Now Hold That Pose For Me: FKA twigs’ 'M3LL155X' Turns 10

Now Hold That Pose For Me: FKA twigs’ M3LL155X at 10

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As I came to terms with what I perceived as the inevitability of motherhood as a child—as all the adult women I knew were mothers, so it seemed as though my fate was sealed—my concept of it revolved around numbers and names, organizing invented information into lists and writing imaginary children as if I was creating characters I could mold and shape. I listed out personality traits and birth charts with random dates pulled out of thin air, trying different combinations as I mimed being an adult. Just as I played teacher or chef or doctor or writer, I also played mother, trying on shoes I was supposedly destined to fit into with a plastic baby’s arm in my tiny fist.

By the time I had passed several semesters of sex-ed and developed my own view of our crumbling world, motherhood slipped from the realm of inevitability into a thing that would take a miracle for me to go through willingly. In college—during a time when, if you had asked me what my worst fear was, I would have said “getting pregnant” without hesitation—I asked a close male friend whether he ever thought about having kids. “Yeah, probably one day,” he said, half-listening, as I thought of organs compressing and shifting and expanding, of blood dripping down my legs, of a partner who just stood there while I risked throwing my own life outside of motherhood away, dragging the weight of basically two careers on my own back, “it’s just kind of what people end up doing.”

I’ve always liked, and still like, kids—I’ve worked in childcare at various points, entertained 13 younger cousins for free for years—but the chances of me becoming a parent grow slimmer each day, due to factors increasingly out of my control. I think of bringing children into this world—where no one has enough money, where our primary methods of communication are full of trad-wife content about “leaning into your femininity” and targeted ads with reactionary polls asking what in our society has “ruined” women the most, where marriage is framed as a practice of mourning your own identity for the tradeoff of being made whole in the eyes of the state—and I physically recoil. I wouldn’t say “never” now, while I’m still in my twenties, but I don’t know if I have it in me to foist any of that onto another person. I don’t know how to burden them with a world that hates them, or otherwise forces hate into them and makes it difficult to shake it out of them with only my two hands.

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In the past few years, I’ve become intensely paranoid as our options seem to slowly slip from view. I’ve been saving voice memos of self-induced abortion steps on my phone, writing down addresses of places with resources in case state websites get taken down, researching cybersecurity and VPNs in case I or a friend or a stranger need to solve a problem that the law no longer protects our right to solve. Just out of sheer curiosity, it’s become a talking point I’ll work my way to in conversations with men once I get the feeling I won’t see them again, like I’m conducting a survey of dates circling the drain—whether they see fatherhood for themselves, whether they worry about the world they’d be bringing children into. Some have hesitated, but I usually get another version of that same, half-listening “yeah, probably one day” in response.

I wondered whether seeing my friends in relationships reach the age where they thought about commitment and family would make me more optimistic, but I didn’t anticipate them experiencing it alongside a wave of women artists slightly older than us writing about that same dilemma—listening to Charli XCX worry that she’s running out of time to have a child, hearing Lana Del Rey ask a song’s subject whether they want to have one at all. Charli, in particular, wrote about it with the concern that a friend who has a child now possesses experience and knowledge that she doesn’t have access to yet by creating life and nurturing it. I admire the way she examined those complicated questions, but found myself wondering whether that sacrifice—which my parents and their parents all made—would be worth it now, in my case. I selfishly think too much about being cast aside as “a person that gives birth,” rather than just a person with peculiarities and obsessions and work which they feel called to create. It’s not a binary that should exist, but one that often does anyway.

All through this wave of pop tackling the motherhood dilemma, I kept thinking of FKA twigs—the moniker of British artist and dancer Tahliah Barnett—but not necessarily of the very good singles she put out at the end of last year, or the album they were a part of this year. Instead, I thought of the way I had seen her double over a decade before.

In this clip I kept replaying in my head, a piece of a short film with twigs’ song “In Time” playing over the scene, she is pregnant and dancing in a sterile, empty black space, being surveilled by a man presumably sitting in a different location. As the song climbs to its glitchy peak, twigs jolts as if her water has broken, looking down to reveal not amniotic fluid, but brightly colored paint running down her legs and pooling around her feet. Ten years later, I have the most vivid mental image of the way the man whose face hovers above her grimaces—not getting up to meet her in the room, just glowering down like he’s watching an insect missing its legs squirming under a microscope as she sings about him having, to put it mildly, “a goddamn nerve.”

It had been years since I had watched that short film, titled M3LL155X and pronounced “Melissa,” which served as a visual companion to twigs’ EP of the same title—supposedly in reference to what she named her own “personal female energy.” Yet, when I watched it in anticipation of the 10th anniversary of its August 2015 release, I realized I had thought of those few frames of that YouTube video more often over the years than I had of most full projects from artists in her orbit around that same time. Her work has always dealt with human physicality, from her earliest EPs and prickly sensory experiments of songs like “Weak Spot” and “Water Me,” to the sensual, aggressive futurism of songs like “Two Weeks” and “Hours” on her 2014 debut record, appropriately titled LP1—where “He told me I was so small, I told him ‘water me’” can flip into “High motherfucker, get your mouth open, you know you’re mine” within skittering tales of dominance, movement, and a fluid exchange of control. In her ballet of fucking and human fallacy, all of existence is a staged performance—a groan or a shriek set to counts of eight.

That sense of the physical and the weight of women’s work has colored twigs’ music in the intervening decade since M3LL155X’s release, notably on 2019’s MAGDALENE, where desire and loneliness—melded in the aftermath of a fairly public breakup intertwined with surgery to remove six large uterine fibroid tumors, which she likened to two apples, three kiwis, a few strawberries, and “a fruit bowl of pain every day” in the press for that record—spurred some of the most staggering songs of the decade’s end. The following “mixtape” project CAPRISONGS and this year’s EUSEXUA both marked playful returns to a thinking woman’s version of hedonism, each finding the artist scouring for something bigger than herself on the dancefloor.

M3LL155X, too, is centered in that search for transcendence through movement, particularly around ballroom culture and the partygoers twigs became acquainted with at the clubs she frequented in London’s Vauxhall area following the release of her first record. Here, the quest for release feels more naïve—exuding carnality and sweat in hopes that a more complete person will emerge from the wreckage. I hear that sense of hope in M3LL155X, where bodies in contact can bloom into something worth cherishing, where a man can learn the worth of those bodies he ruts against. Ten years on, EUSEXUA feels less instructional, moving simply for pleasure instead of forcing others to shift with it. I wonder if it’s just the environment each was released in that colors my perception. It could simply be my own loss of faith. Both are dances for survival, nevertheless. I do not doubt that.

FKA twigs had worked with a murderer’s row of collaborators on her debut record (delivered after years of making demos in college while simultaneously mining a career as a backup dancer for pop artists to pay her bills), including mainstream songwriting titans Emile Haynie and Paul Epworth, as well as critical darlings Arca, Dev Hynes, and Sampha. Yet, when M3LL155X arrived a year later, a more contained list of credits came with it, as the EP was mostly co-produced by twigs and Boots—American producer Jordan Asher Cruz, who was most well-known for his work on Beyoncé’s 2013 self-titled album. Tic, a member of the London band Nautic (of which Laura Groves was also a member) contributed to just two tracks, making for a contained, focused collection of five songs, augmented by the aforementioned self-directed short film of interconnecting music videos.

In interviews around the EP’s release, twigs frequently spoke of using this specific piece of work to connect to a powerful feminine energy she felt lay dormant within her, referencing the incredible physical feat many cis women perform by giving birth to another human being, as well the urge to honor the women who had raised her. Of course, I understand twigs’ intention when she said these things ten years ago, but I can’t help but think about how now, statements like that would potentially be co-opted by TERFs online, or taken out of context to make some reactionary statement about how being a mother or a wife is the most powerful, important thing a woman could be—see, look even this pop star is saying it out loud. Why can’t we go back to the way things used to be? The contents of the work wouldn’t even matter, nor would the fact that multiple, complicated truths can hold water in these conversations.

Before all of those things, it is the work of an artist free to interrogate the way we surveil and cannibalize these women on display—as a vessel for another’s spawn or lust, but never as anything more. M3LL155X is about women, but it’s amorphous and bizarre in its depiction of their movement. It is everything I have ever found beautiful in another woman.

In its examination of image-making, there is also the argument that people learn more about themselves in the thrust of a crowd than they would in an isolated family unit, drawing us into a den of pleasures where everyone has their moment sitting among, as twigs puts it, a front-row seat to the stars. “If you’re drawing figures of 8 around your face in voguing, you’re saying, ‘LOOK at my face, LOOK at my face, LOOK at my face,’” she told Complex. “‘Look at how powerful I am, look at how beautiful I am, look at how confident I am.’ Voguing has helped me grow into the best young lady that I can be at this time, and through these boys, I’ve learned how to embrace parts of my femininity that I wasn’t in touch with before.”

As such, this gradual, physical act of discovery frames “Figure 8,” the project’s opening track, though there’s an evident strain of envy in the finished line’s desire to embody the confident of the other performers on the floor: “Figures of 8 around your face / Elaborate your eternity / You’re so fucking fake that it’s hurting me / I’m just jealous ’cause you’re more alive than I’ll ever be.” All the while, gloriously discordant blasts of sound inflate to the point of claustrophobia between verses, with static filling every channel to convey the full force of “boys growing boys growing girls into women” and the staggering rush of self-actualization it brings. It dances in the face of what any person involved is supposed to move like, sound like, look like, strive like, pose like.

These thematic concerns carry over to “Glass & Patron,” which engages even more directly with a lexicon of movement which may be new to the artist, but has served as the lifeblood to marginalized communities spanning continents for as long as queer people have gathered together. “I can’t wait to make your body my own,” is delivered as a come-on over slithering processed vocals and a thumping bass drum, but it’s meant to read as a moment of possession—of the self, of the space her body will take up—as well. It’s a declaration of freedom, but with a sense of discipline, where the phrasing of “am I dancing sexy yet?” feels like it carries an instructional tone which almost belies the words being spoken. There’s an innocence to it—probably less vulture-like than “Vogue”, and more like a pupil repeating steps in her head before taking her final bow with a “now, hold that pose for me” as the percussion flashes, mimicking the burst of a camera’s bulb. The second she can release said pose, she is, ideally, more herself than she was when the dance began.

Yet, I find that the songs on the tracklist I return to most now are the ones that take place outside of the idyllic snowglobe of the club, where relationships of the sexual, romantic, and familial varieties all impress themselves onto the shape this woman will take once she is no longer being fed the steps. As “Figure 8” winds down in the video, fashion icon Michèle Lamy appears to orally give birth to a sex doll version of twigs as a man stands over her and ogles. Meanwhile, “I’m You Doll” clatters to life as distant, atmospheric clanging gives way to an airy plea of subservience—a lyric twigs later claimed she wrote when she was 18, calling it “completely submissive in a way that I don’t even understand or connect myself to anymore.” In the version of the song which appears here, dense industrial walls of fuzz grow to an impenetrable width as her demand to be adored turns more unruly to the point of terror, where vocals once breathy and pliant are ground down into a growl: “Stop playing with those other girls, you know it drives me crazy / I’m feeling like a loaded gun, and when it’s done, I’m the only one.” The track itself jerks in a moment of unbridled revulsion as spit drips onto twigs’ plastic skin onscreen, as rabid noise soundtracks the deflated toy reduced to a shiny film against the mattress. The metaphor is not subtle, but does not need to be.

From there, twigs is presented to us human again, but pregnant, as the icy intro to “In Time” plays. I still argue that this song represents the most seamless possible synthesis of all things twigs excels at: sleek ultramodernism poured into an avant-pop mold, fearsome in its eruption and desire for understanding, dripping with fiery pathos. In the simplest possible terms, it is a war of two halves of a relationship desperate to change each other and steadfast in their own assertion to not be changed—but then who emerges victorious, and who in the battle is “right” to have held their ground? Her delivery remains pristine and considered throughout the first verse as she dreams a future where her other half will behave himself, gently letting the line “you’ll learn to say sorry and I will play tender with you” escape like she’s spinning a mobile above a crib and dreaming impossible dreams of what a child can be when he’s grown. It’s a vision of an inevitable mothering, even for those who aren’t yet or ever mothers, where everything works as long as her guiding hand is in place to correct all sins.

It’s in the chorus that the whole illusion shatters, as twigs’ voice is manipulated into a furious, cutting hiccup—frantic in its desire for her partner to mirror feigned self-assurance—where the clipped robotic promise of “you’ll be doing me right” is spit out rather than sung, more like a curse than a well-intentioned prayer. Its mechanical push and pull finally gives way to that water-break climax, where the repetition of “I’ve been feeling the same in the club, in the rave” is fashioned into both the shriek of a siren and a ritual chant. I can never hear this fever pitch again without seeing the face of a man whose name I don’t know, watching twigs stomp in the paint that’s just burst from her. Pain is lodged deep in the beat you can hear intensify, and I can’t help myself from always marrying the image of that man shaking his head, watching her, to its audible panic.

At this point in the film, a segment of a remix of the EP’s final track, “Mothercreep” plays as twigs finally acts out giving birth, pulling what appear to be colorful scarves out of herself as the scene transitions to a catwalk set for “Glass & Patron.” In essence, “Mothercreep” is M3LL155X’s most human moment, quite literally the sound of heaving flesh and blood woven into what twigs called “an apology,” a moment of horror movie catharsis dressing an ode to the time “when you realize that when you were 15, you didn’t know everything. The time when you start to understand where the alpha female in your life was coming from.”

I have these moments occasionally as I age where I feel myself understanding (if not fully adhering to or believing in) the motivations of my mother, or of my grandmothers—both of whom had multiple children by the time they were my age. One ended up the breadwinner of her family, eventually leaving a grandfather I never met, and the other ended up both a housewife and a character-and-a-half, a personality that a tiny house in Queens with five young boys could barely contain. I see their furies and their passions in me, but the thing that has struck me the most as I’ve aged, as my relationship with them has softened with time, is the complete lack of judgement they seem to hold for me—this implicit understanding that I have come of age in a different world and harbor different fears.

They have never asked about men, never asked about great-grandchildren. They seem to hold this unspoken knowledge that I am working to preserve the very core of myself (and of them within me), which I can’t let rot away. I wonder if they ever had to deal with that rot reaching their own core, and whether they had to deal with it alone. Last year, the former grandmother—my mom’s mom—and I sat on a bench in the corner of an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York about the history of activism over the centuries within the five boroughs. “It’s just so depressing, how it’s all being undone now,” she said out into the space, looking at me sideways with the knowledge she’s gained through a life of choice—of getting to, in theory, have it all—and the fear of knowing that I might not have the same allowance in this brutal stretch of our gender’s history, in my loneliness that will hopefully not last forever, but will likely endure for our foreseeable future together. “I don’t want to look.”

When “Mothercreep” commences with an ugly thump and the whir of machinery fires up around it, eventually giving way to the distortion marring FKA twigs’ evenhanded coo, that complete lack of judgement is rendered a psalm, meant to be held fast to the chest: “Whisper in tongues / Heal me with your hands / Double knot my throat, mother / In words, I lose.” It expands and contracts like a breathing organism, not like the numbers and charts and organization of childhood practice, but of a bloody, sputtering girl who is too much and is loved for it, who leaks all over her grandmother’s open palms when she is whole. She is never “just kind of what people end up doing.”

In FKA twigs’ own musical circle of life, there is something to be said for birthing and rebirthing yourself, for placing yourself in the hands of others who do not see you as a vessel, but as something already whole and sacred. In our collective shroud, I let myself grow through movement—a woman watching women molt and change: Look at how powerful I am, look at how beautiful I am, look at how confident I am. Our dance speaks too, remolding us before your eyes: I move like this. I look like this. I scream like this. I recoil like this. I pose like this.

Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.

Now Hold That Pose For Me: FKA twigs’ M3LL155X at 10

In FKA twigs’ own musical circle of life, there is something to be said for birthing and rebirthing yourself, for placing yourself in the hands of others who do not see you as a vessel, but as something already whole and sacred.