Megan Thee Stallion has been silent for about 30 seconds, hoping that the tears gathering in her eyes don't give way to a full-on cry. Thirty seconds feels longer than 30 seconds when you're watching a person hold it together—trying to hide a cry face that probably hasn't changed much since childhood.
We've arrived at this moment earlier than expected, the moment when she addresses the more-than-well-publicized incident that she described as “the worst experience of [her] life”—the shooting that she endured in July and the weeks that followed. A few hours before Megan and I meet, the man who allegedly shot her tweeted his intent to address the situation in some mysterious way later that night. And a few hours after our interview, he would release a whole album seemingly dedicated to defending himself, to seizing a narrative, to calling Megan a liar.
It may seem jarring to lay all this out at the beginning of the story, to start with a sudden cold plunge into a life-fracturing subject. In a year marked by undeniable success of Megan's own making—the viral moments and omnipresent bops and joyous social media antics—this lone and shitty incident (that she didn't create) has loomed persistently. Instead of sinking into the muck of a bad situation, Megan has chosen a way forward—not only by continuing to live her Hot Girl life, but also by transforming the ugliness of it all into an urgent message about how Black women in this country should be treated.
She presses her finger to a spot above her left eyelid, as if there's an emergency Off button for her tear ducts hidden somewhere within the socket. She slides lower in her chair, parked on the top floor of the penthouse hotel suite she's rented for the week. She's dressed like she's about to attend a particularly luxurious sleepover party—makeup-free, she's wearing a cute red Kangol bucket hat and dusty-pink cashmere leisurewear so formfitting it must feel like a constant hug.
It isn't so much the incident itself that's upsetting her, though to listen to her explain what happened that night in July is tough. In her honeyed alto voice, she delicately tells me how she left a pool party in the Hollywood Hills and jumped into an SUV with the rapper Tory Lanez and two others. She didn't even put clothes on over her bathing suit. The night was over; she was just going home.
Megan often tells herself, “Always trust your first mind”—her way of saying, “Listen to your gut.” That night, her first mind told her to get out of the car and find another way home. She tried exiting the vehicle to call for a different ride. But her phone died, it was late, she was in a bikini, and everyone was telling her to just get back in, so she did, even though there was an argument brewing. Megan doesn't want to get into the specifics of the dispute—who started it, what it was about—but ultimately it doesn't matter. As has been reported, when she tried to get out of the car again and walk away, according to Megan, Lanez started shooting at her feet, wounding her. She tells me the rest with disbelief still in her voice. “Like, I never put my hands on nobody,” she says. “I barely even said anything to the man who shot me when I was walking away. We were literally like five minutes away from the house.”
After he shot, she says, Lanez begged her not to say anything. She says he offered Megan and her friend money to stay quiet. “[At this point] I'm really scared,” Megan says, “because this is like right in the middle of all the protesting. Police are just killing everybody for no reason, and I'm thinking, ‘I can't believe you even think I want to take some money. Like, you just shot me.’ ” (A lawyer for Lanez denied that the rapper offered Megan and her friend money.)
When the cops arrived, Megan says, she just wanted to avoid trouble—she worried they'd get arrested or end up victims of police brutality if they were found with a weapon. The first thing she said to the responding officers who noticed her bloodied feet was, “I got cut.”
Later, in October, Lanez would be charged with felony assault, but in the immediate aftermath, as details and questions dripped into the news and onto social media, the incident became the kind of “He said, she said” that Twitter loves to litigate.
Megan confirmed that she had been shot. People accused her of lying. Eventually, in August, she went on Instagram to name Lanez as her assailant. He denied it, creating a controversy that spawned insults, jokes, and memes made at Megan's expense. Stories were leaked to the press, including screenshots of Lanez's text apology. Members of Lanez's team fabricated emails to undermine Megan's account. Somehow, before the Los Angeles County district attorney had even weighed in, the case had been tried on social media—and improbably Megan had become, to some people, more of a villain than a victim. To her, the comments of critics seemed louder than ones from her supporters.
To defend herself, she felt compelled to reveal more than she'd wanted to—she posted a now deleted photo of her feet, with stitches, post-surgery, as proof that she had actually been injured. Finally, she tweeted: “Black women are so unprotected & we hold so many things in to protect the feelings of others w/o considering our own. It might be funny to y'all on the internet and just another messy topic for you to talk about but this is my real life and I'm real life hurt and traumatized.”
Megan had discussed all of it—the shooting itself, the social media shitstorm—with relative calm, but it's recalling her decision to tweet this that kicks up all the emotion she's struggling now to hold back. The simple feeling that she was out there alone, fighting for herself, and almost nobody took her pain seriously—as well as the realization that the same is endlessly true for other Black women, including the one who raised her.
She clears her throat. “When I was growing up, my mom didn't have any help with me,” Megan says. “Everybody was doing everything that they could do to help. But it was only so much that my grandmother could do. And it was like, there'll be times that I'm in an apartment with my mama and I know something's wrong, but I don't know what it is.” She pauses and tugs down on her hat. Megan's mother, Holly Thomas, died from a brain tumor in March of 2019. They were incredibly close. When she was growing up in Houston, Megan says, her family wasn't rich, but it was her mom who made her feel not just that she had everything she needed but that she wasn't missing out on what she wanted, either.
Megan clears her throat again and begins to speak, this time like she's addressing her mother directly. “Like, now, I'm understanding you got a lot on you; it's a lot of pressure, but you're not saying it to nobody. I know it's probably just hard, to be a single mama trying to take care of yourself and your daughter. And you're putting on a face.… You are acting like everything was okay so I feel comfortable.” Megan pauses and brings it back to what she's experiencing right now: “I feel like a lot of Black girls learn that early. I did. I do that a lot.”
Throughout the strange weeks that followed the shooting, what surprised Megan most was that even though she had been a victim, she felt an expectation to project strength. “Like damn,” she says, “I have to be tough through all this? All the time? It was like, who really checks on us or who protected us? You just go your whole life with that mentality. And then when something actually happens to you, when you properly should have protected yourself, your first instinct was not to protect yourself, it was protecting other people.… So it was like, ‘What do I do?’ ‘What do I say?’ Like, ‘Is anybody going to believe what I'm saying?’ ”
Megan falls silent, giving herself another moment. She starts again carefully. “It was weird,” she says. “I saw something that said, ‘Check on your strong friends.’ And, like, a lot of people, they don't do that because they think, Oh, this person is just so strong, so I know they got their stuff together.… I feel like I have to be strong for everybody, and I don't want my friends or anybody around me to feel like it's a pressure on me, 'cause I feel like they all start freaking out.”
She says she reached out to her friends and asked, “Why didn't you call me?” And it helped. “Now they're like calling me every five minutes,” she says with a laugh and a faux-petulant eye roll that lifts us out of the dark moment and into a lighter one.
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Any reluctance Megan might have felt to cover the heavy stuff so quickly in our conversation was superseded by a need to confront it, to say her piece, and to move on to fully experiencing everything happening in her life. She was in the middle of an almost absurdly wild week, a week during which practically a career's worth of achievement was condensed into a six-day run. She was on the cover of Time, picked as one of the world's 100 Most Influential People. She had a new single and music video about to drop. She was preparing for her first solo Saturday Night Live performance in a few days.
It was the kind of week that confirms that Megan is at a specific, rarefied point in a young artist's rise—that moment of rapidly growing fame when the big changes to life are sudden and noticeable. There is more attention, there are more opportunities, more followers, more freebies—fewer friends, though, she notes. All at once, the icons you'd rapped about in unreleased songs are now your collaborators—the people who support you and reach out by phone. (Yes, Beyoncé and Jay-Z call her and give advice. “She's so calm,” Megan says of Beyoncé. “She would just be like, ‘Megan, live your life.’ Then Jay-Z will call me and be like, ‘Hey, listen, you know, you supposed to be turning up right now. You really need to be somewhere driving a boat. Live your life. Just fuck that.’ ”)
Since 2019, with the release of her mixtape Fever, when she established herself as Hot Girl Meg—an aspirationally fun, powerfully sexy artist who rapped about the importance of being fun, powerful, and sexy—Megan has made it her mission to inspire a legion of fans, called the hotties, to be as flagrantly confident as she is. Her music is juicy self-help wrapped in wit and buoyed by preternaturally dazzling rap skills. And all of it is paired with a personality that somehow feels simultaneously genuine and like a built-for-Instagram exercise in branding. She's a cultural powerhouse perfectly pitched for the moment. Even a pandemic couldn't stop her; if anything it was an accelerant. In March she released the song “Savage,” which got an immediate boost when 19-year-old Keara Wilson created the “Savage” dance challenge, which was taken up by a captive audience, stuck inside during the early days of the lockdowns. “Savage” became a monster hit on TikTok, basically ensuring that by the time Megan dropped the remix with Beyoncé, it was destined to be the biggest track of 2020.
This, of course, was before Megan and Cardi B. released “WAP,” a pussy-exalting anthem that now has a historic place in the annals of timeless fuck tracks. “WAP” hit No. 1 on the charts without breaking a sweat, but it also set off a surprisingly loud freak-out amongst pearl-clutching, spirit-of-Tipper-Gore-runs-through-me conservatives. The acronym made the nightly news program my 66-year-old father watches, which led me to receive and ignore an earnest text asking what WAP stood for.
Megan laughs recalling those reactions. “I saw somebody…some Republican lady, you know how they be. Some goddamn Republican lady, like, ‘This is a terrible example,’ ” she says, slipping into Republican-lady voice. (Megan is referring to former congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine, who tweeted: “America needs far more women like Melania Trump and far less like Cardi B”.) “And I was like, ‘Girl, you literally had to go to YouTube or to your Apple Music to go listen to this song in its entirety. How are you in your Republican world even finding your way over here to talk about this? You must not have noooo WAP if you're mad at this song.’ ”
It doesn't bother or surprise her much, though. “Sometimes people are really not comfortable enough with themselves, and I don't think they like to watch other people be comfortable with themselves. And I don't think they want anybody to teach other people how to be comfortable with themselves,” she says both thoughtfully and dismissively.
The “WAP” discourse demonstrates the way that nearly everything Megan does prompts discussion and debate. She can proudly describe the appeal of a well-lubricated vagina, and then—bam!—she's caught up in a dialogue about the fear of Black women's sexuality. She can go about her business, wearing a dress, or shorts, or something that shows off her enviably muscular thighs, and it's a flash point in a conversation about what's “appropriate” for someone with a body like hers (frankly, anything). She can quietly try to heal from being shot, then find herself tugged into a national reckoning with racial injustice and the mistreatment of Black women. She's spent the past six months riding out a storm of things both within her control and completely out of it.
After the chaos of the summer, Megan barely took a break. “I was like, ‘I have to take control of this,’ ” she says. She had to remind herself, “I'm still Megan Thee Stallion.” And as soon as she could, she returned to what made her Meg. She performed, she recorded, she Instagrammed her hot-girl activities with her friends. She made big statements. And she reminded herself—and her fans and detractors—that she could handle the topsy-turvy moments not because of who she'd become, but because of who she's been all along.
Megan is in New York for her SNL performance, stationed with her team on the top two penthouse floors of her favorite hotel on the Lower East Side. Her terrace overlooks a bar with a pool, where, I note, there's a hot lifeguard. “Oh, the one with the dreads,” she says, comparing notes. “You know I be checking.”
She loves New York. “It's always poppin',” she exclaims. Which is kind of her to say, because New York isn't poppin' in quite the way it usually is.“When I was coming up, nobody really knew me anywhere except for Houston and New York,” she says, slipping into a memory of the first time she performed here, in a little basement club. “Everybody knew all the words, word for word, in here. It was so packed in there—like, people were onstage with me and the DJ, and someone stepped on the cord and ripped it out of the wall,” she remembers. The sound dropped out, but everyone rapped with her. “So it was me and all the hotties driving the boat and rapping to each other, just a cappella. It was crazy.”
She revisits that night like it happened decades ago, but Megan is only 25. It's easy to forget that when you watch her perform, or listen to her rap, or ask her a question about the state of, say, the environment, or for advice on whether or not you should text that fuckboy who's driving you insane. (Do not.) Her rise has been the embodiment of fast and furious—a blitz to the top that just began in 2016, when Megan Jovon Ruth Pete was still a college student, attending Texas Southern University to study health administration, a degree she's still determined to complete.
Fellow students and her followers on Instagram knew her as Megan Thee Stallion—a moniker derived from the compliments she used to get from men about her five-foot-ten stature—but nobody else really did until she took part in a cypher with a group of local Houston rappers. Her mom gave her wardrobe advice and a ride. Video of the performance shows that Megan arrived basically as the fully formed performer we see now—direct, cool and confident and already in possession of that signature tongue-out Stallion yowl. “Everybody's mouth was open wide like,” she remembers of the audience, “and I was like, ‘Why are you still surprised?’ ”
Her mother stayed to watch, even though Megan warned that she was going to curse. But Thomas knew what to expect. She'd had her own rap career and was known around Houston as Holly-Wood. She raised Megan on UGK and Three 6 Mafia, bringing her daughter up largely by herself in the Houston suburbs. Megan's father spent the first eight years of her life in prison and died when she was 15. Megan calls him her best friend—but her mom was always something more. She was the first person Megan ever rapped for, when she was seven years old. Megan had a Barbie toy that played prerecorded instrumentals and beats, she recalls. “I don't know who at [Mattel] thought of that,” she says, “but it was fire!” When she was 18, Megan told her mom she wanted to rap. Thomas said fine but had two caveats: Megan had to wait until she was 21, and she had to get a college degree.
Until her death, Thomas was Megan's manager. She taught Megan studio etiquette—to show up on schedule, to make the most of your booked time. She told Megan to rap in her own voice. “I used to rap in a voice that was not my talking voice,” Megan explains. “I would probably sound a little monotone, and she was like, ‘Why are you rapping like that?’ I'm like, ‘What? I sound good.’ So she's like, ‘Rap like you're talking to me.’ I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, you right,’ and you know, you hate when your mama tell you something.”
The earliest moments of Megan's career were mostly tumult-free because of her mom. “I always just said, ‘I'm going to call my mama. She'll know what to do,’ ” she says with a sigh. “Now I can't just call my mama, but I'm always thinking, ‘Okay, what would she do?’ and sometimes I don't know, sometimes I do be bumping my head. I'm only in my 20s! But she's there.”
It was more than just business advice and etiquette, though. So much of what Megan raps about, and how she raps about it, and who she is as a woman, is inherited from her mother and grandmothers, she explains. One of her grandmothers, whom she called Big Mama, taught her about the importance of self-reliance; her other grandmother taught her to always be sweet. And her mother, she says, taught her how to be tough. Confidence was instilled early and reinforced by all three women, who were constantly in Megan's ear with affirmations. “They were always like, ‘Megan, you're great. Hundred percent,’ ” she says. “They would always make me feel really, really good. They would always be like, ‘And you don't need no boy or nobody coming up to you trying to tell you, “Give me this, and I'll give you that.” ’ And I'd be like, [imitates her voice as a seven-year-old] Yeah! I don't need no boys at all!”
She often attributes lyrical and sonic inspiration to Southern male artists like Juicy J and Pimp C. Her mom would play Three 6 Mafia, and Megan would study the themes: money, sex, power, high-quality liquor. She heard men rap about, as she says, “what they are gonna do to a girl, or how confident he is, or how tough he is,” and that matrilineal influence reminded her that she could do it too, and better. She thought, “ ‘Damn, this would really be something good if a girl was saying this.’ ”
With Megan, it's never just the words. She has a way of delivering filthy lyrics that can absolutely knock you flat. It's the way she curls her lips while she says a line or raises her eyebrow right before she drops down in a squat. As a performer, she doesn't ask for permission or forgiveness or even confirmation. “I know this about me,” she says. “This is my pleasure, this is my vagina; I know this vagina bomb. Sometimes you just got to remind people that you're magical and everything about you down to your vagina and to your toes is magical.” In the grand tradition of Trina, Lil' Kim, Missy Elliott, Jill Scott, and other female artists who write lyrics that simply drip with horn, Megan's message—and the way she shares it—isn't for men.
“I feel like a lot of men just get scared when they see women teaching other women to own sex for themselves,” she says. “Sex is something that it should be good on both ends, but a lot of times it feels like it's something that men use as a weapon or like a threat. I feel like men think that they own sex, and I feel like it scares them when women own sex.”
JaQuel Knight, Megan's friend and choreographer, bounced into the kitchen of a Brooklyn studio to find Megan, hiding out, dabbing her forehead with a paper towel, taking a break from rehearsing. She had just run through the songs she'll be performing on SNL, “Savage” and a new one, “Don't Stop,” a truly raunchy gift she was about to release with Young Thug. Knight, who worked with Beyoncé on the “Formation” choreography and similar statement-making moments in music video history, has adopted a sweet-and-sour approach to getting Megan back to work, gently demanding that she perform each song twice more. Megan countered with an (unsuccessful) offer to do the songs once more—then gave a good-natured groan before taking her place among four backup dancers. She rolled up her SNL T-shirt to reveal her belly ring and readied herself to rip into “Savage” again.
For as often as she's performed the song, this rehearsal was different. Megan had decided to use her SNL appearance to make a statement about the shooting of Breonna Taylor and the failure of Daniel Cameron, the attorney general of Kentucky, to hold officers accountable for her killing. Two days later, when she took the stage on Saturday night, she wore a black-and-white bodysuit and matching boots and cape, looking like a majorette on an acid trip.
During “Savage,” as she stalked the stage and executed her famously high-precision twerking, the backdrop twisted and turned and rearranged itself to reveal the names of several women, all victims of police brutality, as well as “Protect Black Women.” Midway through, the sound of eight gunshots interrupted the music and Megan stared into the audience to deliver a short speech. “We need to protect our Black women and love our Black women, 'cause at the end of the day, we need our Black women,” she said. “We need to protect our Black men and stand up for our Black men, 'cause at the end of the day, we're tired of seeing hashtags about Black men.”
The very next evening, as the SNL clips were still bouncing around social media, Megan was back in L.A., Zooming with me while getting ready to go meet a friend for a socially distant hang. I asked her how she felt about the whole performance. “I'm proud of myself,” she said while—impressively—pulling a paddle brush through her 40-inch weave, then hitting it with a curling iron for bounce.
As wide-reaching as she hoped her message was, there also was a part of the performance that was for Megan herself. She wanted to have the last word on her own tricky and difficult situation. The shooting had turned her into a meme, a point to be made in a debate; it had forced her into a narrative. Somehow her personhood had gotten lost. If people were going to make meaning out of her, she was going to dictate what that meaning would be.
I'd asked her at one point what she wanted for the women who listened to her music, what she hoped she was inspiring women to do. “I want Black women to be louder,” she said. “I want us to be sassier. I want us to demand more, be more outspoken, keep speaking and just keep demanding what you deserve. Don't change—just get better. Grow from these situations. Don't be beating yourself up about these situations, because that'd be a lot of problems too. I feel we keep this stuff in and there's some kind of way we flip it on ourselves. We didn't fuck up—We didn't do something wrong, and it's like, ‘No, girl, relax. You just needed somebody to come stir the Kool-Aid.’ ”
This is another great Stallion-ism that I hope inspires a song—or even a whole Kool-Aid x Hot Girl Summer at some point. Here's how she explains it: “Even if it's me rapping or if it's me having a conversation with somebody, I'm going to make you feel like you are that bitch. Because you're already that bitch—you somehow just need it stirred up for you. It's like, when you put the Kool-Aid in the water and it all fall to the bottom. But when you mix it up with the sugar, now it's Kool-Aid. You just need somebody to stir it up for you. That's me.”
Allison P. Davis is a feature writer at The Cut.
A version of this story originally appears in the December/January 2021 issue with the title "The Year of Thee Stallion."
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Adrienne Raquel
Styled by Eric McNeal
Hair by Kellon Deryck
Makeup by Megan Thee Stallion
Tailoring by Claudia Diaz
Manicure by Coca Michelle
Set design by Andrea Huelse
