Switched on Pop - Summer Hits: City Girls - Twerkulator (with Kyra Gaunt)

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

One of the songs we anticipate playing on repeat this summer is “Twerkulator” by Miami rap duo City Girls. It’s a track with enough sonic energy to power a small town, but that’s not all we dig. The song’s music includes a chain of samples that stretch back through pop music history—from 1990s house, to 1980s electro, to 1970s German krautrock—and poses an implicit challenge to some of hip hop’s most problematic figures. Meanwhile, the lyrics celebrate a tradition of movement that’s as culturally important as its controversial To break down the manifold cultural dimensions of twerking we welcome a very special guest: Kyra Gaunt, ethnomusicolgist and author of the forthcoming book “Twerking at the Intersection of Music, Sexual Violence, and Patriarchy on YouTube,” who explains why twerking is not what you think it is (and why the Oxford English Dictionary got it wrong). Songs Discussed City Girls - Twerkulator, Twerk (featuring Cardi B) Cajmere - Percolator Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force - Planet Rock Kraftwerk - Numbers, Trans-Europe Express Juicy J featuring A$AP Rocky - Scholarship More Dr. Kyra Gaunt's TED Talk and her brilliant book, The Games Black Girls Play Estelle Caswell's Video, "The Sound that Connects Stravinsky to Bruno Mars" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switchton Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. Welcome to another installment of our summer hit series. And one of the songs that we anticipate playing on repeat this summer is Torculator by the Miami rap duo City Girls. It's time for the Turculator. He's time for the Turculator.

It's a track when my mama gave me. I'm a shape my money maker. It's a time for the turk. It's a track with enough sonic energy to power a small town. But that's not all we dig about it, Charlie. The track includes a chain of samples that stretches back through pop music history and challenges some of hip-hop's most sacred and problematic figures. And the song's lyrics celebrate a tradition of movement that's as culturally important as it is controversial.

Sintillating. break down the cultural dimensions of twerking. I'm going to speak to a special guest in the second half of the episode, Kira Gaunt, ethnomusicologist, an author of the forthcoming book, twerking at the intersection of music, sexual violence, and patriarchy. But first, Charlie, I want to unpack the sonic world of this summer hit with you. Are you ready? Absolutely. Let's start by getting some twirculator in our ears. And it's immediately fun, little bitch, I don't want your men. But these rich things throwing paper, that's time for the sparkulate.

And it's immediately fun, the groovy baseline, throwback sample, the obviously fun lyric. It's a party in a box. Who are city girls? I'll tell you, Chuck, it's Young Miami and J.T. And Torkulator is their newest release. It's actually been a viral hit on. TikTok for a while even before the song was released. Wait, what?

The song wasn't out yet, but a clip of it went viral on TikTok while they were still trying to get the samples cleared. So the song was going crazy on TikTok and you couldn't even listen to it on Spotify or anywhere else. Fun. And Torquilator isn't City Girls' first twerk-related track. Back in 2019, they released a song featuring Cardi B, a New Orleans bounce-inspired bop, simply titled, Twerk. That track samples the classic New Orleans Bounce choppa beat. So I'm getting in the sense that city girls really like reaching back into hip-hop history and playing with it.

It's what I like about these songs is that they both feel. vary of the moment, but have a much longer history. And you can hear this kind of playful swagger in the first verse from J.T. I love the way she delivers her flow here. It is so infectious and so powerful. J.T. I'm fly with it. C-I-T-Y with it. White-cheek-left-cheat with it.

Fun-size-on-fleet with it. Slim-thick-pacete with it. I love what. this track is doing. So many internal references and so many references to hip hop. And the way she kind of pops her voice up to these higher octaves and then brings it down, it's like they are in control. And it's not just in the flow that they're kind of dominating this song. It's in the way that they layer all these hip hop historical references on top of each other. I heard get your freak on. Exactly. And the music mirrors that.

Like, let's start to dig down. Let's excavate all the layers of samples that make up this track. We'll go kind of in a backwards chronology because there's a lot of archaeology to dig through here. Let's start with the title sample. That hook, it's time for the torquilator. Oh, I don't know it. That comes from a underground 1990s house music hit by Kashmir. called percolator.

But Charlie, if you think it's pronounced percolator, you are sorely mistaken. Perculator? It's time but a percolator. It's time but a percolator. It's time but a percolator. It's time but a percolator. It's time but a percolator.

It's such a great groove because it comes in not right on the downbeat and it kind of has you guessing where you're going to dance to, you're waiting for that four on the floor to come in to tell you, oh, here we are. We've arrived at home. It's time for the percolator.

I love that. And once you've listened to this song once, I think you will never again get that line. It's time for the percolator out of your head. So I think for a lot of people listening to City Girls' twerkulator, it's like they hear that opening line that does this kind of wordplay on this 1990s house track. And they're like, oh, okay, I am in. Right.

But Kashmir's percolator is. just one Sonic reference. We got to keep digging. Let's go a little further back in time to the 1980s and check out the sample of a hip-hop classic, a breakbeat classic, maybe the song that created the entire genre of Electro. It's Planet Rock by Africa Bombata and the Soul Sonic Force. I love that you pulled this one out. It was the first thing that I heard, and there's so much in just this little beat.

you know one thing that comes to mind is that orchestral hit there's an amazing video on the history of this sound that actually comes from stravinsky our colleague estella caswell over at vox made a video on the orchestral hit we will definitely link to it it's amazing but this sample also reminds me that though the development and history of hip hop is so often connected to turntabalism it's also really important to note that the influence of electronic drum machines and samplers were near the very beginning as well. And we hear that in this sort of electro vibe from Africa Bombata. I think listening to this track is an important reminder of the diverse influences that went into developing the sound of hip-hop in its early years. Because our sample archaeology isn't finished yet. When we're listening to this Africa Bombada, and the Solsonic Force track, we're hearing them sample a group even earlier and maybe a kind of unlikely group,

the German electronic pioneers Croftwerk. Of course, right. Check out Croftwerk's track from the 1970s numbers. What is disorienting? It's like, oh, there's that drum groove from Planet Rock, but wow, it sounds very different in this new context. Entirely. But that's not the only Croft Verk.

reference in Planet Rock. Let's listen to another craft track called Trans Europe Express. And then skip about 45 seconds into Planet Rock. That synth line. And of course,

twerk you later. German electronic musicians telling people to twerk via their synthesizer line many decades later. It's really fun. I feel like there's so much to celebrate in this kind of wild mashup of all these global, historical, diverse musical styles going into this

contemporary twirculator track. But I think City Girls isn't just celebrating this hip-hop lineage. I think they also might be criticizing and subverting it. Because as important a track as Planet Rock is, Africa Bombata is a deeply problematic figure. He's a hip-hop legend, but also an alleged child molester, who was first accused in 2014 after decades of alleged abuse. That's wretched. It's deeply upsetting. Right. So it's like, what do you do when the founders of an art form are not who you think they are?

Exactly. I think probably one route is to maybe try and silence their contributions, ignore it, try and forget it. Right. But I think ultimately you can't deny the importance of this planet rock track. So maybe one thing you can do with it, is you can sort of reclaim it. You can reappropriate it.

You can make it your own by twerking all over it and trying to write a new history of this song. Are there ways you feel like we're hearing that in the lyric itself, or is it sort of more in the overarching act of resampling and rethinking this work? I think it's more the larger act, Charlie. And I think you can hear that when you listen to it in the context of something we've discussed on the show before, which is like the female takeover of hip hop, this moment when women are surging into the floor of hip hop,

surging onto the charts and flipping classic hip hop samples and classic hip hop stereotypes on their heads. Especially ones which are hyper masculine and potentially from exploitative people. Exactly. And I think this is where we need to dig deeper into twerking because twerking is more than just a dance move. It's a touchstone of African diasporic movement that brings up questions of cultural meaning, value, and appropriation. And, you know, I don't know about you, but I don't feel equipped to give that background. So I can neither twerk nor do I talk about twerking because it is not my subject to talk about. To better understand this phenomenon, I'm really excited to speak with Kira Gaunt. She's an ethnomusicologist, professor, a TED fellow, and someone who spend a lot of time,

thinking and writing about the meaning of twerking. That conversation when we come back. much for being here. Thank you. Kira, you've described the music industry like so much of the rest of the world as a hostile space for black women. So I'm curious, when you listen to a song like Torculator, do you hear it as trying to reclaim some of that space? I think there is something that defies, I think, imagination and logic, at least for me, as somebody who's from an older generation about how twerking and this sex positive moment and this resistance to shame and blame around women is being launched by these artists from like 2017 on really i mean i would say

that the shift probably began should be marked at 2013 when the music industry really started to monetize music streams particularly through youtube And through these other platforms now, TikTok, these women have been able to use these platforms in ways that I think, one could argue I'm just speculating in the moment. Yeah. It's not unlike the kind of early manifestation of underground culture out of the back of your trunk making cassettes.

It's just a new level with YouTube is the number one music discovery channel. That's where everybody searches for new music. So 2013 with the peak of Miley Cyrus and the Harlem Shake. Yeah. That was where everybody learned about twerking outside of black communities. And twerking has his legacy in the bounce culture of New Orleans that dates back to the year that Miley Cyrus was born. Right. So there's something that's percolating around this that I think defies what I could have predicted.

Yeah. Just in 2013 even. What made you interested in researching twerking? Ground zero for me is that I'm a dancer. As I've been doing this research the last 20 years, perhaps, every day more and more I'm realizing just how this is really about kinesthetic, nonverbal communication and the power of dance in African diasporate culture. Afro-Latin, African culture.

There's something that we can maintain that can't be replicated unless you come through us. So that's one layer of it. But the other was that I was offended for them. I was offended for them when JuC.J's 2013 Twork Contest for his song, Scholarship, you know, I was offended as an academic that this song was going to be promoting

girls out there to try and buy for a $50,000 scholarship, which was hiding the feminization of poverty, not just in the black community, but among white girls, because white girls were some of the most people submitting videos for that contest. But I got into it with feeling protective of these young women who might be the winner who goes off to college and is known as the winner of the twerking contest. Meanwhile, I didn't have a problem with the dance.

Or at least I eventually and very quickly realize it's not the dance. So twerking, the word twerk, went into the Oxford English dictionary that 2013 with the wrong definition. The Oxford people got that wrong. They said it was a mix of twist and jerk. I spoke to some local people when I first went to New Orleans in 20, I would have been 2011. And a guy driving the taxi that I was taking to go to a conference on gender,

sexuality and hip hop at Tulane. He said that twerk was a contraction of to work. And I was like, oh, of course, twerk it, to work that body. Because that is a common trope across translocal communities throughout the United States. Everybody's, work it, baby, work, work that body, twerk. And he was like, you could use it just like, I have to go to this job I hate. I'm going to twerk it, you know. And so I began, and I was fascinated with studying something on YouTube,

and I wanted to find what was the corollary to my book, the games Black Girls play, what was the online games that Black Girls were playing on YouTube? So I'm hoping Torkulator and WAP and these songs, I keep having reasoned, spectrum-moving conversations with myself about what is the value, what are the benefits, and what are the constraints? of this because it's a both and not an either or situation.

That makes me want to ask, what do you wish people understood about twerking that you don't think is sort of common knowledge or common parlance? So for black girls and women who are either from New Orleans or the dirty south of hip hop, for me who grew up in the 70s and 80s with funk where we did these dances, even in the game songs that I learned where we move our hips so that we can learn a litany of different dances. One of the dances in my generation was called the Four Corners, where you pop your hips back and forth and kind of a semicircle while you lock your arms back and forth.

It was a popular dance in the 70s. How else do you learn these gestures if you aren't playing with them in your games? And so for people from the Caribbean or from center. or from Botswana or from Ethiopia, these dances are things that are very endemic to our socializationist girls and boys, for that matter. A lot of the African pop songs today, you can see these gestures are done by boys and girls, men and women. In New Orleans, twerking is done by men and women. It's YouTube that I think has really assigned it to only female bodies. Interesting.

And for the perspective from black girls, this is a spiritual. In fact, I saw a tweet the other day. I want to quote this tweet. It was so good. He says, throw an ass is spiritual. And that is a hill that I'm willing to die on. Hashtag, twerk you later. I love that. And so for the parents out there clutching their pearls. Yeah. And the respectability politic parents in the black community, whether the Caribbean, African or whether the religious folks, twerking is a threat. Mm-hmm.

Right. For me, one of the things about the proselytizing of Christianity to people of African descent since Africa and beyond has been to divorce us from our bodies and to divorce us from knowledge of our relationship to our bodies, to our breath, to our heart that we get through dance. So you see the early black church after slavery banning dance. Dance is the devil's music. Right. You know, you can't lift your feet. They said during slavery, if you lift your feet, then it's dancing. But if you shuffle, that's a spiritual. So, I mean, this is all these nuances. For people who are in college and in high school in places like New Orleans or urban areas where twerking is what they do at the party, it's everyday culture.

Yeah. Bounce is what they call it in New Orleans. Bounce culture is important. It's called Kachaka in Kenya. Yeah, yeah. It's called Lombo in Senegal. My last take on it is that we still, we, black, black. girls and women and the people who care about us, we're dealing with people's perceptions of us.

And it is a big systemic, structural problem. They think it's us. They really think it's us. And I can tell you that even black people think it's us. Because there are times when I look at things and I'm like, well, my first thoughts about twerking. Wow. Yeah. So we don't give full humanity and agency to black girls and women. Kira, hearing you talk about the sort of multi-perspectival meaning of twerking makes me hear this city girls track in a new way. And I think it's going to make me hear a lot of women in hip-hop through a new lens. Thank you so much for joining us and for sharing your thoughts in this song and its history.

Thank you. Switched on Pop is produced by Nate Sloan, Megan Lubin, and me, Charlie Harding. We're engineered by Brandon McFarland, edited by Julie Myers, social media by Abby Barr, and illustrations by our Scott Leap. Nishak Karwa and Hana Rosen are executive producers. We're a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. And this episode was made possible by the folks at JBL who have hooked us up with the gear we need to produce the show on the road as Nate and I visit our families this summer. To check out more of Kira's amazing work, we're going to put links to her TED Talk and her book in our show notes. We're also going to link to Estelle Caswell's fantastic video about the history of the Fairlight orchestral sample in our show notes as well.

You can find more episodes of Switched on Pop anywhere you get podcasts on the Apple podcast app on Spotify, our website, www. www.switchedonpop.com. And of course, we are at Switched on Pop on social media. Hit us up there. And we're going to be back pretty early on Friday. Exciting. We have a double week for a special live show. You don't want to miss it.

And we'll be continuing our summer series next Tuesday with a brand new episode. We'll see you there. Until then, thanks for listening.