We pride ourselves at The FADER on scouring the globe to introduce you to some of the most left-field music around. But in our monthly column Popping Off, Aimee Cliff takes the temperature of mainstream pop music.

Vaginas: in a world where porn is mainstream, they're not as shocking as they used to be—as long as you're just alluding to them in a sexual context. On the London leg of Miley Cyrus's Bangerz tour last year, I watched as she thrust hers forwards on the hood of a car. On "Work," Kelly Rowland sings you gotta put it in when we get it on, while Beyoncé says hers is sweetest in the middle on "Blow," and Lana Del Rey wants you to know hers tastes like Pepsi Cola. But vaginas, we all know, can have many other functions; and recently, two prominent popstars are proving just how shocking they still are by drawing on that fact.



Björk's Vulnicura album campaign began at the beginning of 2015 with artwork that showed an opening beaming from her chest, and the release of the video for album track "Family" made her visual metaphor even more explicit. As she sews up the gaping hole that splits her down the middle to the tune of Vulnicura's call-to-arms, Björk is visualizing what she described in the album's release notes as the "biological" process of heartbreak: "the wound and the healing of the wound." But, let's be real: it also looks like a vagina! Which is, of course, the anatomical source of the family unit that she mourns on "Family," following the breakdown of her relationship. Where do I go to make an offering, she sings, To mourn our miraculous triangle: father, mother, child.