This post originally APPEARED on stereogum.com
The camera pans in through CGI wrought-iron gates, to a CGI fountain with a spinning CGI statue of two women, both spraying CGI water from their nipples. Some of that CGI water gets on the camera lens, but the camera keeps moving — right up to the stately CGI mansion, where more CGI water spills under the door and all down the front steps. Suddenly, we’re inside a kooky Seussian-proportioned blue hallway, where water — real this time, not CGI — soaks the floor. Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion step out in bodysuits with long gloves and capes, staring down the camera. The camera pauses its long zoom to cut away to the sculptures mounted on the walls — a bronze butt, some bronze boobs that are spraying more water even though boobs do not, in my experience, typically spray water.
While the camera finishes its Evil Dead-style journey into this mansion, a repeated, droning message appears on the soundtrack: “There’s some whores in this house, there’s some whores in this house.” Welcome to the house. Suddenly, Cardi B, her cartoonishly long nails twirling around her million-dollar face, stares right into the camera and begins her address: “I said certified freak, seven days a week/ Wet and gushy, make that pullout game weak.” That’s not really what she says, though. The title “WAP” does not stand for “wet and gushy.” It stands for something else, and you already know what it is. That tiny little nod toward decency makes the whole thing even funnier.
The video for Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s 2020 blockbuster “WAP” is set to the song’s radio edit. This is ridiculous. The idea that “WAP” would even have a radio edit is ridiculous. “WAP” is a song that delights in its own freakiness. It sells itself on pure raunch. It’s got plenty of competition, but “WAP” is probably still the most gleefully obscene song ever to reign atop the Billboard Hot 100. It’s an ebullient, energetic extended dirty joke, and part of the fun is the very idea that a song this nasty can serve as a unifying cultural event. It’s not innuendo. It’s more than innuendo. Never mind a double entendre or even a single entendre. Can you have less than one entendre? Because that’s what “WAP” is. So when the radio version subs out the song’s actual title for “wet and gushy,” we get a phrase even more evocatively tactile than the actual thing they’re saying.
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Yeah, you fuckin’ with some wet-ass pussy. Just to give you the full, proper experience, here’s a fan edit with the song’s dirty version.
