A deep listening to Atlanta rapper Pluto shows how her sound reshapes Black girlhood, time, and survival through bass-heavy imagination rather than protest.
Some music must be listened to on loud. If you were to cut on Pluto’s song “What Da Fuk” once your ears settle into the vibrations of the 808 drums you will hear “I’m just a girl but I ain’t no bitch. Misgender me, I’m bangin’ hard, come through trippin’ with them switches.” Like Pluto, we have all wanted to be seen for who we are without being reduced to the worst possible version of it. To have the ability to use whatever is at our disposal to be understood sincerely. As an emerging star from Atlanta, Georgia, Pluto pulls from the local trap and drill subgenres that both use gun and drug references as an organizational feature of their sound. She is part of a class of young women who rap over dark beats and don’t see a contradiction in carrying guns and being pretty, shaking ass and honoring family, and being independent and being a girl.
Pluto was raised in the epicenter of contemporary U.S. music, which means she was raised in a city where white Americans are more likely to exploit Black art because of its international appeal. Atlanta is a place where Black girls can get a beat from one part of the city and rap lyrics that are an interpolation of an artist’s song from another part of that city and have major American record labels calling three days later. That is the birth of “Whim Whammie” and the arrival of Pluto. The irony that heavy lyrics about guns, money, and gangs (w)rapped over even heavier beats makes a different life possible, while American society rests the responsibility of the emotional and physical deaths of Black people on these songs.
Record labels often see the future of music in these young people, while the culture around the music is viewed as destructive to a future. Black American girls are assumed to mature quicker, are punished more harshly, and have shorter life expectancies than their white counterparts. Their time is stolen. In the ways that it matters, Black girls are denied the opportunity of being a child, which means pulled across time away from the possibility that their failures and recklessness will not form raised scars that sit on them for a Black girl lifetime.
Pluto’s music is subversive in that it doesn’t straightforwardly aim to undo any system, but it has captivated the imagination of young Black Americans who are committed to helping things die a little bit slower in this world. Imani Perry once said that imagination doesn’t erase the nightmare but helps repurpose it. Pluto and other southern women trap and drill artists craft realities where the violence of the world isn’t always squarely directly at women of color.
Pluto’s voice is soft and heavy. That of a young person who has experienced a lot. Someone old enough to craft their own prayers, but bold and young enough to ask God for something he probably doesn’t care about. The type of prayer that hasn’t yet been weighed down by a lifetime of waiting on God’s timing.
It is difficult to not think about Pluto and her relationship with time. Not only because she named herself after Atlanta rapper Future’s alter ego “Pluto,” but because her ascension to fame was relatively quick. Future is popularly understood of as one of the most influential trap artists because he pushed the use of a melodic flow over heavy bass and fast hi-hat drums to international success. Pluto didn’t have to continuously repair a dream so that it would remain light enough to carry. Fame came early on. In that way her story is less relatable. We don’t get the years of struggle. Quitting. Then the rebuilding of the dream. America has limited ways of appreciating Black girl’s success as more than triumph over rejection. The country may not see the lesson in her story. It may think Pluto didn’t earn her stardom or that she would appreciate it more had she struggled harder for it. They may believe that young Black girls can’t value the beauty that the world gives them for their gifts if they haven’t had at least some of their time stolen.
Pluto looked to the future. “My Collection” and “March Madness” are her favorite Future songs. Both are about drug life not simply as a strategy to make money in a world where Black people face limited opportunities, but also to move and feel outside of the logics of our current reality. Future’s work suggests that the violence done to Black people is an inherent part of our current world, and liberation cannot be found in reform and progress but rather in running towards the pain and seeing who or what comes out on the other end.
Pluto’s music isn’t as pessimistic as Future’s. In part because she doesn’t make as many overt formal political statements about issues such as police brutality, racialized poverty, and drug addiction. To understand why her music matters, you would have to listen for something else beyond direct critiques of the sociopolitical conditions that organize Black life. You must feel for how her oddly shaped narratives about women carrying guns to protect against being misgendered gives young girls alternative entry points into safety and living. Robin D.G. Kelley once said that “the most radical art is not protest art but works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling.” For Kelley it is not enough to simply critique what serves to undo us, but to cultivate alternative strategies of breathing.
Pluto takes us somewhere else. To somewhere that’s kind of a planet but not really. She embodies Future’s otherworldly persona and produces maps with routes that spaceships would only go if Black girls from the hood drove them.
This is not an attempt to get lost in the fantasy of it. Pluto still lives outside of Cop City. We are writing this while young Brown and Black kids in her city are marching because the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement just murdered another person. A death that the state deemed unceremonial and explained away as a narrative on what must happen if we want our country to remain safe and free. A story that momentarily reminds us of the horrors of our reality prior to us slipping back into the mundaneness of it all.
It may seem that young girls who rap about guns and scamming men may not offer much but entertainment that is shaped like momentary escape.
There is value in that.
This essay needed to be co-written to say what else may be there. There needed to be a Black girl on it. One who had lost more than the world had given her and spent nights driving bumping Pluto. A girl who has driven with her windows down so the world could see and hear what she was listening to in hopes that they’d learned something about the sound of Black girlhood. Or maybe they wouldn’t see, and there is beauty in that too. It’s not for everybody.
Pluto’s music is subversive in that it doesn’t straightforwardly aim to undo any system, but it has captivated the imagination of young Black Americans who are committed to helping things die a little bit slower in this world. Imani Perry once said that imagination doesn’t erase the nightmare but helps repurpose it. Pluto and other southern women trap and drill artists craft realities where the violence of the world isn’t always squarely directly at women of color.
There is honesty in that.
But she doesn’t walk us into a fantasy. The violence is in her music. She has crafted double entendres that rely on anti-queer sentiments. Her music is flawed in ways that most people are. Often unaware of their potential to do harm because they hurt. Part of our listening practice is learning to hear if loud, flawed, and imaginative Black girls can offer us intellectual entry points on how to move this world to somewhere else. Push back against the notion that negative performances and our flaws can’t tell us something about how desire, liberation, and making the most out of our bodies while they are still strong enough to carry our stories.
It is less about what Pluto says and more about the vibe that her music produces. Like other trap and drill rappers, her music is largely produced in minor keys to craft a dark atmosphere. It sounds like her name. Existing in the minor key requires an attention to minor sounds, and potentially minor feelings and figures. The noises that live in the undercurrents. Also, her music is largely constructed in double-time. This is when the tempo is played twice as fast, with notes being hit in half the time. To get a feel for this, count out loud and snap on the numbers. One and two and three and four. This is normal time. Now count and snap on the numbers again. One, two, three, four, one two, three, four. This feels a little more like double-time, you can sense the urgency. Pluto’s music does this so that the song itself can be experienced as slow and fast at the same time, depending on how and where you listen. In many ways, this is like Black women’s lives. Living in double-time isn’t just about doing multiple things at once but making contradictions not contradictions. If the song can be both slow and fast, then living in double-time demonstrates how Black women can be tough and soft, subversive and conservative, and on beat and outside of time all simultaneously.
For Black American girls, learning right from wrong is a lesson on safety. Sitting like a boy could mean taking up too much space, and sitting like a girl could mean inviting sexual attention. There are limited ways of following rules that govern you when those rules are products of systems that render you illegible. Even the respectable Black girls aren’t safe. To be respectable is no more liberating than being ratchet if the performances are both aimed at undermining the same racist patriarchy. The logic of both performances remains steady even when the expressions made seem unfamiliar.
This is why being in the minor key in double-time becomes useful. The performance is for the performance. It almost seems as if Pluto understood that no matter what pain the repercussions would cause, feeling out of this world was worth it. Pluto’s music largely insinuates that respectability and anti-respectability are simply boring. Her mind is oriented elsewhere.
We decided to write this together because we heard Pluto differently. When Karizma listens to “Pull Yo Skirt Up,” she hears a testimony. Like most testaments there is some selfish gain at the end of it. She hears a young girl who is loud about her financial independence. Someone who is worthy of having the world still slow down for her even though she lives a fast life. As a young girl who didn’t go against the rules because getting the approval of older Black women was one of the clearest paths to safety and status, Karizma heard a Black girl not afraid of the pain that comes from the breakup of you are from the expectations that the people love you have for you.
When she says “take you to pluto” Corey is reminded of the Nikki Giovanni poem, “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea,” where Giovanni says we are going to Mars for the reason we fall in love — it’s the only adventure. Having never been a Black girl nor to Mars, he speculates that maybe because Black women have created life and culture in cities that never really knew them, doing it out this world doesn’t seem as impossible as it should.
We both never really let go of the idea that Pluto may just be a reference to getting high. Maybe all songs are about a desire until the targeted audience hears something else. What we both hear beyond the guns and drugs is a Black girl using space-time to refuse the logics of a city that is in a country that is on a planet that has stolen time from her.
Pluto gives us a form of subversion that is less about undoing the violence that organizes Black women’s lives but embracing the liminal space they exist in. Having an alleged freedom within limited opportunity structures positions you behind time — trying to grab what is said to be yours. Being Black on Pluto isn’t just about leaving Earth but forming a different way to remember and tell time. The stories of how the years passed.
There’s a woman preparing an outfit for an interview that she’s unsure about with Pluto playing in the background. She throws up three fingers to represent the side of the city where the people know her the best. Again, maybe it’s just a song about some foolish desire that helps her get through the day. Maybe it makes it feel a little easier to grapple with being considered an alien on a planet where people are murdered on their own streets, in their own homes. We do know that the bass is so loud, you will feel something.
