In "Papi Pacify", the video that introduced FKA twigs to the wider world, the British pop star stares into the camera as a man (a lover, it should be said) pries his fingers into her gaping mouth. The hook is a moan: "Mmm, papi pacify." The lyrics are about the tension of desire, but the mise en scene is power. On the cover of her third EP M3LL155X, twigs echoes this gesture, staring at us as her own hand merges into her face. Once again, her gaze is discomfiting and impossible not to return. A glassy-voiced singer refracting melody through diffuse electronic beats, twigs takes the familiar R&B star as her avatar, but her presentation is more complex: her ideas mar beauty and mine power, and exalt sex without exotifying.
She develops these ideas further on M3LL155X, a five-song EP accompanied by a 16-minute music video/film that dropped last week, just over a year after the release of twigs' high profile debut, LP1. As a creative package the EP is unimpeachable; a high-concept, intellectually curious project that's evocative, accessible and transgressive enough to satisfy the competing demands of a newly broadened fanbase and her existing audience of Tumblr-educated aesthetes. M3LL155X (pronounced 'Melissa') builds on her previous work, exploring ideas of dominance and submission and drilling down almost completely into the self.
Instead of obfuscating her soft voice with layers of effects or singing in that cartoonishly frail and breathy falsetto, twigs prowls confidently over M3LL155X. The opening track "Figure 8" rumbles, shudders, whirrs and clicks like most of LP1, but her voice is clearer than ever. Over modular synth patches and a fluid wheeze of artificial strings on "In Time", she tests her brawniest delivery yet: "Every day, every day, you be testing my sane, you've got a goddamned nerve." When there are vocal effects, they're sinister instead of sweet, as if she's haunted by her own thoughts. That's the rub behind a seemingly submissive song like "I'm Your Doll", an angsty love song written by her pre-woke teenage self that twigs repurposes for adulthood."I just want [for] you to love you," she implores, as a reminder, on the garage-meets-gagging dancefloor missive "Glass & Patron." M3LL155X — like Sasha Fierce or Zadie Smith — isn't interested in vulnerability.
In the video for "Figure 8", a song about life and birth, twigs uses a prosthesis to appear pregnant, stepping and spinning while clutching her belly. The title of the track, produced with Beyonce's Beyoncé ace Boots, is derived from the detailed handwork voguers use to frame their faces as they dance, as twigs explained in an interview with Complex. Voguing, like the ballroom culture that birthed the dance style, has been a way for gay men and queer people of colour to aggressively reclaim their bodies, cycling back into twigs' ideas about rebirth.
What lyrics might not make explicit, her videos and movement do: illuminating the multifarious ways in which a woman — a black woman — understands and owns her body, sexuality and creativity. The film accompanying M3LL155X opens on the wrinkled, smiling face of restaurateur and creative icon Michèle Lamy, who is tattooed, older and unbothered, and the muse and partner to fashion designer Rick Owens. Later, twigs moves through vignettes that show her as a sex doll, seductress, pregnant, in the club with her girls, being watched by a man as she dances solo to trembling down a runway with a crew of voguers. The mood flips between the skin-crawling sci-fi of Jonathan Glazer's succubus film Under The Skin and the bubblegum spunk of early '00s girl groups like 3LW and Cleopatra.
What twigs is interested in, above all, is mastery. Her idea of mastery involves ownership of her craft, but is mindfully tempered with the knowledge that she is one of many voices. twigs appears to understand that mainstream culture pins her as artist zero for voguing (and baby hairs) and she counters cultural myopia by continually naming her teachers and collaborators: Wet Wipez, Benjamin Milan, Derek Prodigy. She maintains co-producer credits on her tracks (although, as MIA, Bjork and Missy Elliott have noted of their work, credit often goes to the men who produce with her, like Tic and Arca). For some, it matters profoundly that twigs centers black men in her videos. We increasingly see twigs behind the camera as director as well (in additionto many of her recent videos, she developed that crazy piece for Google Glass as well).
All of which is to say that the EP takes the ur-feminist mantra of "the personal is political" as a starting point. Indeed, after the tiresome reams of "is she or isn't she?" thinkpieces dissecting Beyoncé, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Taylor Swift and other figures that commodify feminist rhetoric, twigs makes the strongest case for the feminist pop star proper, standing up (for now) to the checklist scrutiny of "ur fav is problematic" culture. Role models aren't universal, but if we need a feminist pop star, then twigs is it.
