I keep a guy in my rotation for one reason and he knows what it is. He’s a standing appointment for my orgasms and he’s never once phoned it in. I text, he shows up already focused, and nothing about the night moves forward until I’ve gotten mine – twice if I’m feeling generous with my own time. My friends call him my subscription service and I’ve never corrected them. The first night he tried to flip the order and get his first, I reasserted the ground rules and he’s been a model fucking employee ever since. That’s the thing about training a man properly – once he learns your pleasure is the whole damn event, he starts taking pride in it. Latashá built an entire track out of that law and named it ‘PPNE.’ She takes the oldest power on earth, sets it at the center of the record and lets the room organize itself around it. I’ve never felt so seen by a thesis in my life.
‘PPNE‘ opens as a seduction and finishes as a fucking takeover. The first stretch is hypnotic old-school house, ancestral and slow, the kind of groove that gets a man swaying with his guard all the way down. Then the floor drops out from under all that pretty shit. The 808s come in heavy and the track turns into a raw hip-hop assault with him still blinking at the switch. Latashá built it with a village – Eli, Rocky Snyda and Yung Spielberg all in the room – and together they made a combat record aimed at every law and pulpit that ever tried to tell a woman what her body is for. Her thesis is a biological checkmate, pussy as a nuclear force, every power structure on this planet tracing back to the same source whether the men in charge want to admit it or not. This is her stepping into full goddesshood, creator and executioner in the same breath, and the beat flip is her flexing both.
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Her opening statement sets the altitude. “I fear no one / I see no one / Bitch it’s me / I am the moon / I am the sun / I am planets / Galaxies.” She claims the whole solar system as her own body and sounds bored doing it, a woman so far past needing approval that even her flex comes out unbothered. Then she names the engine underneath all of it – “I put the pussy in the middle / Let it work” – and delivers it the way you’d set a drink down and walk off, dead certain the thing runs the fucking room without supervision. I run my own nights on that principle. My pleasure sits at the center of the evening and the man in it figures out fast that his performance review depends on how well he serves it. Latashá isn’t recruiting believers. The pussy handles its own marketing.
Then she turns cruel and it’s my favorite moment on the track. “New to this? I neuter dicks. / I give you bush that’s dinner bitch!” A man walks in swinging confidence and she informs him his dick is decorative here, useless the second she decides it is, and what she’s serving is a full meal he should be fucking honored to be seated for. Her satisfaction is the entire menu and he’d better arrive hungry. I once had a man thank me for letting hin eat it afterward – out loud, unprompted – and I understood right then I’d been doing everything correctly. That’s the energy she’s rapping from. She feeds a man dinner and he leaves owing her money.
Verse two moves into straight obedience training. “When I say smoke you say how high / When I say jump you say how high / When I say tip you say how high.” Every command gets the same answer, every man in earshot going up on cue, and sliding “tip” into the sequence so his wallet obeys along with the rest of him is funny as hell. Then she names the doctrine – “Pussy Power Nuclear” – title and warning label in one line. I’ve had a man clear his whole weekend on the chance I’d want him for an hour of it, and the high of that is better than anything he could hand me in bed. Almost. She knows the feeling, she wrote a whole damn track from inside it.
By the end she stops flirting with the argument and files it as law. “Where ya mother come from PUSSY / Where ya father come from PUSSY / Where ya brother come from PUSSY / So what you is PUSSY.” Every man who ever raised his voice at a woman crawled out of one and she repeats it until the ego runs out of exits. It’s the most disrespectful mic drop of the year and it’s also basic fucking biology, fifth-grade science sharpened into a blade and slid in slow. She made the whole patriarchy trace its bloodline back to the thing it keeps trying to legislate, and she did it grinning. She didn’t stutter.
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Latashá is a genre-bending artist, producer and creative director who treats the lines between hip-hop, electronic and avant-garde as suggestions she declined. Raised by a dancehall queen in Brooklyn, shaped by the West Indian sound of her block, she carries ancestral roots through Haiti, Panama, Puerto Rico and Jamaica and channels all of it into work that reads as a direct line to something higher. She produces, writes, codes, raps and DJs, and every one of those skills goes toward reclaiming her own agency and handing her audience something transformative. Her collaborations run from Pussy Riot to Honey Dijon to Nick Littlemore of Empire of the Sun, her live shows have crossed the US, Canada and Asia, and her work has run in VICE, Wonderland, Huffpost and Coindesk. Of course this is the woman who made ‘PPNE.’ Nobody who needs permission writes a coronation.
My subscription service texted while I was writing this, asking if Thursday works. It does, and he’ll spend the first half of that night proving he earned the damn invite before he gets a single thing he came for. ‘PPNE‘ is going to be playing in my head the whole time – four minutes of Latashá confirming that the arrangement I’ve been running for years is older than any government and stronger than every one of them. She turned the source of all power into a track you can throw ass to. I intend to worship accordingly. So will he.
