedonkadonk, dumps like a truck– and what they want women do with their body. This results in commands like “wiggle wiggle,” “shake ya ass,” “get that thing jiggling,” and more. Here then, male booty songs dismember and define women through their butts, and they become erotic objects that are exulted, while also being evaluated, judged, and subjugated.

Is it then empowering when female artists like Trainor and Minaj sing about their own butts? When Destiny’s Child tells an assumed male spectator that he is “not ready for this jelly” in the song “Bootylicious,” are they exerting female strength? Is it a feminist act for Fergie to sing about her “humps?” Maybe. I cannot watch Minaj’s “Anaconda” and not be overcome by both the strength of her aggression and confidence, along with her sexual objectification. Trainor sings of her body and her “base” as a non-conformist symbol of defiance against the hyper-thin photoshopped beauty ideals we see in fashion magazines, and in this sense her song pushes back against mainstream beauty ideals. However, overall, these songs still define women by their beauty and ability to attract a man within the boundaries of a heterosexual relationship. I am also conflicted whether or not Meghan Trainor’s song “I’m All About That Bass” culturally appropriates the butt from women of color, especially given the way she uses colloquial terms like boom-boom, and junk. I think her vocal performance also conjures blackness through the timbre and pitch of her voice. Is it cultural appropriation for white women to sing about their booties when this association between non-whiteness, butts, and hypersexuality is itself rooted in racist, colonial practices and discourses of racial difference? What do you think, dear reader? Post below. Whatever your thoughts, I hope this post reminds us that, while it may be “the year of the booty,” booty music is a site of complex and ambivalent discourses about social power.

What does Madonna’s half-time performance mean? It might mean progress. That a female pop singer with a decades-long career is at the center of such masculinist spectacle instead of a big-tent rock band is still worth mention. Of course, we’ve seen pop stars play the half-time show. Britney Spears, N*Sync, rapper Nelly, and R&B singer Mary J. Blige performed with Aerosmith for Super Bowl XXXV, though I find it upsetting that “Walk This Way”—a song Rick Rubin pushed on Run DMC—is still deployed as an anthem for generic intermingling. But Super Bowl XLVI began with Kelly Clarkson belting the national anthem, which suggested that female entertainers’ presence on the stage was welcome and not noteworthy unto itself.

Madonna isn’t even the lone viable female performer, or at least not the only substitute for Janet Jackson. Björk might be too much of a niche artist, but she has no problem captivating Stephen Colbert’s audience or delivering a riveting performance at the Olympics. If Beyoncé weren’t on maternity leave, she’d strap on gold shoulder pads and charge the field with her all-female band. Women dominate pop music. A number of them project Madonna’s sense of drive and self-possession, which may better reflect of the spirit of athletic achievement than a group of guitar-slinging white dudes. Pete Townsend doesn’t know how to be a star like Tom Brady does, but Madonna either wrote the playbook or stole it.

But what is Madonna’s performance about? Her dense semiotic play always makes that question too daunting to answer. I have no idea why “World Peace” was displayed in lights at the end of her performance, though it contradicts the gladiator regalia, which is entirely in keeping with Madonna’s politics. I recognize that performing “Like a Prayer” was a loaded moment, but only if you knew that her Pepsi ad was pulled from the Super Bowl because of the song’s supposedly blasphemous music video. But I liked seeing her dance with an army of warrior women, many of whom were women of color. I liked seeing her crack wise with her queer-coded male dancers. I liked seeing her stick her tongue out with (at?) LMFAO. And I especially liked seeing her fumble a dance step on a set of bleachers and strut past the moment in stiletto boots like it was nothing.

Yet I have trouble working through Madonna’s collaboration with Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. on “Gimme All Your Lovin,” the lead single off her forth-coming album MDNA. To some extent, including these transnational pop stars—Minaj is from Queens by way of Trinidad, M.I.A. grew up in England and is of Sri Lankan descent—helps destabilize the notion of a home team. This was further illustrated by the rappers’ uneasy pairing of cheerleading uniforms with ethnic headdresses. As a football non-fan, I didn’t see as strong a sense of regional pride that I saw mobilize around the Saints and the Packers in previous years. Neither Eli Manning nor Tom Brady seems to represent their teams’ geographic location so much as function as tradable branded commodities.

Ultimately, I encounter the same problem that bell hooks articulates in her 1992 essay “Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister”. I want to read Minaj and M.I.A.’s participation as progressive and recognize their agency in this participation. But Madonna’s model of liberal feminism so centralizes the blonde white woman who profits from patriarchal power while two female rappers of color hold pom poms for her. This is especially surprising, given Minaj’s fascinating vocal play and “sea-parting” cameo in Kanye West’s “Monster”.

M.I.A. is also a scene stealer. Her confrontationally pregnant Grammy performance with West, T.I., Jay-Z, and Lil Wayne still feels revolutionary to me. As a fan, I’m fascinated and troubled by how negative reception of her subaltern signification intensifies as she gets further away from an imagined Sri Lanka. What is she getting at with the video to “Bad Girls”? Is it a response to Beyoncé’s “(Girls) Who Run the World” refracted through the ugly American Orientalist materialism that sunk Sex and the City 2 and reframed by the women the film condescends against? Maybe.

However, I did like that Madonna performed with Cee-Lo instead of simply providing a platform for him. Yet I wonder whose performance  we were watching. M.I.A. prompted NBC and the NFL to speak out against her for raising her middle finger. Flipping the bird may have been an empty gesture, especially after she apologized for it. But what is perhaps even more telling is that Madonna hasn’t responded.