Where My Girls
Dai Burger
By Natalie Silver
The first song of the night is the click clacking of pedicured feet into the Uber XL. They pollute the conversation with talk of their exes and the air with a sickly blend of designer fragrances. Bubble gum snaps and coats the sterile Ciroc exhales with a pink hue. Chrome pink acrylics tap against keyboards as she sings out, “Do you have an aux cord?” and the second song of the night takes over.
It’s a girls’ song for a girls’ night; it’s for girls, of girls, by girls. And most important it’s calling all girls. It’s calling you.
Maybe you’re drunk in the backseat, playing with a daisy in your hair and waiting for the red light selfie lighting, resisting in agony the urge to text You Know Who.
Maybe you’re Dai Burger—Queens-bred female rapper and eminent figure in NYC’s fashion and music scenes—spitting out “Where My Girls” under rainbow locks, electric makeup and heavy body ink, rallying the troops and igniting girl power far and wide.
Maybe you’re me—writing about a song you have a hard time qualifying despite hearing it a thousand times, writing for no reason other than wanting to advance its reach and expand the network of gangster, feminist music.
Maybe you’re reading this—hearing this song for the first time ever, accumulating your first impressions. You realize this song is a continuation of the same larger opera to your young adult life, an odyssey composed of acts which violently vacillate between swagger and vulnerability with absolutely no rhyme or reason.
There is an intangible and amorphous common denominator of the experiences young female consumers of mass media—especially music, and especially hip hop—live out. It’s a genre that has deeply embedded roots in an unquestioned misogyny that has been consistently written off—and even celebrated—as humor, as typical behavior, as hyperbole, as locker room talk.
But for the first time, this decade’s girls in hip hop are rallying us to not only reject that standard, but also to create a new one. We’re traveling together—pink lips, tight skirts, hairspray and all. And we’ve got a killer soundtrack.
You take in the night’s song in full and without a second thought, add it to your own queue, still twirling that daisy as it wilts in your hand.
September 11, 2019