There’s a version of me that used to walk into rooms ready to apologize. Shoulders in, smile first, make yourself a little smaller so nobody feels threatened. That girl was exhausting. She was also full of shit. I remember the night I retired her. It was the summer after my high school senior year, standing in front of my bathroom mirror at midnight with glass of tequila stolen from my mom’s liquor cabinet and staring at my own reflection thinking “who the fuck are you performing for right now?” I put on my highest heels and went out anyway, but something shifted. I stopped making myself digestible. Stopped softening my eye contact. Stopped being carefully, strategically available. I walked in a local dive with fake ID ready like I owned the floor, picked who I wanted, took him to the bathroom, and left him on his back wanting more. That feeling, that specific cocktail of dominance and indifference and total bodily confidence? AKOSIA bottled it on ‘That’s What I Want.’ Every single drop. This is the soundtrack for every girl’s slutty feral era.
The song opens with the purest statement of sexual priorities I’ve heard in a while. Her body wants what it wants and her heart doesn’t get a vote. She tells you what’s on the menu: “I just want to fuck ’cause that’s what I like.” Full stop. The delivery is so matter-of-fact it’s almost rude, which is the correct energy. She says it the way you’d order at a restaurant. Confident, clear, completely unbothered about whether anyone or their damn mother is comfortable with it.
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Then she dominates the whole room. “All the fly girls want to be like me / all the fly boys want to go on and on” and she’s catalogued every last one of them before finishing her first drink. She’s “the heat on the smoke show,” the whole fucking party, and the big shots show up because that’s what big shots do when they sense something worth wanting. “All the big shots want to roll with me” because being in her orbit feels like its own kind of status, and by the time anyone figures out her next move she’s already three plays ahead, “all of my moves, on the way, go on and on.” She drops “I am the light and the light show” the way you’d state your name at a party you’re about to take over. Then “I always get what I want though” lands so flat and so final it should probably come with a warning.
The pre-chorus is where the shit gets real. She’s done with half measures and with anyone who offers them. “That’s right, I’m not satisfied, I want it all” is the kind of statement that ends negotiations before they start and she means every word. She’s not settling or compromising. Some man thought he could run that slow-burn manipulation where you dangle just enough warmth to keep her chasing, then pull it back, repeat. “He tried to make me want, now he’s gone” and that’s all the eulogy he gets from her. She’s already moved on and having a better night than anything he could have offered. “I’m with my girl tonight, you better crawl” because walk up expecting access and see what happens. She’s going to collect every damn thing she came for and “I’m gonna get what I want. heat, heat” is her closing the door on any further discussion. The heat she’s describing starts at the base of your spine and doesn’t stop.
The bridge is where she goes full feral superstar and owns every second of it. “Living my life like a superstar / looking real nice like a model, yeah, a model” – she’s not auditioning for that status, she’s already living inside it. The way she doubles down on “a model” is so goddamn good, like she’s savoring the word in her mouth. And who’s getting access to all of this? “Baby, I don’t care who you are” – your name, your job, your whole personality are completely irrelevant to her. What she wants is “the letter with a lot of time” and if you can’t bring that she’s already looking past you. She’s young and she’s feral and she’s going to ride every inch of that for as long as her body will let her.
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She’s claiming her whole lifetime as a pleasure-seeking exercise and she wants you to know it. “I’m gonna shake my ass till I am 69 / I can’t fly, I’m young, shake my ass in 69” – young, shameless, and absolutely going to fuck her way through every good thing this decade has to offer. “Can’t dream better, so don’t” is the most casually devastating flex in the whole song. She’s telling you to stop fantasizing about a better version of your life because whatever you’ve cooked up in your head doesn’t come close to what she’s already living. The audacity of that line is genuinely unhinged. Then she takes out the trash. “Don’t you waste my time when you don’t got it / you talk a big game, but you’re broke, so I don’t want it” – broke in your wallet, broke in your energy, broke in what you’re bringing to the table. She can smell it before you finish your sentence and you’re already dismissed. The vibe is Azealia Banks meeting Doja Cat at a Slayyyter afterparty where Doechii is on the aux and Kim Petras is the only one sober enough to drive home.
Okay wait, I need to tell you about Akosia because she showed up FULLY FORMED and I’m honestly not okay about it. Her parents are Ghanaian, moved the whole family to Melbourne when she was literally two years old, landed in this tight Christian community in the suburbs, and Akosia opens her mouth in church and everyone stops what they’re doing. She wins a scholarship to the national children’s choir of Australia as a child, which is insane, but then school gets real because kids made her feel different about her complexion and her background in that way kids can be genuinely little shits about, so she went full creative goblin mode instead of letting it break her. Poetry. Dance. Acting. She built her own little world and lived in it, which is honestly the most queen behavior I’ve ever heard. Then she hits young adulthood, starts collaborating with friends, and something fucking clicks. The church voice, the choir scholarship, all those years going inward instead of shrinking, it wasn’t survival, it was practice. She said it herself: “I was nursing a voice and a dream within me that I needed to release.” She released it. We’re all better for it.
I still have those heels from that summer after senior year. Wore them last Saturday, actually. Left the house knowing what the night was going to be and came home at 3am having gotten exactly what I went out for, an amazing hookup and nobody’s number. That apologetic girl is so far gone I can’t remember how it felt do be her. Akosia took the church choir, the poetry phases, all those years of building herself from the inside out, and turned it into a woman who can look into a room and declare herself the light and the light show without blinking. She grew that confidence from the ground up and the whole world can feel it.
