CupcaKke - Queen Elizabitch

Pitchfork 76

The opening track of Queen Elizabitch is a scathing onslaught set to disquieting keys and decaying synths as CupcakKe reveals herself as a rapper to be taken seriously alongside songs like “Best Dick Sucker” and “Deepthroat.” She’s the artist that tweets things like “I’m spring cleaning out this pussy” on a Saturday morning and affectionately refers to her fanbase as “slurpers,” but album opener “Scraps” sets a different tone.

She offers a critique on the poverty that marked her upbringing and the crime that came with it, deadbeat fathers (including her own) and the judgmental eyes that pathologize these experiences. This is far from the version of the now 19-year-old that honored her vagina and favorite pastime—“Juggle them balls in my mouth, deep throat circus”—but it remains the most compelling. Born Elizabeth Harris and raised on Chicago’s South Side, CupcakKe attended the same elementary school as Chief Keef and is a musical byproduct of the drill style he helped popularize. Her raps are underscored by the fearless resolve shared by her scene peers, but her versatility in sound and subject adds another weapon to her arsenal.

Like the three albums that preceded it, Queen Elizabitch juxtaposes reality rhymes with the comically obscene. CupcakKe commits fully to her angles, attacking sex, social issues, and violence with the same level of conviction. She sounds no less authentic when she asks, “Can I measure it with a ruler, papi chula/Hit a split on that dick in the back of the Uber” on lead single “Cumshot” than she does on “Tarzan,” one of the album’s few true-to-form drill records, when she raps “Niggas came after me, I took they salary/Pull out the chopper then test out the accuracy.”

Her willingness to embody the totality of her experience on record, to resist the urge to commit fully to only one part of her identity at the expense of others, feels defiant and brave in an industry that tries to shrink artists into marketable boxes. The whimsical moaning on ode to oral “CPR” does an abrupt 180 into “Author,” a combative diatribe depicting the aggravation of trying to trust a man she believes is cheating. The album seesaws often in this manner, but the presentation is both honest and necessary: Women can, at once, be shameless and vulnerable, sexy and brilliant—the former doesn’t cheapen the latter.

In just forty minutes, Queen Elizabitch finds every corner in CupcakKe’s mind. On the jungle-like trance of “Biggie Smalls,” she tackles traditional beauty standards and eating disorders through the lens of body positivity, reassuring her fans that “big or small, I love you all.” She showcases a level of pop sensibility on songs like the effervescent victory lap “33rd,” but that potential is further revealed outside of this album on a spotlight feature on Charli XCX’s cascading “Lipgloss.” Their contrasting voices—Charli’s in cutesy animation, CupcakKe’s passionate and fiery—work well, perhaps foreshadowing a future where CupcakKe embraces more features on her own work. For now, she stands alone.

The album closes the way she started it: somber and introspective. “Reality, Pt. 4,” is an a capella confessional and a continuation of the respective tracks from 2016’s S.T.D. and Cum Cake. It’s a reminder that this party didn’t come without a cost, that CupcakKe herself is nothing short of a miracle. She emerged from some of the worst life can offer with an extraordinary sense of humor and music that makes the case for subversion by magnification. She turns any semblance of respectability politics inside out, walking in a truth, exaggerated or not, that she’s earned the right to tell. But assigning buzzwords like “sex positive” or “body positive” is to miss the point. While she is certainly all of those things, her mere existence in rap and as a whole is resistance, and CupcakKe is mostly just doing whatever the hell she wants. If she just so happens to shift a dominant paradigm or two, well, we’re all the better for it.