Thee Book of Megan

In the beginning, Megan Thee Stallion created the bars and the flows. And she said: Let there be twerking. And there was twerking. And she said let there be number-one hits, swimsuits, fragrance, and lots of other Real Hot Girl Shit. Megan saw all that she had made, and it was good. Then she said, let there be a Universe.

Prologue

Spend that shit, I’m worth it
Thick, look better in person
Hair, nails, match my Birkin
I don’t block hoes, keep lurking
Real hot girl shit
“Pressurelicious,” 2022

While waiting for Megan Thee Stallion to arrive, I join the line for a tarot reading. My partner and I are in the final throes of buying a house in Los Angeles. Time to do it or don’t. 

In search of a sign from the universe, I sit down with the reader who looks like Katie Holmes. She shuffles her deck and slaps down a quadrant. Her eyes grow wide. She says something—I watch her lips form “Oh my God”—but I can’t hear over Megan’s bars.

Take a picture of my bag, now these bitches pressed to get it
Take a picture, shake my ass, now your n-gga pressed to hit it 

It’s mid-July in New York City. Megan has convened a small group of friends, famous friends, influencers, and a few French Noses from perfume maker Coty to a Manhattan club to celebrate her first fragrance, Hot Girl Summer.  

Her denizens are dressed for comments: Boys in shades, shorts, socks, and Chanel bags and girls are head-to-toe Thee Stallion-coded—which is to say Body-ody-ody-ody. Having been to many celebrity perfume launches, this one is the only one I can remember that features both coconut shrimp and a bikini-clad woman entangled in scarves who falls from the ceiling again and again. 

Salt Lake City Real Housewife Meredith Marks walks by holding cotton candy airbrushed with ‘Hot Girl Summer.’ She pauses to greet Olympic gold medalist Jordan Chiles. As the deejay segues to Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” the room fills with a fresh spritz of Megan’s flame-bottled fragrance: fresh orchids, Hawaiian Tropic, and a round of negronis, by my take. The lights transition to the precise orangey shade of the passed shrimp. Megan Thee Stallion incoming. 

Someone asks Marks if she’s a Hottie, i.e. a Megan fan, like a Swiftie. “Absolutely. I’m into Hot Girl Everything,” she says.  

Meredith, I think to myself, that is precisely Megan’s plan. 

Chapter 1

I feel like Mariah Carey
Got these n-ggas so obsessed
My pussy so famous might get managed by Kris Jenner next
“Hiss,” 2024

A few days later I am at a midtown hotel, taking a circuitous path to meet with Megan. Up an elevator, down a staircase, through a restaurant, up another staircase, past a guard, part a curtain, pause, guard knocks on secret door, through secret door, into a library. I find her behind a coffee table filled with her likes: Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos, crudité, Ricola lozenges, Red Bull, pepper jack cheese, crackers, and a plate of sliced fruit so ornate I mistake it for sashimi. Over her head, a black and white George Hurrell portrait of 1930s movie stars Tyrone Power and Loretta Young, who fell for each other on the set of Love Is News. 

I catch my breath and tell Megan that getting here is like meeting up with Hermione Granger for a drink on Diagon Alley. “ ‘arr-y Pot-tuh!” she exclaims in perfect Cockney. The privacy is more than discretion. Megan Thee Stallion is a valuable commodity. She’s about to increase her worth. 

“I want to be the Mariah of Summer,” Megan declares. “I love Mariah Carey. Mariah is Christmas. As soon as November starts, we just hear Mariah hit that high note. Boom. That’s her shit. Me, June 21st. As soon as summer starts, boom, it’s Megan.” She pauses. “I’m not playing.”

I believe her. Megan Thee Stallion, born Megan Pete, is one of the biggest stars not just in hip hop, but in music. The Houston-raised rapper has won three Grammys, earned three Billboard number-one hits (her six-times Platinum “Savage Remix” featuring Beyoncé added to both those bonafides) and, at 31, is one of the few artists (and even fewer women) who are both independent and own their own masters. In other words, what she creates is hers and she calls the shots. 

“She wanted to have control. She’s writing her music. She’s making her music. She should own it,” says Desiree Perez, CEO and co-founder of Roc Nation and Megan’s manager. Perez explains that, as an independent artist, Megan doesn’t receive an advance from a recording label, therefore she pays for the production of her music. In essence, her deal is not as favorable upfront, but she earns her return on investment on the backend. It is all published under her own entity, Hot Girl Productions in a new deal with Interscope Records that was finalized in August. Says Perez, “Megan depends on herself.”

Her music honors Southern hip hop pioneers like Pimp C; female rappers like Queen Latifah; Megan’s own sexual agency; as well as her teenage roots dominating freestyle rap contests in Houston. Growing up, she listened as male artists rapped openly and explicitly about sex while witnessing female rappers experience backlash for doing the same. She set out to change that. Her songs, like “Body,” “Plan B,” “Thot Shit,” and “WAP” with Cardi B, combine nimble songwriting with very likeable, very shareable, and very provocative—at times, just dee-lightfully dirty—beats and bars. “I hope people also hear the self-love,” she says of her music. 

Then there’s the voice. Megan’s Texas twang is singular, powerful, unapologetic; dizzyingly fast and deathly funny. Every so often a bar (or talk show quip) is punctuated with Megan’s signature, guttural, tongue-stuck-out “Ahh.” Which, aurally, lies somewhere between a door creak and an ass smack. 

Megan in person, you ask? Joyful. Fizzy. Curious. Perceptive. Gorgeous. Grateful. And why wouldn’t she be? She’s got a new album on the way, arriving soon. Hotties will be thrilled to know it marks the reappearance of her harder-edged alter ego, Tina Snow. Her talent extends beyond one persona. She’s coming off a bad breakup, but refuses to be defined by her love life. She is creating an anime series—she won’t be limited to just one art form. Megan Thee Stallion is simply too big for this world. So she’s building her own.

“The Hotties need a universe,” she says. “I’m the Hot Girl Coach. Why not provide the uniforms for the hot girls and the hot boys?”

“Ahh.”

Chapter 2

Handle me? Who gon’ handle me?
Thinkin’ he’s a player, he’s a member on the team
He put in all that work, he wanna be the MVP
I told him ain’t no taming me, I love my n-ggas equally 
“Hot Girl Summer,” 2019

Once upon a time, back in those chiaroscuro lighting days of Tyrone Power and Loretta Young, it was enough for a celebrity to simply be a star. Their craft was enough; which is to say, whatever talent, beauty, notoriety, or chemistry they managed to leverage onto the screen, radio, or magazine covers sufficed. As Hollywood grew and fame-distribution channels evolved, so did the famous. Earnings were augmented via partnerships with brands as they co-starred with soda, insurance, and, as Oscar-winning actor Jamie Lee Curtis likes to remind us, she once pitched “a yogurt that makes you shit.” Then, by the turn of the 21st century, celebrities became the brands. 

Lately, it’s no longer enough to have a movie, album, book, sweater, fragrance, smoothie, non-alcoholic beer, or lip gloss with one’s name on it. What’s the experience? How do we scale? Can we build a universe? What’s the IP? 

In 2018, Megan was a rising hip-hop artist balancing courses at Texas Southern University. She was rapping—and tweeting—about doing “hot girl shit,” which she defines as a call to be “unapologetically you, having fun, being confident, living your truth.” Early the following year, Megan, who at the time also referred to herself “the H-Town Hottie” and “Hot Girl Meg,” got seasonally specific and called for a “Hot Girl Summer.” 

The phrase hit. It became a massive viral meme, emoji (Twitter launched the #megantheestallion smiley face with a protruding tongue surrounded by flames), and lifestyle movement. After it was co-opted by the likes of Wendy’s, Maybelline, and Duolingo for heaven’s sake (she would later rap about Duolingo, in Japanese no less, on “Mamushi”), Megan decided to make an official anthem. She released “Hot Girl Summer” featuring Ty Dolla $ign that August. 

“I am Hot Girl Summer. So why not have a Hot Girl Universe? I’m going to make it all the things that are in my head and manifest them into my real life,” Megan says. She starts ticking through categories: “I love my animals, so of course I have the Hot Dog Summer line with all their clothes”—including dog bikinis (dog bikinis!)—“and toys, and my dogs really, really love it. So, I thought, Other people’s dogs must want to do this too. And for my Hotties,” she goes on, “we all need to be in uniform together. So swimwear.” Megan walked the runway in her own show at Miami Swim Week this May. “I’m from Texas. I’m hot. I always have on a bikini remix with some jeans.” She motions to her current look, a True Religion denim bandana repurposed as a bandeau top and matching jeans, her hair in a sleek Leslie Bibb cunty bob. In January, she added her own Popeyes franchise in Miami Beach to her business portfolio, following the success of their 2022 Hottie Sauce collab. “Then I had to have tequila. I feel like I’m a vibe curator.” She launched the $80 Chicas Divertidas Reposado on her 30th birthday, topped with a heart pierced by a dagger. “And now, my first fragrance.”

“Ahh.” She sticks her tongue out.

Hollywood is next. An avowed fan of horror films, Megan says she’s working on a screenplay. She’s equally passionate about anime. She once rhymed the manga series Naruto with “nah, ho.” Megan has teamed up with Carl Jones who created the animated series The Boondocks. “I was like, ‘Carl, I want my own anime-style series and I wouldn’t want to do it with anybody else other than you.’” 

“I’m voicing my own character,” she continues. “Going in the studio and being Megan Thee Stallion, like, I can record something and I know what voice I’m going to do it in. Boom. This is what it sounds like over the track. That is easy. But voice acting for a character is really different. When I saw it back the first time, I was like, Oh hell no. I did that way too dry. I got to be more animated. I got to make my inflection different here and there. I’ve been having a lot of fun doing my voice acting.”

There is more regular acting for her as well. She recently had a successful Broadway run in Moulin Rouge! and a hilarious cameo in the film Roommates. She’s appeared several times on the NBC comedy The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, opposite (closing the loop here) Mr. Daniel Radcliffe. Finally, Love Island-ers, yes, she’s a devoted fan but, no, she’s not coming for host Ariana Madix’s job. However: “I’d love to host the after show,” she says seriously. 

Her friend Reneé Rapp, with whom she collabed on the 2024 hit “Not My Fault” from the Mean Girls movie musical, believes Megan visits Earth from a different planet. “An alien! She’s that rare. A one of one.”

“I was such a big fan of hers before I was ever even working professionally,” Rapp remembers. “So to meet somebody who you admire and then they’re the same exact person that you had in your mind—even better—trust me, it’s a rarity in this business.” Rapp gets deeper. She says she vets Instagrams with Megan pre-post. “I mean, one of the greatest things she ever taught me was to just get my ass out. Meg was like, ‘You got to show the people that you have an ass.’ So now every time I take a picture of my ass, I text it to Meg first and she’s like, ‘Post it.’ And I do.” 

Rapp wants to explain the reach of Megan’s IP. “This is dead ass: I was in the middle of nowhere. This guy, I don’t know, late 50s, straight-ass white guy, he just came up to me and was like, ‘I love your work with The Stallion.’ And I just said to myself, ‘Oh my God, this bitch is so global that she has people in the middle of nowhere referring to her as The Stallion.’ Megan is everything. She’s everywhere.”

As for the future of The Hot Girl Universe, Megan is open. “Whenever I become a mom, I’m sure I’ll have Hot Mom Shit.” At that moment, my face must have betrayed me. Did my eyes widen, revealing a craven journalist ready to pounce on an exclusive?

“Oh, never mind,” she sighs, realizing how her words could be construed—or used. This is part of Megan’s “celebrity value”—the downside of fame to be sure—the tabloid fervor around her romantic life.

“Um, there’s absolutely no chance,” she clarifies, giggling. Today she can laugh at the absurdity of the mere thought. Megan dramatically rolls her eyes, up to the portrait of the Old Hollywood couple. Love is news, indeed.

Chapter 3

I lost my mommy and my granny in the same month
A bunch of bitches talking down ‘cause I’m coming up
I know some people in my own city hating on me
And if you hoping I fall off, you gon’ be waiting on it, ahh
“Ain’t Equal,” 2020

Megan’s great-grandmother was known as Big Momma. “My whole life, I saw her taking care of me, my grandmother, my mom, her sisters and brothers, their children,” she remembers. “Never complained about it.” Megan’s mother, who was Megan’s first manager, and Big Momma both died in 2019. 

“Big Momma was probably the OG Hot Girl,” Megan says. “She was so kind and very confident.” Above all else, Big Momma (Megan does not ever use Big Momma’s given name) was about self-respect. “Don’t be selling yourself short. Whatever you want, ask for it. Purse first. She definitely taught me about how to be stern on these people I date. Like, you’re going to have to step it up and respect me.” Another Big Momma mantra: Never rely on a man. “Like, I should have my own things. I should never be somewhere just stuck out because I was dependent. I was putting my whole life in somebody else’s hands.”

Back in April, Megan announced the end of her roughly year-long relationship with NBA player Klay Thompson. In true form for both a digital native and Ms. Megan Thee Stallion, she did so via an Instagram story and did not hold back: “Trust, fidelity, and respect are non-negotiable for me in a relationship and when those values are compromised, there’s no real path forward.” 

“I’m trying my best,” she ventures slowly, when I ask how she’s doing today. “I feel like I’ve been put through the washing machine and the dryer with tins, shovels, and a cactus.”

“It was very rough. Especially….” She trails off, sitting back on the banquette. For the first time in our interview, she slows down, choosing her words carefully. “How do I want to say this gently? What’s meant for you is always going to work out. And if something is constantly making you feel uncomfortable, just on edge all the time, you probably are not supposed to be there. God will always make you uncomfortable when something is not meant for you. I think I just kept trying to make pieces fit that didn’t belong, trying to fit myself into someone else’s life. I was losing myself a little bit. I am now in the space of finding me again.”

She stops. A slight smile. She’s not done. “You will not disrespect me. And you will be thankful. Period.”

Megan says she has learned from the experience. She leans toward me. “I cannot be disrespected. I cannot be a person who is not gonna be me. I cannot not go to work. I’m going to be Megan Thee Stallion.” She is back to speaking in her rapid-fire, rat-a-tat-tat cadence. “I love being me. I love rapping. I love interacting with my fans. I love shooting music videos. I’m not a person who is in the house 24-7. I’m never going to be that. And whoever dates me is gonna have to just understand, like, she is her own person. She’s her own boss. I cannot be minimized. I will not be behind any man. I will have a partner. I will be equals with my partner. I’m never gonna take the backseat to anything. So just going forward, I think I’ve just learned this is the type of person that I want to be with, this is what I will tolerate, this is what I won’t tolerate. And if you can’t take that, we just gotta respectfully go our separate ways.”

“Somebody not seeing your values doesn’t make your value go down,” she tells me. “People cheating on you, that doesn’t have anything to do with you. You’re not less attractive. You’re not less of a good person. Even though it might feel like that. Oh my gosh, why me? Why am I not enough? Cause it could definitely feel like, Why am I not enough?”

It sounds like a single Megan is enough for Megan. “Being by yourself is okay. Like, I ain’t smiled so much in so long. Like, I’m outside twirling in the grass like, Wow, it’s a beautiful day outside!” We both laugh at the cartoon visual. “I don’t know the last time I did that.”

Chapter 4

Bitch it’s Tina Snow, they love me ‘cause I’m cold
And you can’t take no n-gga from me
I got mind control
I want to fuck in the mirror, I like to look at your face when you in it
Come in the room and I’m giving commands
I am the captain and he the lieutenant
I need that neck like a mothafuckin’ pendant
“Big Ole Freak,” 2018

Megan says her new album is a return to her Tina Snow era. Created as an alter ego that titled Megan’s second EP in 2018 (which featured her first Billboard Hot 100 hit, “Big Ole Freak”), Tina Snow is one-third of the artist today: Tina, Megan Thee Stallion, and Megan Pete. 

“For a long time, I really just assumed I was all of these people at once,” she explains. “The more famous I got, the more I realized I had to separate my personal life from my performer life. I was just giving out trust so freely. I was making myself so available to people and going out of my way to do things for people who wouldn’t do those same things for me.” Maybe some days she even splintered. “Everybody doesn’t deserve you. But I wanted everybody to like me.” She began to compartmentalize. “I was able to place some things in Megan Thee Stallion and save Megan Pete for special people.” 

Then there were days for Tina Snow. “This is my armor when I need to be a little bit more mean, I guess. The things that Megan Thee Stallion or Megan Pete wouldn’t say, I let Tina Snow say it.”

I talked to Megan’s best friend and hairstylist, Kellon Deryck, who are together “constantly” both say, about his experience interacting with the three personas. He translates it simply: “Tina Snow is a cold bitch. She stands on business. Megan Thee Stallion has different layers to her. She’s sexy. She’s a lover girl. She’s empowering. Megan Pete is a loving, caring individual that wants to see everybody win and shine.”

“It’s time for Tina Snow because I finally have reached a point in my life and in my career where I learned that people who don’t like you, there’s nothing you can do to make them like you.” She shrugs with a smile. “Sometimes, people take what I say—or any rapper—they’ll take what you say and apply it to them. So you try to filter yourself because you don’t want people to feel like this was about them. Even though, ‘Bitch, it is probably not, but why do you feel hit?’ So I feel like on this [new] album, I’m definitely just like, ‘Bitch, if you think it’s about you, maybe it is.’ I don’t know. Cuss me out. I don’t care. I can’t control what you do. Just like you can’t control what I do.” 

Creating three personas (hot Freudian take: Tina Snow her id, Megan Thee Stallion her superego, Megan Pete the ego) was a survival instinct, the end result of fame, Megan says. Perhaps, I posit to her, if you’re everything to everyone, then you’re nothing to yourself?

“Boom. That. This is for me.”

Megan has been on a journey of self since the breakup, she says. She knows her fans can see her as a superhero. And she has survived so much—including being shot by rapper Tory Lanez, which resulted in Lanez being sentenced to 10 years in prison—and has even thrived since. “I’m not an anime character,” she says, “despite what some people really do think.” Even with three personas, fame, life—it can take its toll. 

“I’m more grown-up now,” she says. “I’ve been to therapy. I’m still in therapy. I’ve been to a facility where I did a bunch of different therapy.” Where Megan once pushed herself to go and go, worried that if she stopped, it would all disappear, she now will take to her bed some days, phone off, piled under the covers with her dogs.

“I feel like I used to think a lot with my emotional mind and now I can think logically and emotionally and figure out how to react.” Or not. The art of non-response. Megan will leave you on read. “Not everything deserves a screen test.”

Chapter 5

Flip-flop hos actin’ fake, I’ma chip-chop
Say she don’t know me, she fanned out on TikTok
Bitch, stop, thinkin’ you ate, should’ve been quiet
Can’t get your ho back ‘cause he with a pimp now
No dick can’t make me argue with no bitch
Same n-gga doggin’ you out gettin’ ghosted
Hos runnin’ to see what I posted
Gettin’ a tan with my feet by the ocean 
Ahh
“Whenever” 2025

Megan Thee Stallion has a, well, what do you call it? It’s a sound. And a facial expression. Sticking her tongue out. Ahh. Physical onomatopoeia. It’s a yes, it’s a no, a hi, a bye. It can function as a surprised “ooh!” or a very pleasured aaaah. I call an expert. 

“Megan’s signature sound is a specific vowel involving opening the mouth wide and pushing the tongue forward,” explains Zachary Wallmark, associate professor of musicology at the University of Oregon, who published “Analyzing Vocables in Rap: A Case Study of Megan Thee Stallion” in 2022. It can be interpreted as a culturally loaded gesture, since it “was really cemented in U.S. pop culture with the porn-film boom of the 1970s. To put simply: a sex sound.” 

Let’s bring it all together: Marry the Megan Thee Stallion IP with the Tina Snow id and place that within the Hot Girl Universe. A universe needs a common language.

Wallmark says “ahh” is Megan’s timbre trademark. “Timbre refers to the quality of sounds, like what separates your voice from mine or a violin from a trumpet. It relies on saturation, consistency of usage, and uniqueness.” Take a listen. It’s everywhere in her music, videos, socials. That’s saturation. 

Wallmark’s analyses of her early recordings—he examined more than 100 songs and found her vocal sound appears about 700 times—show that she uses it as a rhythmic accent at consistent places: the “and” of the final beat of a 4-bar phrase. “Finally, it’s unique. Nobody in rap makes that exact sound.” Wallmark says some, like Erica Banks, come close. “But Megan’s style and sound is unique in music in that she’s approached sonic branding using the most emotionally powerful, often subliminal, and quick musical tool possible: timbre itself.” As a scholar of timbre, Wallmark finds this part the most fascinating: “her savviness in tapping this ancient, powerful component of sound as a tool of branding.”

She writes first, though. Megan is often working on several songs at once. Her Notes app is a mess. Algebraic codes only she would understand. Things she was thinking throughout her day, lyrics she’s written jumping out of the shower and tapping on her phone and then ruining the phone. Lines written down before bed. She might shuffle them around between all of the beats that she has in her phone until they fit perfectly where they belong. She journals as well, pen to paper and only in cursive. She doesn’t want to get lazy about writing and doing it long-hand helps her remember things better. She takes her work seriously. If Megan Pete’s big heart comes from Big Momma, then Megan Thee Stallion’s brilliant mind is from her mother. 

She was a rapper in Houston known as Holly-Wood. Megan grew up watching her in the recording studio. “One of my family members just gave me an old CD that they found of all my mom’s songs,” she says. “And it just brought back so many memories of, like, watching her write these songs and going to the studio with her. Sitting in the lounge waiting for her to be done or having my ear at the door while she’s doing it. Riding in the car and free styling with her. Going to watch her perform at a club or at, like, a block party or something with my dad. We were both just like, ‘Wow, look at her.’” 

Her mother’s talent is with her today. “Her delivery stays with me. I think my mama was definitely harder than me.” She chuckles at the thought. “She was definitely a little tougher.” She was tough on Megan, too. “When I was going around Texas performing, or would be at, like, a dance competition at school or something, she’d be like, ‘You better get on that stage and act like it’s the last time you ever gonna touch that stage.’ Everything I do, I go all-out because that’s what my mama told me to do.” 

There was no mother-daughter competition. “But I would always tell her, ‘I’m gonna rap better than you,’” Megan says softly. “But she knows she could demolish me.” Megan can slip into the present tense speaking about her mother. “But it was cool to have her around because it is like iron sharpening iron. It was me trying to just get better and learning from her. And probably impress her a little bit. I wanted to impress her so bad. I want her to know, like, I’m so serious about this. I want to be like you. I can really do it. I don’t want her to think I was playing.” 

She corrects herself. “I am not playing.”

Epilogue

Ahh, I’m at the top of my game, I’m who they hate
This shit come with the fame, that’s how I knew that I made it
I woke up lookin’ this good, I’m in my prime, these n-ggas gotta get played
If these bitches ain’t mad, I need to go harder, I can’t let ‘em think we the same
“Bigger in Texas,” 2024

With Hot Girl Summer notes hanging in the air, and “Bigger in Texas” beats pouring from the speakers, I look at the tarot cards. Alexis, the reader, begins to interpret. The Ten of Cups. The Queen of Pentacles. Six of Wands. Knight of Wands. 

“Your Knight of Wands,” she says, “it’s committed to a decision. ‘I’m geared up for battle. If it gets hard, I will not second guess myself.’ Notice that your Six is facing this direction. Six of Wands is achievement. ‘I’m riding into my parade. Everyone is here supporting me.’ Abundance of success. Above your achievement is the Ten of Cups, which is a happily ever after. ‘I have a support system. I’m building a foundation for my family.’ And the Queen of Pentacles. That’s always having enough money.”

“Are these my cards or Megan’s?” I ask Alexis.

We’re interrupted: “The lady of the houurrrrr! Make some noise for Megan Thee Stallion!” And we do. 

Megan parts the crowd and approaches the deejay booth. She semi twerks briefly in a beaded ombre gown—nude to flame red, of course. “Real Hot Girl Shit!” she says, stepping to the mic with a giggle. She is beaming. Tonight is not a sell, it’s clear. She is genuinely stoked to be doing this. 

“I’m not going to hold y’all. We are smelling very good. We are bad bitches. We are doing the things. I just want everyone to have a good time because I am about to have one!” 

The scarf dancer drops from the ceiling. Megan’s 2021 song “Thot Shit” plays. 

Hands on my knees, shakin’ ass, on my thot shit
Post me a pic, finna make me a profit
When the liquor hit, then a bitch get toxic

From the center of the room, there is a glow. Megan’s augmented iPhone is lit. She is filming her own party. Admiring it all. Smiling, nodding her head, dancing on her own, rapping along to her own song. Megan looks at everything she has made in her universe and declares: “Ahh.”

Via: InStyle