‘Rap Sh!t’ Just Gave Us TV’s Best Scene About What It Means to Be F*ckable
In Rap Sh!t, Insecure creator Issa Rae’s new HBO Max show, everyone is watching each other. Shawna (Aida Osman), a hotel receptionist holding onto old dreams of breaking into the rap scene, watches videos of her old collaborators on her laptop at work. She decides to start a group with her former friend Mia (KaMillion), who spends her time watching businessmen hide their hard-ons while she dances for them on camera. Shawna’s boyfriend Cliff (Devon Terrell) ends up watching one of Mia’s scantily clad stripping vids after his roommates recognize her as OnlyFans’ Ghetto Dominatrix.
Watching a show where the characters are watching videos, FaceTiming each other, or recording footage is both less meta and more fun than it initially sounds. Voyeurism is crucial to the storytelling; Rap Sh!t is about two ambitious women unsatisfied with where they’re at in their careers and relationships, banding together in the hopes that someone will discover them and make them into the superstars they know they can be. And that means they’ve got to get people to look at them.
Sex, sexuality, identity, fuckability, confidence, exploitation: These are concepts that are all over TV and pop culture. But right out the gate, Rap Sh!t dares to unpack them. In one of its first episodes, the show does something rare: It gives two women the floor for a frank, nuanced conversation about who gets to decide who’s fuckable, what it means to feel fuckable, and, more, whose gaze that fuckability is coming from. (New record for the number of times that word has appeared in one sentence at the Daily Beast.)