How Salt-N-Pepa's 'Blacks' Magic' Gave Me A Blueprint For Feminism
NPR Music's Turning the Tables is a project envisioned to challenge sexist and exclusionary conversations about musical greatness. Up until now we have focused on overturning conventional, patriarchal best-of lists and histories of popular music. But this time, it's personal. For 2021, we're digging into our own relationships to the records we love, asking: How do we know as listeners when a piece of music is important to us? How do we break free of institutional pressures on our taste while still taking the lessons of history into account? What does it mean to make a truly personal canon? The essays in this series will excavate our unique relationships with the albums we love, from unimpeachable classics by major stars to subcultural gamechangers and personal revelations. Because the way that certain music comes to hold a central place in our lives isn't just a reflection of how we develop our taste, but how we come to our perspective on the world.
I don't remember the specific choreography I invented, but given the era — '89, '90 — I am certain it was big, full-bodied and probably involved the Running Man. There is no record of this, as I was a bedroom-confined tween imagining music videos on a stage of cream-colored carpet, my audience a doe-eyed Maltese Terrier my mom and I called Chip. But I know I was dancing to match the mic attack of Cheryl "Salt" James and Sandra "Pepa" Denton, who, along with their compatriot DJ Deidra "Spinderella" Roper, had blasted their way into the American consciousness a few years prior with the indelible and ubiquitous "Push It," gold doorknocker earrings and shiny spandex catsuits in tow. They were pop but they were hard, exemplifying the false equivalence between "femininity" and "softness," and putting down classic MC bluster over beats meant for the dancefloor. Or the tween bedroom floor. The patina of , and specifically the strength in which Salt-N-Pepa delivered their many messages on it, gave a lonely Mexican Wyoming girl a blueprint for a confidence I didn't inherently possess.
