As many have heard, BRAT summer has come to an end, but there’s nothing to fear as we near the biggest album release of the year: EUSEXUA by FKA twigs. Though the name may not sound too familiar, FKA twigs has been around the music scene for more than a decade now.
Born Tahliah Barnett, she got her nickname “twigs” because you could always hear her joints crack audibly when she danced. FKA twigs actually got her start as a professionally trained dancer in ballet and contemporary before she moved from her hometown of Gloucestershire to London at age 17 to pursue a dance career.
This move allowed FKA twigs to get her first glimpse and exposure to the music industry. She worked as a background dancer for many major musicians, such as Kylie Minogue and Ed Sheeran. It wasn’t too long until 2012 when she released her first E.P. This 15-minute first Extended Play (E.P.) really established FKA twigs as a conceptual artist, one who really seemed to value the art that was music.
FKA twigs is a groundbreaking artist, one that is a rarity of our time, yet she constantly remains overlooked in the music industry — why?
As a passionate feminist, I believe it may be due not only to her being a woman but also a woman of color trying to find a place in the experimental world.
The music industry, time and time again, has failed many black and mixed-race women, oftentimes restricting them to a box of hypersexualized roles. They are often expected to stick to the genres that were picked for them, such as R&B or hip-hop.
While FKA twigs’ work does explore the idea of sex and sensuality, she does it on her own terms, constantly resisting these stereotypes, which unfortunately makes her less marketable. When it comes to the world of experimental art, the white male artist always tends to be favored, and any woman in the field is always likely to face some skepticism.
With FKA twigs’ avant-garde approach, her welcoming into the experimental world has always been hesitant. Especially at a time when the industry’s reluctance to embrace women of color is limiting their visibility. FKA twigs’ journey has definitely underscored many of the systemic challenges women of color have to go through in order to gain mainstream recognition — especially when it comes to her art.
I would not classify FKA twigs as just a musician, but rather as a transformative artist. Instead of exploring surface themes, her art explores profound nuanced themes such as trauma, healing, and even spirituality. She bends multiple genres like experimental pop, alternative R&B, and electronic music to push the sonic boundaries through her art. While many mainstream hits emphasize hooks and a good song structure, twigs choose to surrender these elements and add unconventional beats and ethereal vocals, all for the sake of storytelling.
This is what stands out the most to me about an artist like FKA twigs. Her music is not designed for passive listening but rather for an immersive experience in the silence of noise-canceling headphones to pause, reflect, and just feel.
FKA twigs is reshaping the way music is being created in the 21st century. She encourages conversations about race, gender, femininity, and what it means to be human. Though the essence of BRAT is about rebellion, raw defiance, and rejecting traditional femininity, EUSEXUA extends that rebellion into a realm of self-discovery.
FKA twigs redefines rebellion in an ethereal way, where power is asserted through movement, vulnerability, and hyper-femininity. In the EUSEXUA world, hyper-femininity is power, and softness and sensuality uncovers itself to be a new form of reclaimed femininity.
While EUSEXUA channels a lot of BRAT energy with the rejection of traditional societal expectations, there is a deeper complexity, one that invites sensuality and artistic innovation through not just a rebellion but a rebellion as an art.
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