The Lyric Review: Female Energy – Willow Smith

At 14 years of age Willow Smith does a lot more than just whip her hair. In a few short years, we have watched this young lady go from simply sharing her appetite for wonder to exploring topics in a way that people rarely share. It is remarkable to watch her growth and there is no better song to highlight that growth than ”Female Energy”.

Listening to “Female Energy” makes you feel as though you’re meditating somewhere above the Milky Way. The sound is tranquil with futuristic elements, and some of Willow’s ad-libs are reminiscent of spiritual chanting. It’s one of those songs on your playlist that you just relax and vibe to.  Lyrically, the song is beautiful and contains a refreshing amount of thought and depth.  It explores the process of letting your own energy manifest while learning how to let go.

But let’s dig a little deeper into it.

I just landed in another atmosphere

I’m just floating, in a stain steel sphere

I bet you have questions, like where did I come from

I know, I come from that planet that hit Tiamat

Years ago (4x)

I do my flows and then I get so lost

Light just take my sphere to go (4x)

To the top of the pyramid let’s save the world like this

Conversing with light bodies, but really they’re all apart of me

Let’s get the whip and go, ‘cuz I’m tired of this solar ring

Female Energy is a tale about love. Willow uses the creation story of Tiamat to illustrate the spoils and complexities of love gone awry.

There are two common stories about Tiamat.

---

The first is the Babylonian Epic of Creation known as the Enuma Elish.

In this creation story Tiamat is a goddess who represents primordial chaos. She becomes the mother of the Universe by giving birth to the first generation of gods.  Ultimately, she is defeated by Marduk who uses her body to form Earth and the heavens.

---

The second story of Tiamat is a planetary theory.

It is believed that the planet Marduk and its moons collided with and split Tiamat into two halves. One half was said to have become the Earth while the other half was smashed into smaller pieces and became an asteroid belt.

---

These two accounts of who/what Tiamat is provide another layer of understanding for the first verse. One interpretation that can be drawn from these accounts is that two people/entities/ ideas that once had mutual feelings of love/understanding/cohesion collided and resulted in one person being thrown out of balance.
Although she was thrown for a loop, she accepts and owns the differences that have come to fruition and is strengthened by both that sense of acceptance and her defensive, “stain steel sphere” barrier she puts up emotionally. She alludes to that latter half more in the hook and ending. The ability to accept things for what they are isn’t always easy, but when Willow allows her emotions to flow free, she gets lost between what was and what is. Instead of burying her emotions, however, she puts her energy into illuminating what’s before her. This propels her out of the emotional depths that entrap her. She realizes that sometimes we project the things we want onto other people.  Sometimes what we project doesn’t exist within others, but instead only exist within ourselves. This projection keeps people trapped in a cycle until they are fed up and ready to leave.

It’s really out of my control

How you feel is not my problem

I do not want you to go, but I don’t know how to stop you

Cuz you gone do what you got to do

And what I do is not your problem

Just let me let me love you

Stop trying to make it complicated

As a sample of Jhene Aiko’s “The Pressure“, the last stanzas are much more straightforward and frank.  They deepen the sense of acceptance by taking the person through a few stages.

The first step is admittance with a smidgen of denial. You admit to yourself that the way another person feels is out of your control and ultimately not your problem, but even with that in mind, you still contemplate ways to change the other person.

The second step is flipping your emotional switch. To stop yourself from trying, you pretend to stop caring. You don’t care how they feel and don’t want to reopen the floodgates of emotion.

The third step is true acceptance.  This is where you can admit that you still care, but you no longer have the desire to waste your energy. One important underlying message is that just because two people love each other, does not mean that they need to be together.

Willow goes deep to show the relationships between love, dependency, and the ability to let go in this piece. Although it is about love, the lessons can be applicable in many aspects of life. Breaking away from something should not leave you broken. Like Tiamat, those experiences allow for you to create something new. Female energy is the energy of creation, after all.  It is this energy that allows us to be pulled and stretched to our limits while simultaneously regenerating ourselves and producing new life.  Female energy is love.  And though it is not always pretty, it’s always worth it.

– Indigo B.

If there are any songs you would like to see featured in “The Lyric Review”, let us know in the comments below.