"Thot Shit" (known as "Thot Ish" in the radio edit) is a song by American rapper Megan Thee Stallion. The first solo release following her debut studio album Good News (2020) and the lead single from her compilation album Something for Thee Hotties (2021), the song was produced by LilJuMadeDaBeat and OG Parker and was released on June 11, 2021, through 1501 Certified Entertainment and 300 Entertainment. An uptempo song with heavy bass, it began as a freestyle by Megan Thee Stallion, and was inspired by her desire to reclaim the term "thot" from men who used it in a sexist manner. The song is performed from the perspective of her "raw and aggressive" alter ego, Tina Snow.
"Thot Shit" was nominated for Best Rap Performance at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards. The Aube Perrie-directed music video for "Thot Shit" was released on the same day as the song. It was inspired by conservative backlash against her and Cardi B's 2020 song "WAP", and horror films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and The Shining (1980). In it, Megan Thee Stallion and several other women follow around a hypocritical conservative politician and twerk wherever he goes to exact revenge on him for posting a sexist comment underneath Megan Thee Stallion's "Body" video on YouTube.
Background and composition
Over a month before the release of "Thot Shit", several sci-fi-themed posts on Megan Thee Stallion's social media showed her in a "regeneration tank" and announced that she would be "recharging". A week before "Thot Shit" was released, she posted a CGI animation of herself announcing her return as her alter ego, Tina Snow. Megan Thee Stallion later posted a link to pre-save the song, and revealed the release date, title, and cover of "Thot Shit", which shows a shirtless man collapsed on a checkered tile floor next to a plate of food, a magazine featuring an image of Megan Thee Stallion, and a box of "Tina O's" cereal, with three women in white patent leather platform heels standing over him.
According to Megan Thee Stallion, "Thot Shit" began as a freestyle. After Shawn "Source" Jarrett, the song's engineer, asked for beats from producer OG Parker, he and producer Lil Ju met up at Parker's house in Atlanta to produce "about seven beats" together before sending them to Jarrett. Megan Thee Stallion chose to use one of them for "Thot Shit". The song was released at midnight on June 11, 2021. It is her first solo single of 2021 and her first solo release following the release of her debut studio album, Good News. It was also included on her 2021 mixtape Something for Thee Hotties as its lead single.
After the song's release, black TikTok creators went on "strike" and refused to choreograph a dance to the song. The strike was organized in response to black creators previously having not been credited or compensated for creating trending dances on the app which white TikTok users profited off of, and was intended to show that black users were essential to the success of the app. Dances created by white TikTok users to the song were heavily mocked online.
"Thot Shit" is an uptempo song with a "booming" bassline performed by Megan Thee Stallion as her "raw and aggressive" alter ego, Tina Snow, who first appeared on her 2018 EP of the same name and was inspired American rapper Pimp C's alter ego Tony Snow. The song was inspired by Megan Thee Stallion's desire to reclaim pejoratives used by men against women, such as "thot" and "hoe". The song's lyrics are described as "confidently risque" "self-confident", "sexually liberating", and "hit[ting] hard while also being playful". The chorus gives "twerk instructions". In the song, she references her three wins at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards for Best New Artist, Best Rap Performance, and Best Rap Song with the line "I'm the shit per the Recording Academy". She also references her scheduled graduation from Texas Southern University in 2021 and the 1940 film Pinocchio, and quotes the 1998 miniseries The Temptations with the line, "Ain't nobody come to see you, Otis".