Dr. Viviana weighs in on George Watsky’s “Going Down” and his representation of sexual fluidity on his recent track.
There’s a lot to like about George Watsky’s recent release, x Infinity, and most of it is what fans liked about Watsky’s previous releases. In case you’re not up on the burgeoning San Francisco rapper/poet/New York Times-bestselling author, his musical blueprint is like a day at the races. The racetrack is a never-ending circle of dope beats which hosts the mad dash between his graceful, Secretariat-speedy cadence and his wire-to-wire wit.
Those who have paid attention to his work might tell you that what he does best — arguably better than most rappers today — is write songs about the human experience. Because sexuality is part of that experience, they may not have been surprised by the opening bars of “Going Down,” track 12 on the new album. The first stanzas are boastful claims about sexual prowess, a familiar rap theme. But Watsky focuses on cunnilingus, which isn’t the most common sex brag in hip-hop, so it’s refreshing to hear a rapper extol the virtues of this specific act, and extol he does in lines like “One tiny warning, I’m dining on your gourmet form until the morning, performing like it’ll stop global warming.”
Yet it’s what occurs in the second half of the song that’s more intriguing and quite possibly groundbreaking. We haven’t listened to every rap song, so we may be wrong about this (feel free to fact-check us), but it’s conceivable that Watsky is the first straight male rapper to record a rhyme contemplating willfully performing fellatio. Of course, many rappers have ordered their nemeses to “suck a d” and the like; but if any hetero male rapper has entertained the possibility of going down on another man in the thoughtful and provocative way Watsky does here, we’ve missed it.
“Many guys visualize giving BJs and say ‘eww,’ but can we just please give smoking pole a calm objective view?” he suggests, then makes his case with wordplay and open-mindedness. We’ve heard homophobic raps as far back as Brand Nubian’s “Punks Jump Up to Get Beat Down” and have recently seen Kanye West vehemently deny anal play with the very female Amber Rose. So, isn’t Watsky taking a bit of a risk here, we wondered? We asked local gender-fluid rapper Brian is Ze and Texas Relationship Therapy’s Dr. Viviana Coles to weigh in on the song and the subject.
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