40 days of art

18

Thunder Thighs

One hot summer night, I rode my bike home from this date with an artist who was so committed to cutting living expenses that they resided in the attic of a church. When I woke up, I had chub rub because of course I forgot to wear the proper fabrics to protect my thighs from rubbing together. I am not sure if I was inspired by an artist who was more extreme than me, or my screaming aching thighs, but that next day I wrote Thunder Thighs. 

I sent KEISHH the lyrics and she wrote a really hot beat for it. I got the track roughly mixed and did not think much about it. A few weeks later I was going to the corn maze with my friend Elissa and asked if I could play a song I just finished. She heard like 30 seconds of it and screamed “THIS IS A HIT!!!” and I was like “ummm I don’t think so sweetie” so I just sat on it for another 4 months.

I was working on my album Feminasty and I added Thunder Thighs to the track list. I decided to also make a video for Thunder Thighs since Elissa fancied it so much. I hit up April, and we came up with a plan to make a fun summer body positive dance video. We really wanted to be inclusive for this, so we threw out a wide casting net that included our friends and some actors from a casting site. We wanted all ages, body types, races and sexual orientations. We wanted to make a radical summer dance video for everyone.

Per usual, the budget for this video was whatever pennies and dryer lint I could dig from my pockets. For that reason, I decided to produce it myself. We wanted an ice cream truck in the video, so I waited on the corner of my block for an hour for the ice cream truck man to show up. I gave him my number and he never texted me (typical), so I waited on the same block again and I got his number this time. We wanted a fire hydrant, but I wanted to do things by the book. I walked down to the local fire station and filled out all of the paperwork to have the hydrant turned on. It was a big cast, so I made a vegan and non vegan dish so everyone could be well fed since I did not have the budget to pay the whole cast, but I also wanted to share my gratitude for helping me make this art.

April and I told the cast to wear colorful clothes, but everyone did a great job in styling themselves. Cat Conley of Steer Queer made a custom necklace for me that said Thunder Thighs and I made a lot of fun custom jewlery, plus shopped my own closet for some cute looks. Sydney Vigotov, who was living in North Carolina, did all of the choreography remotely by making follow-along dance videos. Max was second camera so we could get more angles since we were only shooting in one day. This whole project was a total team effort.

I had no idea how huge this would hit. I remember being on vacation in Montreal (before I moved here I would visit 2-3 times a year) and having Kelly, my publicist, call me and say “Jezebel is premiering it.” Both of us were kind of in awe. I remember being in the AirBnB holding my phone for like 5 mins with my mouth open. It felt so unreal because it had been such an uphill battle to get press, especially when I do not have many music connections and am so DIY. 

The Jezebel press kind of broke things wide open for me and I was just overwhelmed by all the positive support. I remember friends texting me “omg shanthony 10k views! Now 20k views! Jessica Biel just tweeted your video.” There was one moment when I was like, wow, I think I have a viral video — attention which was both overwhelming and affirming.