FKA twigs’ MAGDALENE: a portrait of Blackness, womanhood, and pain.
MAGDALENE cemented FKA’s place in the pantheon of art pop visionaries. How can we better understand her masterwork by analyzing the conditions that led to its inception?
Up until MAGDALENE, we’d only ever seen FKA twigs be confident and coy. In the years from EP1 to LP1, her fans saw her climb within the dance and art pop genres; several of them caught on early and waited for more musical genius to come. From her Coachella vogue performance, to a ballroom-infused remix of “Give Up”, to the stunning M3LL155X visual EP, her music oozed pop excellence and queer influence. Collaborations with revolutionary contemporaries like Arca, SOPHIE, and Jesse Kanda framed the artist early in her career as one disinterested in the mundane. This quality that (still) characterizes all of her music led to her near-instant cult and critical acclaim.
During this era, she sang about being recognized from music videos, reservations about turning the lights on during sex, and even a tumultuous partner who’s “got a goddamn nerve.” Don’t get me wrong, her discography has always been marked with emotional depth (ex. “Water Me,” her breakthrough), but on MAGDALENE, the twigsnation was exposed to a previously guarded side of her: a woman vulnerable and weary.
While producing the album, twigs underwent surgery for excruciating uterine fibroid tumors; a condition she metaphorizes on the album as ”apples, cherries, pain” (“home with you”). Running parallel to this condition, she withstood relentless racism from the general public in unjust retaliation to her relationship with Robert Pattinson — and his inability (or just incompetence) to shield her from his rabid fanbase. These two hardships — one emotional and one physical — took root and bore fruit in the form of the artist’s magnum opus, MAGDALENE.
With this album, twigs soared to new heights. From tracks like “sad day” to “cellophane,” her music has never been more potent, vulnerable, cinematic, and ripe with emotion. We hear her cry out regrets toward Pattinson (”If you'd had told me, I'd be running down the hills to be with you”, in “home with you”) and describe the position she held in the relationship as one under the scrutiny of “a thousand eyes.” The production of this album was an integral part of her journey in healing from her physical calamities. Perhaps the making of her opus was also requisite for her recovery from her relationship troubles with Twilight’s poster boy, and the intense scrutiny that inherently accompanies womanhood and blackness.
The suffering that twigs ensued is audibly evident to any fan of hers, from the hopelessness within “sad day” to the astonishing cries in the dark in “cellophane” (“and I just want to feel you’re there”). While twigs knows that she isn’t solely responsible for the shortcomings and failures of the relationship, she second-guesses herself on tracks like these and ruminates over how she could have been a better lover in the midst of internal and public turmoil.
A shining example of this theme lies in “home with you,” a single off the album and one of its highlights. The song chronicles her struggle to understand and satisfy the needs of her lover. Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’s disciples, embodies the traits that twigs wishes she has: someone who can satiate the demands and needs of the ones she loves. To Twigs, this icon exists out of reach of her as she strives to mirror this quality within herself.
I wonder if you think that I could never raise you up
I wonder if you think that I could never help you fly
Never seen a hero like me in a sci-fi
But I'd save a life if I thought it belonged to you Mary Magdalene would
never let her loved ones down
In this track, “home” refers to a safe place with her lover (“with you”), creating a metaphorical safe haven for her and Pattinson where all is right and at peace. The intention behind using the word “home” could also be to symbolize privacy from the outside world — a space inhabited solely by her and her lover, safe from the unrelenting gaze and external pressures of the outside world. She wishes that she could have been there when she needed to be. Maybe missed moments like those were what led to their demise.
“Cellophane” continues exploring this theme of regret as another one of MAGDALENE’s peaks. In one of the most heartfelt moments of the record, she asks, “Didn’t I do it for you? Why don’t I do it for you? Why won’t you do it for me? When all I do is for you?” Here, “do” is the operative that shifts in meaning across the verse.
In the first two phrases, do likely refers to her suitability as a partner through attractiveness and compatibility; in the last two phrases, its meaning shifts to its more literal meaning of doing something for your partner out of love for your partner. Why didn’t Robert Pattinson protect her from the wolves who hunted in his name?
In “home with you,” she acknowledged that her intuition and emotional support could sometimes be inadequate. In these last two lines of the verse, she flips the token and charges him with his own personal failures and asks if he regrets them the way she does. While she may not have always ran down the hill to be with him, everything she had consciously done was for him; why didn’t he do the same for her? At this point, twigs permits herself to be selfish and recognizes that her own needs weren’t met either: “and I just want to feel you’re there.”
In songs like “thousand eyes,” she continues this non-linear storyline and bridges the connection between the relationship and the general public. At previous points in the album, her feelings are mostly internal and cover only the troubles experienced due to the faults of her and her lover. At this point, she externalizes the situation and gives context to how the intense fixation of a “thousand eyes” ultimately led to her fate as a woman tortured. She uses a thousand eyes to personify the public gaze; to characterize the overly critical lens she was subjected to at the hands of fans, tabloids, and the paparazzi. Between racial slurs and dog whistles used, we know that the vitriol received was heightened on the basis of her identity.
She circles back to this on “cellophane.” According to twigs, “they’re waiting, they’re watching, they’re watching us, they’re hating, they’re waiting, and hoping we’re not enough.” She can’t both resolve their issues and worry about how she’s covered in the media while doing so: “I don’t want to have to share our love, I try but I get overwhelmed.”
The rest of the album follows this general sequence of ideas: the difficulties the two experienced, the added intensity of outside coverage, the retrospective regret and dysphoria, and the person she was left alone with to mend back together. Indeed, despite the album's release nearly four years ago, these themes can still be felt in their entirety due to the music’s timelessness. At minimum, then, MAGDALENE continues to exist as a masterpiece that demonstrates twigs’ vocal and lyrical capabilities as a creative and art-pop pioneer. At most, one can hope that MAGDALENE served twigs as the medium she needed for her physical and emotional healing.
edited by Nicole Millan Ortiz.
album artwork believed to belong to either the publisher of the work or the artist.