Musezine
/ˌmjuz.ˈzin/
The Body Language of the Worst Girl in America
Everybody in the underground pop music scene is waiting with bated breath for Slayyyter’s new album WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, which is coming out next week. Slayyyter started off in the y2k-revival corner of the hyperpop scene alongside Ayesha Erotica, quickly becoming, as her Spotify description states “an erotic electronic pop femme fatale”. With her third album, STARFUCKER, Slayyyter already established herself as an artist who can curate a distinct & coherent visual identity, but with WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA (WGIA) she has gone the extra mile and created a cinematic universe beyond anything I have seen in music.
STARFUCKER was all Hollywood glamour, nu-wave interior design, silk and latex. Aesthetically, WGIA is its antithesis. It’s guns and Marlboro Reds, animal skins, plaid and jeans. As she told FADER “I’m not a Hollywood star (…) I’m quite the opposite. I’m dirty, with messy hair, and Missourian”. The WGIA cinematic universe (the WGIACU, if you will) is fantastically original & fresh. Also in the same interview, Slayyyter says “This project is so near and dear to me in a way that albums, projects, and visuals have not been in the past, because it feels so reflective of my actual life story. There’s so much of me as a person”. Nostalgia is trendy these days, and for Slayyyter it’s a youth with iPods, skater boys, messy nights out and middle America in all its violent and unsanitised glory. The fashion remains frayed, vintage and DIY even when approaching something glamorous.
The visual identity of WGIA has some definite trappings of a post-brat music landscape. Slayyyter has adopted a signature font and colour for her album title and logo: Futura PT Demi Oblique in a saturated bright red. ‘Worst girl in America’, like ‘brat’, is a label that can take several interpretations - all of which Slayyyter explores in the music videos (MVs) for her singles. The ‘worst girl in America’ or a ‘brat’ is a persona, or several, that you can take on. You probably have the right clothes in your wardrobe already but, unlike brat, the costumes are diverse and plentiful.
The mastermind behind these personas is Slayyyter herself. Through her own fashion and her body language, she brings the world to life. How she interacts with the world around her completely changes scene to scene. Across the MVs, Slayyyter consolidates femininity with masculinity, messiness with elegance, and stillness with rage. She isn’t trying to be a perfect pop princess nor is her subversiveness simply a coy wink-wink to the audience. Her vision is uncompromisingly her own. She doesn’t have a curvy hourglass figure or the now more trendy fatless ozempic look. She is tall and fit, with broad shoulders, thick thighs and big boobs. She is never trying to shrink herself and come off as a dainty 5’-nothing girl-woman. As she moves on-screen she is alluring and sexy, but at the drop of a dime she can be intimidating or disturbing. With this blog I want to showcase the range of body language Slayyyter uses to communicate ideas and themes in her MVs. As a long-time stan, I also want to shamelessly promote her album.
Watching the music videos in their tracklist order reveals glimpses of a chronological narrative. There is no audio other than the music, so the viewer has to interpret the scenes for themselves. This means that the character(s) that Slayyyter plays are also unnamed; for the sake of convenience, I’ll refer to them all as ‘the worst girl in America’ or ‘Cathy’. The tracklist is as follows:
DANCE…
BEAT UP CHANEL$
CANNIBALISM!
OLD TECHNOLOGY
CRANK
The woman we are introduced to in the minute-long intro of DANCE… is unlike any of the characters that follow. Despite all of the worst girl in America’s personas and substance abuse, her self-assuredness & fearlessness are unwavering throughout. The story begins with Cathy meekly approaching her home at night, climbing through her bedroom window, and trying to escape the grasp of her angry father (or boyfriend?). The switch in character comes when she locks herself in her room and, as this man bangs at her door, picks up a shotgun and aims it there. Her expression loses its fear to make way for determination. She pulls the trigger and instantly the scene changes. The bass comes in and we are transported to a new world.
Dancing
The lyrics of DANCE… come in at the beginning of the ‘dancefloor’ scene. Slayyyter stares directly into the camera with a confident stature that sets the tone for the rest of her videos. She looks like fucking Wonder Woman. Her dancing is carefully choreographed, but delivered with a force that belies a power close to breaking free.
In contrast to her measured, weighty movements in DANCE…, in BEAT UP CHANEL$ (BUC) Cathy dances with a level of freedom that sobriety does not allow. No longer looking at the camera, or anything for that matter, the strobe lights and other dancers give the impression that she moves weightlessly.
Transforming again, Slayyyter is absolutely hipnotic in CANNIBALISM! as a burlesque dancer. And no that wasn’t a misspelling; just look at her!! She still exudes power and control, but her aggression is replaced with elegance. This scene likely exists outside of the canon events of the WGIACU, however. Elegance, as I will expand upon later, is a quality that the worst girl in America repeatedly aspires to within the chaos of her world, but only here achieves without difficulty or a reversion to more erratic movements. Unlike the other burlesque dancers in CANNIBALISM! Cathy has no audience - we see a superimposition of her navel in place of the slimy men.
It would be criminal to discuss Slayyyter’s dancing without highlighting her signature move, the ‘Slayyyter Shuffle’.
The move itself compliments the ever-changing character of the worst girl in America. In DANCE…, she performs it with power and fury. In OLD TECHNOLOGY (OT), she performs a more minimal version of the move while seated with a cigarette between her fingers. She shakes her head concurrently in the erratic way that, as I will explain, typifies a core tenet of her character. In CRANK, her movements are stiff and she comes close to losing her balance.
Messiness
While we never again see fear like she displays in the intro to DANCE… , a tenet of being the worst girl in America is getting fucked the fuck up. The beginning of BEAT UP CHANEL$ to the end of OLD TECHNOLOGY could be considered one long bender. Cigarettes and alcohol are everywhere and in OT she quite explicitly smokes meth.
Periodically across the videos a more erratic character comes out in her body language. “The Khia Asylum? No girl, I’m in the psych ward”, Slayyyter joked with FADER. It’s present in BUC, and comes to the fore in CANNIBALISM!, even during her burlesque dancing sequence.
The harsh, erratic instability in Cathy’s movements strengthens in the following MVs. Some of her dancing in OT is clearly meth-induced. In CRANK, Cathy stands in a lush hardwood-furnished room surrounded by taxidermied animals; she wears a mismatched animal fur bodice, and fittingly her movements too devolve into something animalistic.
The worst girl in America’s drink & drug intake has other consequences beyond the visible tweaking. The MV for CRANK represents the aftermath or the hangover. Cathy is alone in the woods, sunglasses protecting her from the light, screaming and pointing her rifle at everything that moves, including the camera.
CRANK goes on to show Slayyyter at her most vulnerable since the intro of DANCE… . We see her stumbling into a bathroom and falling ungracefully to the floor, nausea taking over her body.
The final scene depicts Cathy again in a vulnerable position. She semi-consciously swayyys at a dock at night with the illusive Bunnyman behind her. She looks like she is about to lose her balance until she spins towards Bunnyman.
Dominance
In group scenes, the worst girl in America wordlessly asserts herself as the leader. She remains in the centre, with the others in the scene following and supporting her with complete faith and devotion. Even when the dancers fall and writhe over her she does not retreat and allow herself to be consumed by them. There is a passive magnetism to the worst girl in America: a magnetism she doesn’t rely on nor is she overwhelmed by.
What is all the more striking is that in BUC the people she leads are a horde of gruff, threatening, solemn men. Her body language matches theirs in their march to nowhere in particular at dusk, and again when a mud brawl breaks out.
Bunnyman, as I have dubbed him, is a tall unsettling figure in a bulky white rabbit costume. He first appears in CANNIBALISM! and plays a role in Slayyyter’s subsequent MVs. In terms of body language, he creates an interesting juxtaposition with the worst girl in America by being completely still. Her relationship with Bunnyman is unclear, and potentially represents several ideas in conflict. In CANNIBALISM! Bunnyman is Cathy’s accomplice as she tortures and eventually kills a man. In their first scene together she sports black bunny ears, compounding a sense of comradery between the two. In the first shot, Slayyyter stands hands on hips with a kind of casual dominance, in heels that put her on a height with Bunnyman. The camera points up at her from below - a strategy used time and again to emphasise the worst girl in America’s presence and power. In the second shot, she takes up space and blocks the light. She stands motionless and expressionless like Bunnyman himself. In potentially the most upsetting scene of the WGIACU, Cathy throws up blood from the man she has just killed in a sterile blue room while Bunny stands in the corner and … stares. Is he an accomplice? A pervert? Covertly in control of Cathy? These questions arise both here and in the final scene of CRANK but remain unanswered.
Their dynamic takes a 180 in OLD TECHNOLOGY where Slayyyter becomes a sadistic dominatrix. Her legs steal the show, teasing both Bunnyman and the viewer. She enjoys being in total control and humiliating the beta Bunnyman who stays bound to a mattress. Rabbits are rich symbols for sexuality, and again Slayyyter is wearing the black bunny ears - they seem to symbolise sexual dominance. Contrast that with the white twisted angel outfit she wears in CANNIBALISM! or the white bunny ears she wears at the end of CRANK - the clothes’ purity and innocence goes hand in hand with a possible subservience to Bunnyman. As conflicting as the image of Bunnyman in OT is with CANNIBALISM! and CRANK, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was consenting to, and getting off on, being tortured by Slayyyter.
Masculinity, Violence, and Rage
Slayyyter tells Culted, “Over the past couple of years, I’ve used music as an outlet for anger … I feel less angry after making some of these songs and screaming my head off”. DANCE… is, unsurprisingly, the most radio-friendly dance track of the singles, but her rage creeps in in the chorus as she essentially tells a man to leave her the fuck alone. The bridge of the song ends with this epic impassioned scream that feels both cathartic and blood-curdling, and in the music video Slayyyter sells the feeling, yelling in pain while covered in blood on the dancefloor.
The worst girl in America is all about her 2nd Amendment rights. Cathy in the intro to DANCE… picks up and aims her shotgun hesitantly, but firing that first shot unlocks something within her. In BUC she does some shooting practice with a pistol and a Chanel bag as her target. Is this a metaphor for denouncing unattainable luxury products in her rough, shabby world? There is certainly a dialogue in the WGIACU around aspiring to luxury, social conformity and feminine beauty, but that’s for another blog post.
The frenzied, bloodthirsty woman in CRANK is a seasoned shooter. Armed now with a scoped rifle - she prowls the forest hunting an unknown target. Whoever her target is, she must fucking hate him. The chorus of CRANK is shouted, not sung, and her rage in the MV is so great you get the impression that she shakes the ground as she marches and that her rifle/baseball bat is going to shatter in her grip. The dynamic shots are juxtaposed with stiller shots where the worst girl in America turns into a proud soldier.
Slayyyter also wasn’t going to pass up on an opportunity to create phallic imagery with her rifle.
Beyond guns, the worst girl in America subverts gender norms in more subtle ways. In BUC she is a literal gymbunny: she lifts weights in the otherwise macho environment of a dingy outdoor gym. In CANNIBALISM! she’s a mechanic with her leg stretched onto a car bonnet à la Megan Fox in Transformers. The CANNIBALISM! MV ends with an understated credits scene where she is spread languidly on a chair reading a magazine and smoking another cig. The aperture of the shot purposefully presents Cathy taking up space, and the credits DIRECTED BY $LAYYYTER is the ultimate flex. What can’t this woman do?
Cathy’s masculine mannerisms, her violence, and her rage are encapsulated in flashes of an interaction she has with her reflection in OLD TECHNOLOGY. Her speed and focus fluctuates greatly: first she casually waves a finger gun at herself, then passionately cusses herself out, then finally squares up while looking on the verge of passing out.
Stillness & Elegance
The worst girl in America at points aspires to rise above her rough material conditions by disassociating into elegance. The stillness in the following shots are not validated by the music nor are they not lingered upon. These ballet-like poses fail for her - she reverts straight from this momentary stillness back to erratic movements. Just compare the stills below to her head-shaking and animalism above from the same scenes.
The most rewarding parts of Slayyyter’s hectic MVs are the moments when she can stand still without strain or effort. In BUC she bears a sombre expression as crackling fireworks colour the skies pink, she lights a cigarette without urgency then gives herself over to the music. She places herself in the eye of the storm where everything is calm and the beauty of the storm itself can finally be admired.
In OLD TECHNOLOGY her stillness creates a different effect. She stands in these desolate urban locations wearing her trailer park attire. She has her stuffed ferret over her shoulder and fur coat dragging on the ground as if they were game she caught. In the midst of the cracktivities and BDSM of OT these shots remind us of the control and power that Cathy exerts in this world. In moments like these Slayyyter makes sure to frame herself in the centre with the camera looking up at her from below.
The final scene, where Cathy sways by the pier at night, uses stillness to unsettle the viewer. This eerie note does not seem to be the end of the story however. The newly-released WGIA album trailer includes scenes from new sets in addition to new scenes from the sets used in the MVs. I pray, iPod in hand, that there are more MVs to come or even, in my wildest dreams, a short film.
I am endlessly impressed by how Slayyyter has cultivated the WGIACU with a unique and personal visual identity. Between her dancing, her threatening, and her crash outs, she has a boundless commitment to exploring the nature of the world she has created through her various personas. Slayyyter has proven herself to be a talented singer, actor, director, and overall artist. I can’t stress enough how much of a creative genius this woman is: she is the artist and the muse, Da Vinci and Mona Lisa, Josh Safdie and Julia Fox. WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA is out on the 27th of March and you can visit her website or read her recent interviews linked below if you wish x
- C 26 March 2026