With WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA being unanimously praised and placing in the Top 10 on the streaming charts, Slayyyter has officially arrived as “that bitch.” A long overdue reception considering she’s now three albums into her career. And for the latest, just about every video has featured her in one scene or another wearing bunny ears. You know, of the Playboy-inspired variety. At one point, during the “CANNIBALISM!” video, Slayyyter even pairs her DIY bunny ears with a minidress “crafted” of garbage bags, with some crushed cans and crumpled cigarette packs attached to it for good measure (an aesthetic choice that smacks of early era Gaga).
It’s also in the “CANNIBALISM!” video that the scene opens on Slayyyter reading from a newspaper (dated April 1, 1953, mind you) that happens to have the word “Easter” scrawled across the top and the mention of “Easter Fashions modeled tomorrow”). Almost like a foreshadowing to all the rabbit action the viewer is about to see. And not just in the form of bunny ears, which also show up in “DANCE…,” “BEAT UP CHANEL$,” “OLD TECHNOLOGY,” “CRANK,” “OLD FLING$” and “I’M ACTUALLY KINDA FAMOUS.”
However, the frequency with which these bunny ears (and even a man in a bunny suit, sort of like a more “coiffed” version of Frank from Donnie Darko) appear in her “visual album” for WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA is actually more wholesome than one would think. For, as Slayyyter told Vogue, “My mom loved bunnies so there’s probably four hundred bunny plates and statues and figurines and all that all over my house. I feel like it’s almost a weird kind of fever-dream nod to that.”
In which case, Slayyyter’s bunny ears have as much of a “family friendly” slant to them as they do a “sexy” one. And yes, it is inarguably because of Playboy that bunny ears cultivated their association with being “kinky”/for “hot girls.” This is also why, every Easter, there is no shortage of “reanimated” photos of celebrities (usually women) wearing bunny ears with corset teddies and fishnets on everyone’s feed. Though sometimes, it’s not that “on the nose” of a Playboy Bunny imitation, with everyone from Madonna to Natalie Portman to Lily Allen to Britney Spears to Rihanna donning a pair of ears in some iteration or other. In effect, there’s no shortage of options for someone to post a “festive,” Easter-oriented image of whatever “fire” (which really just means thin) female celebrity resonates with them.
But now, there’s a new bunny in town—and she might just be one of most standout lapins yet. Not only because, on Slayyyter’s head, the bunny ears represent a new era of American trashiness, but because it seems as if it’s been so long since someone (especially a pop star) saw fit to make them “chic” again. That is, by wearing them at all. For even when someone like Madonna did it, the look of the ears was more “impressionistic” than anything else, designed for the purposes of being an “haute couture” accessory (specifically, for Louis Vuitton) rather than a “full-on” rabbit imitation. Or when someone like Lily Allen decided to don them onstage at Bestival, it was more about being “campy” than “sexy.” With Slayyyter’s riff on this classic “topper,” it becomes both: campy and sexy.
What’s more, when worn against the backdrop of some of her more “trash-tastic” tableaus (think: Gummo), the subversive, ironic tone the look takes on can’t be ignored. As if, by wearing them within this context, Slayyyter is subconsciously asking the question: is this still sexy even within a “broke ass” context? Phrased a different way, can poverty be “glamorized”? The answer, as also once proven by the Yeezy x Gap collaboration, is yes. Not only that, but it can be made to come across almost like a fetish. But because Slayyyter says she herself grew up “poor” (a statement that someone like Lana Del Rey has also made, even though it didn’t [and doesn’t] ultimately ring true), perhaps that’s why she’s so deft at romanticizing it in the present (now that she has some more cash to throw around). Particularly for the “world” of this album.
As she told Nicky Reardon on his Nicky at Night podcast, “I feel like a lot of it [the aesthetic of WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA] comes from, you know, I did not grow up with, like, any money, I grew up with, like, no money at all pretty much and I feel like that was always a really big insecurity of mine, always something that I felt like held me back in life, ‘if only I had a rich parent to pay for this or that or, like, maybe if I had this or that I would be bigger…’ Even, like, when I started working in music and, like, making money, I’m so financially illiterate and irresponsible ‘cause so are my parents, I never was taught, like, I don’t know how to, like, save, it’s like I feel like when you don’t have money and you get it, you’re like, ‘Oh my god, it’s gonna go away I better spend it all and, like, buy this dress that I want ‘cause I’m not gonna have it, like, in a month.’”
Despite Slayyyter’s assurance of her lack of wealth as a youth growing up in the suburbs of St. Louis, there are some who might go so far as to call what she’s doing with these visuals the equivalent of “poverty porn.” At the same time, isn’t that just America now? One giant abyss of poverty, even for those making a “decent” living? But what is a decent living when everything costs what might as well be a million dollars for how inaccessible it is to most people?
This, too, is why Slayyyter has unwittingly transcended not only into an Easter totem with her bunny ears, but into a totem for America at large. One endless sea of “worst” girls (and boys) just doing what they can to feign “keeping up.” With fashion, with culture, with anything, really, that’s tied to money (which is everything). This was also exemplified by Slayyyter mentioning during her recent interview for The Zach Sang Show that writing a song about wanting beat-up Chanels was indicative of her aspiration levels as a poor kid. She couldn’t even dare to dream of having a brand-new Chanel bag, only a used, beat-up one likely found at a vintage shop.
Granted, in this sense as well, Slayyyter echoes the “crying poverty” aura of someone like Lana Del Rey (or now, Chappell Roan) in the sense that when you are the kind of poor that people want you to be upon making that declaration after becoming famous, you don’t even have the brain capacity (or the time) to covet such superfluous material objects.
And so, in this regard, Slayyyter embodies a new kind of American middle class: the one that declares themselves to be poor while still finding the time and energy to lust after material. Resurrecting (that’s right, an Easter term) an almost feudal breed of class conundrum: one where everyone who isn’t filthy rich is poor. All while the truly destitute fade entirely into the background. Something that, of course, Jesus might take issue with.
