FKA Twigs on her questionable lyrics: I feel like Im in control of my submission
Just before the VMAs, FKA Twigs did an interview with NPR. Unlike some of her print interviews, Twigs came across as chatty and a little bit wry. I think that side of her gets lost in many print interviews that I’ve read with her – she can come across as too self-aware, too self-editing, too humorless. Twigs is promoting her new EP, M3LL155X, pronounced “Melissa.” You can hear her NPR interview here. Some highlights:
Her back-up dancing years: “I don’t know, I was paying my dues — and I learned so much. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to direct my own videos if I hadn’t have spent hours on set, just waiting for the artist to get ready. I would just spend those hours learning what each person did on set, which, you know, was invaluable, really.
Whether she choreographs & directs her videos: “I wouldn’t really say I choreograph. I love movement. I work a lot with my best friend, Aaron Sillis, and he does a lot of choreography for me. But yeah, I direct my own videos, and all the concepts are my own.
On submission, and her lyrics to “I’m Your Doll,” including “Dress me up, I’m your doll / Love me rough, I’m your doll”: “Now I feel good about it because I’ve taken it to a place that I can feel comfortable with. I think when I wrote this song, I didn’t really understand what I was writing. I was a 19-year old girl singing, “Love me rough.” I was young, I was inexperienced, I’d never been in love, I’d barely had a boyfriend — but I felt that if I wrote that song, maybe I’d get a demo deal, or maybe a producer would want to work with me, or maybe I could get a manager. So when I heard the song a few years ago … and I thought, OK, I want to reinterpret that into a place that I can digest now, a place that I feel comfortable with. And now it has a completely different meaning: It’s dark, it’s twisted, it’s sexy, and there’s this undertone of power. Even though the lyrics are incredibly submissive, in a way, I feel like I’m in control of my submission — and that makes me feel good about myself, rather than making me feel bad about the message that I’m sending out.
Whenever Twigs makes a reference to submission and those kinds of sexual politics, it feels real to me. Meaning, I feel like she’s really thinking about this stuff and she genuinely plays around with submission and dominance in art, sex and life. It’s not just for show, it’s not just a shtick. This is, after all, the woman who reads Anaïs Nin at the beach with her sparkly boyfriend. Now, with all that being said, I think Twigs was saying “I feel like I’m in control of my submission” in regards to her art, to her song lyrics. Or is she saying it in the larger sense?
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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