Belly Up for Princess Nokia

When a dog feels outmatched, it drops to the floor, rolls onto its back, and stretches its legs out in every direction. Absolute surrender. I do the exact same thing—and on top of that I get this overpowering need to press myself against whatever just overwhelmed me. Not purely sexual, though it’s definitely that too. More like a ritual acknowledgment of something that beat you.

If someone asked me right now who I’d fuck, kill, and marry, it would be Princess Nokia across all three categories, probably in the wrong order. Destiny Nicole Frasqueri, born 1992, lost her mother to AIDS at ten, spent the years between then and sixteen moving through foster homes. She is my spirit animal in its most unironic sense, and if I had any real follow-through I’d be reorganizing my life around the project of getting close to her.

The video for For the Night cuts between old concert footage and Nokia moving through a villa drowned in blue light—pool outside, that specific emptiness of money inside—shaking her ass with the kind of authority that has nothing to prove. Thirty seconds in I was on my back. Legs out. Full submissive. I want to press myself against her and just stay there. Permanently and without apology.