Video Girl

I saw FKA Twigs perform at the Kings Theater in Flatbush in 2019. She was midway through her Magdalene tour and at a peak of her success so far. The show is like a fever dream to me, she fenced, she pole danced, she sang “Mirrored Heart” and cried real tears on stage, her voice cracking in places. I cried too. I had been a devoted fan of hers for six years then. 

It’s been a decade now. My coming of age decade, my longest running love affair. I still listen to the first EPs regularly, which are still among my favorites of her music. Watching her music videos, I found fluidity in my body, learned how to really dance. She’s a consummate performer. Trained as a dancer, growing up in London clubs, the daughter of a costume designer who has helped create her looks, she learned to do a lot with a little. Although she is exceptionally creative and retains an unusual amount of direction and control over her projects, she has often been relegated in the popular imagination to Robert Pattinson’s ex, to a weird Tumblr girl artist, to a sort of British Grimes.

I came to her music as a sad and alienated girl in my late teens, and I found her specific mystique incredibly compelling. Her form of sexiness made sense to me, felt like a meaningful blueprint for self-expression. It was both fragile and imposing, airy and experimental, explored the darker seams of power dynamics. In the video for “Papi Pacify” (a song released in 2013 and produced by Arca) she grinds in a slow embrace with a man who gags and chokes her before emerging covered in glitter midway through. In the short film for M3LL155X, her 2015 EP (pronounced Melissa), she appears with the body of a blow-up doll while a man has sex with her. Later on she gives birth to streams of mesh and dancers, reclaiming her power. In “Pendulum,” she hangs suspended by her own braids, tied around her in an intricate form of bondage. The videos were received with apprehension. Mainly because they lean into ambiguous space, the perceived conflation of submissiveness with passivity, of desirability with objectification, of femininity with helplessness. When Twigs suggested in an interview about “Papi Pacify” that emotional abuse could feel “tender” and “sexy,” she was widely condemned for glamorizing abuse. In the full quote, she goes on to say: “That’s why it’s messed up. If you are in an emotionally abusive relationship, it can be tender, that’s why you stay. And you stay because there’s a poorly part of your mind that likes it.” Although this is a fairly common idea and a large part of how abuse and grooming function, headlines grabbed onto the idea of abuse as tenderness and castigated her.

This was the early 2010s, corrosive, repressed, confused.  When Rihanna released Loud in 2010, The BBC reviewed it caustically, writing of “S&M”, “Since when was ‘flirtatious’ synonymous with sadomasochistic? [...] Similarly, her insistence that "I like it rough" on the comparatively restrained Skin can’t help but come across a little uncomfortable in the light of her personal history.” They were referring to her publicly documented history of physical and emotional abuse by Chris Brown, who had beaten her and threatened to kill her numerous times. By all measures, Rihanna wasn’t playing the victim right. A recent series of think pieces about rewatching Girls have suggested that it may look very in the current cultural climate than it did when it was released. But I wonder how much that’s true. Interviewed about Girls in 2012, Lena Dunham said of Adam and Hannah’s role play: "It's definitely going to evoke the feeling like, 'Why is this self-respecting woman doing this, and if so, is she a self-respecting woman?'” The girls of Girls, like the Sex and the City women, were ultimately punished for their lack of self-respect in a series of downward character arcs. They absolutely hate to see a girl winning. 

A lot of the scrutiny Twigs received at that time in her career had to do with her relationship with Robert Pattinson. In her niche corner of alternative art pop, she wasn’t particularly controversial. But as Rob’s girlfriend, she was both targeted with horrifying racist abuse and also became the subject of probing and tawdry gossip in the media. A 2015 piece in The Cut, filed under “Celebrerotica,” speculated about the couple’s sexual practices. Tabloid pieces detailed Twigs’s “racy” performances and questioned why Rob would tolerate them. Within a culture unforgiving to alternative expressions of women’s sexuality, and particularly to Black women, the vortex of Twilight fandom was especially vicious. I have already written about how Fifty Shades of Grey makes Twilight’s fairytale purity narrative explicit. Bella is able to redeem Edward through her own bodily sacrifice of nearly dying in childbirth. Anastasia endures Christian Grey’s deviant sexual preferences until she successfully reforms him into a marrying man who can love her tender. In this context, Twigs’s use of BDSM aesthetics, her unfettered exploration of sexuality, the fact that she was manifestly cooler and more creative than Rob, as well as being a Black woman, was particularly threatening to the social order. 

Rob briefly doubled down on his new image before reforming. In a 2014 Dior Homme ad, he chokes Camille Rowe in an elevator. He chose his own parts in arthouse films and gained a reputation as a serious actor with an edge. He started dressing better. It is notable that Twigs released almost no music over the course of their relationship. Magdalene, written after they broke up, feels like a project bursting with the inspiration of years of self-doubt and struggle. The album takes direct shape from the story of Mary Magdalene and plumbs the depths of feminine interiority and power, the damage of being loved poorly and insufficiently. In an interview with NPR about Magdalene, Twigs described exploring “the concept of the virgin-whore, which is the idea that, as a woman, you can be pure, and you can be innocent, and you can be like a fresh flower — but at the same time, you can be dangerous, and seductive, and all-knowing and healing.” So to reduce Magdalene, which is very conceptual, to a breakup album is a mistake, but the “Didn’t I do it for you?” of “Cellophane” or “Did you truly see me? No, not this time” of “Mirrored Heart” express inarguable emotional devastation.

In light of all of this, it is particularly courageous that Twigs has filed a lawsuit against her ex-boyfriend Shia LaBoeuf, citing emotional and physical abuse. Rayne Fisher-Quann called the extreme eruption of misogyny around the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial “a cosmic punishment rained down from every aspect of the patriarchal establishment [...] to serve as a looming warning to every woman who might be considering doing the same.” Fisher-Quann pointed out, as others have, that the expectation of perfect victimhood which the mainstream feminist movement and court system has by and large accepted is a vanishing target. And Twigs has always been an unruly woman, too liberated overall, but also too vulnerable, willing to explore softness. After the details of her lawsuit were announced, a popular right-wing podcast host mocked her as a “clout chaser” with “BPD energy.” “ One can only assume,” wrote Heven Haile in i-D, “she [the podcaster] felt comfortable making these cruel remarks because Black women are not afforded the same vulnerability that white women are able to capitalize on.”

In her most recent mixtape, Caprisongs, Twigs is mostly lighthearted, mingling recorded snippets of her friends talking with appearances by The Weeknd, Shygirl, and Rema, among others. The series of low-budget videos she self-released to accompany the album also feel celebratory, of accomplishment, of love, of community, of her physical capacity for movement (she underwent surgery in 2017 for massive fibroid tumors). In the video for “Oh My Love,” her nail tech coaches her in self-confidence, while applying her bedazzled, talon-like acrylics: “Fuck crying over these stupid boys,” says the nail tech, “That don't even recognize the worth in themselves [...] I wish you could see in you what I see in you / What everyone sees in you, because / That's the golden stuff right there / And these are your golden years so, have fun.” 

I hope she is. She launched her new relationship, with artist Jordan Hemingway, on Instagram in early March with a screenshot of a Daily Mail article asking for tips to identify her “mystery man.” the whole of my career i’ve been hunted for who i am dating, wrote Twigs in her caption, so this time i’m pipping you to the post and taking control of the situation. his name is @jordan_hemingway, a beautiful artist whose heart has restored my faith in love. 

With the unwind of alternative aesthetics into an ugly resistance of “cringe,” the uplift and joy of Twigs’ recent projects are refreshing, even if I’m nostalgic for her early work. A recent  incredibly pointless Flash Art essay about the rise of the “based it girl” suggested that there isn’t “much shared conformity left to rebel against.” Grimes posed with a copy of The Communist Manifesto, mocking those who criticized her relationship with right wing tech billionaire Elon Musk.

Is there a lack of shared conformity? All I see all around these days is a sea of ideological consensus, an incredibly impoverished culture, a fear of sincerity, of earnestness, of moral clarity that is both boring and bleak. Perhaps everyone should try seeing the worth in things a little more, the worth in themselves.