How FKA Twigs Uses MAGDALENE As A Metaphor

10:41 · 1,523 words of transcript · watch on YouTube

1. The album's title figure is Mary Magdalene, who in the gospels followed Jesus, was present at the crucifixion and was the first to witness the resurrection, yet history remembers her as a repentant prostitute.
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2. That reputation traces to one misreading. Gregory the Great in 591 conflated her with a different woman in Luke, and although Pope Paul VI corrected it in 1969, fourteen centuries had already fixed the label in popular culture.
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3. The parallel the record draws is about authority over a story: Magdalene never had control of hers, and FKA twigs uses her as an allegory for reclaiming her own after a public breakup.
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4. The relationship behind it was with Robert Pattinson, and the scrutiny that followed, including from his fans, is part of what the album is answering.
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5. In 2017 she fell ill and learned she had six tumours in her womb, which the video compares in size to small fruits.
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6. The illness damaged her confidence as a woman and strained the relationship, with her partner left alone while she was hospitalised and recovering.
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7. The quiet tragedy she admits is that she never told him how isolated she felt, so the fallout came out of a silence that transparency could have prevented.
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8. The production pulls glitch pop, baroque hip hop, EDM and jazz into short tracks, with a ticking-clock figure on one of them set against a song about a relationship running out of time.
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9. The co-producers are all men, including Jack Antonoff, Skrillex, Oneohtrix Point Never and most audibly Nicolas Jaar, which the video reads as her exerting control rather than ceding it, since the production never competes with her voice.
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10. The album maps onto the stages of grief across its tracks, with acceptance of the ending never arriving, so the story is left still being written.
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