The music video for 'Massive Attack', red-hot artist Nicki Minaj's aggressive electro-rap track, does its best to shock and awe: There's the hot-pink Lamborghini speeding through a desert, the shirtless jungle soldiers with super-flexible limbs, the army of scantily clad, fuchsia-haired fembots.
The most attention-getting element of all, however, just might be Minaj's facial expressions, which are as surly and even crazed as they are enticing. From the sight of her eyeballs darting this way and that to the tight shots of her curled (plump) lips and exposed (very white) teeth, the schizophrenic effect can only be described as sneeringly seductive.
Nicki Minaj
Welcome to the era of the come-hither snarl, a tool in the art of demonic foreplay. Not long ago, female music artists were considered provocative if they writhed on the floor, licked a lollipop or showed a little skin. But while the idea and promise of sex remains as strong as ever in the Minaj opus and other recent videos by performers from Ciara to Lady Gaga, the predictably pouty mouths and tempting stares have been replaced with grimaces, scowls, bared teeth and simulated bites.
“Sexuality in our culture and many cultures is connected to power and control, animalistic nature and rawness of desire,” says Megan Boler, a social-media expert and professor of theory and policy studies at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. “I see [the performers] as seeking to express and represent the rawness of sex. There's really nothing subtle [about what they're doing]; these are facial expressions that women do make when having sex.”
In their rawness, the stances adopted by Minaj, Gaga and their ilk contrast markedly with famous female come-ons of the past, from the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile to Brooke Shields's Lolita-esque admission that nothing comes between her and her Calvins. Whereas those quieter versions of the gaze-as-invitation are tinged with artifice, however, the current, ostensibly truer-to-life displays can be more than a little unnerving, a fact that the artists themselves acknowledge.
“I don't mind being called a weirdo,” Minaj (née Onika Maraj) says in a recent issue of Interview magazine. “I made a conscious decision to try to tone down the sexiness. I want people – especially young girls – to know that, in life, nothing is going to be based on sex appeal. You've got to have something else to go with that.”
That message seems to be resonating. Since its debut four months ago, Massive Attack has been watched nearly nine million times on YouTube, where Ciara's 'Ride' video, in which the r & b star reveals as many ways of moving her mouth as her body, has generated close to 11 million viewings. Outdoing both, the video for Telephone, the chart-topper performed by Beyoncé and a very toothy Lady Gaga, has attracted 74 million hits.
Ciara
“It's only the really huge ones who [mug aggressively]; the up-and-coming would never dare,” says Nicole Holness, the Toronto-based MTV Live host who does her own version of “the ugly sexy face” in parody videos. “It's like they're saying, ‘You are never going to knock me off this pedestal; I'll always be here.'”
Indeed, it's no coincidence that the ambitious Lady Gaga has a song called Teeth on her most recent album, Fame Monster. Psychologist Nancy Etcoff, who directs the Program in Aesthetics and Wellbeing at Harvard and is the author of Survival of the Prettiest, explains the baring of Gaga's and the others' choppers – a common leitmotif – thusly: “We associate [it] with threat and that seems to be the message here, especially because the lips are curled back and the teeth are apart, as if about to bite. All in all, it looks like mock aggression to me and it's saying, ‘I'm better than you, don't mess with me.' It's a declaration of status; it's not about looking beautiful.”
In addition to all the exposed molars in these videos, MTV's Holness also detects some tongue (in cheek). “It's reached such a saturation at this point,” she says of sex in music videos. “How many new moves can be invented? They might be self-referencing as a way of doing something new.”
For now, the ugly sexy face has yet to cross over conspicuously into other style arenas. Despite some of the fierce or solemn expressions worn by many models, for instance, they never go so far as to look goofy or unattractive. “When you look at American, French or Italian Vogue, nothing that ugly is happening,” says Elmer Olsen, the well-known Canadian model agent.
Since fashion takes its cues from the wider culture sooner or later, however, the just-released video for rapper MIA's new single XXXO signals that we may be on the verge of a new high (or low) in facial possibilities. Although the notoriously prickly performer may not be overtly angry in the clip, her lips and teeth are very much the stars, further suggesting a departure from the body among some artists as the centre of sexuality.
No pants? That's so 2008.
