Megan Thee Stallion Is the Complete Package on Good News
The Houston-based rap sensation’s debut album covers all the bases, but does it a bit too well
2020 is Megan Thee Stallion’s year. At only 25, the Texas-bred rapper has led a new wave of rappers that take female empowerment to new highs. Laced with that Dirty South twang and clever wordplay rife with innuendos, Megan’s career has seen a straight line upward from unsigned darling to major-label player, all while balancing her life as a college student. A year on from her explosive major-label debut Fever and eight months after her EP Suga, Megan has already carefully curated a sound and niche that make her debut album Good News feel anything but rushed. However, with such a strong body of work, it also can’t help but feel a bit too safe for this boundary-pusher.
Megan is no stranger to headlines, with over 17 million Instagram followers watching her every move and tabloids analyzing every friendship she has. The traumatic July 15 shooting that left Megan with gunshot wounds and an onslaught of memes and accusations of her lying eventually led to her revealing the alleged perpetrator: fellow rapper and friend Tory Lanez. Lanez denied all involvement in the shooting, going so far as to release an entire album addressing the incident. Megan used this situation to craft a larger discussion about Black women not being believed, shifting the narrative into one of empowerment.
On Good News, the scathing opening track “Shots Fired” uses the same sample used by Biggie Smalls on his Tupac diss “Who Shot Ya?” Utilizing this apt sample, Megan does not shy away from detail, taking diss tracks to a new level like an annotated thesis. She refutes all of Lanez’s claims made on his album Daystar, such as how she was able to recover quickly from being shot in the foot with the line “You shot a 5’10” bitch with a .22 / Talkin’ ‘bout bones and tendons like them bullets wasn’t pellets,” which takes jabs at both Lanez’s size and the small caliber of his firearm. She doesn’t reference the incident again in the album, letting her last say on the matter sit conveniently as the first track for any naysayers to hear.
The rest of the album is what we’ve come to expect from Megan: quick-witted bars, hilarious and sexy innuendos, and a magnetic confidence that is seen, heard and felt in each track. In such a short amount of time, Megan has already carved the perfect persona for herself that still allows her to explore and experiment without it feeling disingenuous. “Don’t Rock Me To Sleep” is an obvious synthwave homage similar to Jessie Ware and The Weeknd, and is one of the few instances in her catalog where her singing does not take a backseat to her rapping. Similarly, Juicy J-produced “Outside” showcases Megan’s tougher take on pop, which sounds a lot more comfortable for her. “I ain’t for the streets, ‘cause bitch I am the street” is such a simple yet powerful line that encapsulates her personality incredibly well. The clever sample of R&B staple “Something in My Heart” by Michel’le is also a possible nod to the track originator’s own tragic story of domestic abuse and violence at the hands of her ex-husband Dr. Dre, drawing subtle parallels of shared trauma and the kinship that results from it.