Migos, The Beatles, and Ethical Laughter

One of the more one-sided online debates in recent memory has pitted the musical merits of The Beatles against those of Migos. And the Twitter consensus is that Migos > Beatles.

You heard that right. Migos is better than The Beatles.

You’ll be forgiven if you haven’t heard of this new musical powerhouse. The hip hop trio that supposedly puts the Fab Four to shame has only been on the mainstream radar for about a year. The members of Migos—Takeoff, Quavo, and Offset—make unabashedly “trap” music, the kind whose lyrics revel almost exclusively in money, women, and drugs, set over a club banger beat.

What sets Migos apart from other trap acts is their overwhelming charm, admittedly juxtaposed with a “cavalier depravity,” as Pitchfork puts it. They have a playful, energetic stage presence, and many of their rhymes are downright goofy. They are at their most endearing when doing things like mimicking a cow mooing during the hook for “Move.” (Mooooove. Get it?)

[W]hile goofiness might well expose a multitude of pretensions, it remains an inappropriate mode for addressing the female form with hints of brutality, let alone veering into sexual assault depictions by way of yucking it up.So the Migos vs. Beatles “debate” is actually one-sided in favor of the rappers. Asserting Migos has surpassed the legends of Lennon and McCartney is a joke that pokes at the veneration of a pop act, any pop act. The Beatles are pop “legends,” but they’re not sacred, are they? You can choose Migos and be in on the joke, or defend The Beatles’ honor and become the butt of the joke.

Migos themselves weighed in on the question, somewhat incoherently claiming victory on the strength of their social media presence. Some have even compared Migos’ lyrics with those of The Beatles, suggesting mockingly that one might easily mistake the hip hop trio’s verse for an all-time classic.

I’m fully on board with such poking. As much as I love The Beatles, any gasp from a self-serious music fan for besmirching the source of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Am the Walrus” is a wasted gasp. Self-important pretensions should be deflated. There’s also a cultural undercurrent worth noting, as Migos’ aforementioned explicit content puts them in the crosshairs of the Bill O’Reillys of the world, who are quick to lay societal ills at the feet of three-minute pop songs.

A given conservative listener might perceive hip hop as automatically more dangerous than a genre that agrees with their taste. They might denounce these contemporary musical acts, even while extolling the “revolutionary” cultural contributions from the likes of Elvis Presley and John Lennon, youth-corrupters their grandparents tsk-tsked. The Migos vs. Beatles Twitter-feud calls out this double standard, yet I fear this mock debate also masks something more sinister, smuggling in misogynistic attitudes under the banner of humor.

My first encounter with Migos was as part of an intentional effort to look for some signs of life in the most popular mainstream rap, a terrain I rarely explore. I expected to encounter some nasty lyrics, but I was taken aback by Migos’ “Fight Night” (still their biggest hit to date). The song is an extended, violent metaphor whose virtual target is the female body. In one verse, Quavo drifts between “float[ing] like a butterfly, sting[ing] like a bee” under the sheets and knocking his foe out cold.

I’m not merely being prudish here. I’m aware that “hit it” is crass slang for bedding a woman, but Migos’ imagery ups the ante. If hitting that doesn’t automatically have a violent/abusive connotation for listeners, shifting the phrase to pummeling that pushes the idea to an objectively more violent place, let alone shouting those words while wearing actual boxing robes, as Migos did when performing at the BET Hip Hop Awards. And this isn’t an isolated event in the Migos catalog. It’s now becoming a recurring motif: in their latest mixtape, they advance their habit of indiscriminately “hitting” enemies and sex organs on the track “Hit Em.”

While I doubt Migos is seriously advocating violence against women, that doesn’t change the fact that females are being directly compared to punching bags in the context of sexual conquest. Delivering the lines playfully, energetically, or goofily doesn’t mitigate the troubling content. Taking on The Beatles—funny; imaging domestic violence—not so much.

This type of imagery passes (if less explicitly so) across popular genres with very little stir. Just last year, Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” was (rightly) slammed by some pop critics as “rape-y.” Yet the weight of this criticism amounted to simply taking note of Thicke’s gross song and accompanying video while the song itself dominated the pop landscape, overwhelmingly embraced by most listeners. Rick Ross lost an endorsement role with Reebok over a date-rape verse, but appears to have remained on the shoe company’s payroll despite never actually apologizing for the line. The only hint of controversy I could track down surrounding “Fight Night” was limited to the Tennessee Titans, who were scolded for playing the song in the wake of the NFL’s Ray Rice/domestic abuse scandal. Migos’ hit wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous as Thicke’s, but the Migos vs. Beatles debate betrays the idea that no one is paying close enough attention to the alarming (and more on-the-nose) language in “Fight Night.”

Maybe Migos deserves the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they are just behaving like young knuckleheads, throwing around careless, unfortunate analogies. Maybe they’re good-natured about all this. Or maybe they’re just as creepy as Thicke turned out to be. Regardless, while goofiness might well expose a multitude of pretensions, it remains an inappropriate mode for addressing the female form with hints of brutality, let alone veering into sexual assault depictions by way of yucking it up.

This isn’t a failure of hip hop, in my mind, but a failure of discernment. That Pitchfork review doesn’t address the treatment of women in Migos’ music, but does describe other “indiscretions” by the group as “usually, mercifully scant . . . the group never approaches this material with anything less than an affable, good-natured goofiness.” Can no one check them for this? To judge from public discourse, all that can be mustered is a well-orchestrated poke at the Beatlemaniacs’ nest.

The bent toward being hands-off when it comes to evaluating individuals and systems of thought that tolerate the laying of hands on women is ancient and outsized, pre-dating The Beatles by centuries. I wish we would have arrived at a more conscientious approach to these themes by now, but the joke marches on. Playful criticism that mirrors Migos’ tone seems to have completely supplanted any measured response to their disturbing posture toward women. It’s just not funny.