Deepthroat by CupcakKe (2015)

Elizabeth Harris was eighteen when she released Deepthroat on 17 November 2015 on her own channel, a month after a first single called Vagina, which tells you she was working through the syllabus in order. The two songs went viral together. Deepthroat is a step-by-step guide to oral sex on a man, rapped with a cheerfulness that makes the explicitness funnier rather than harder, and it is explicit to a degree no major label would have cleared, which is presumably why no major label was asked.

The video reached 23 million views on YouTube before the platform removed it in 2018; it was later restored, like a confiscated textbook handed back at the end of term. By then the song had done its work: it made her famous (her self-released debut album, Audacious, followed in October 2016) and it started an argument that is still running about how much of the explicit female rap of the late 2010's traces back to her.

Its afterlife is that argument. When WAP debuted at number one in 2020, the question was no longer whether a woman could rap like this but who had done it first, and CupcakKe's fans have the date to hand. The song also remains the most searched-for thing she has made, by people who are not always looking for music.