Shenseea’s vulnerability was not something I expected on my morning scroll through Instagram. But there she was, baring it all, baring her soul to us. For the first time, Shenseea was vulnerable?
For all that Shenseea reveals on “Vulnerability,” there is a struggle happening throughout the song. She wants to be vulnerable. She wants to heal and open herself up emotionally. But her revelations are still shrouded in the defiance that has seemingly become her armour.
Across the three-minute track, she opens boxes that appear to have been tightly sealed for years. She speaks about family, motherhood, relationships, sex, abandonment, trust issues, her career and the criticism that has followed her success. Some wounds are revealed almost casually. Others clearly still hurt.
Perhaps the deepest is her relationship, or lack thereof, with her father.
Shenseea reveals that she never met him and says she was told that he wanted her mother to abort her. She believes he may have been married at the time. What makes that revelation even more painful is that the one person who could perhaps answer the questions she still has, her mother, is dead.
There is something particularly haunting about having questions about your own beginning and no longer having the person who can answer them.
Yet the tone of “Vulnerability” is not necessarily what one might expect from someone laying her wounds bare. Shenseea is still aggressive at times, still boastful and still very much defiant.
But that defiance has seemingly served her well.
It is the armour of a woman who has had to fight her way from humble beginnings into international stardom, through criticism of her transition from dancehall and the constant noise surrounding her career. Even here, while supposedly at her most vulnerable, she finds time to remind critics that neither her complexion nor “pretty privilege” can write, rap, sing or perform for her.
She wants to remove the armour, but she is still wearing it.
Perhaps nowhere is that internal conflict more interesting than in one of the song’s most provocative revelations: at 29, Shenseea says she has never experienced an orgasm with a man.
Naturally, that is one of the lines people are running with.
But the revelation becomes much more interesting when she immediately turns the lens on herself, wondering whether there is a mental block connected to something she heard or experienced years ago.
I didn’t hear a woman blaming men for failing to please her. I heard a woman realizing there may be something within herself that she needs to confront.
And that resonated.
Sex is hardly whispered about in Jamaican culture, and certainly not in dancehall. Women sing liberally about what they want sexually, while men boast endlessly about their ability to provide it. Listening to the music alone, you might assume everybody is out here having spectacular sex.
But it’s all a facade.
There are women who have never experienced an orgasm, women disconnected from their bodies and women who struggle to communicate what they want sexually. Beneath all the bravado surrounding sex can exist shame, trauma, fear and discomfort that we rarely talk about with the same enthusiasm.
So Shenseea’s admission feels bigger to me than the salacious headline it can easily become.
Elsewhere, she speaks about betrayal by someone who helped her escape the ghetto, while still acknowledging the good that person did for her. She examines her romantic relationships and even identifies patterns in her own behaviour, including her tendency to become toxic when things are going well.
Again, there is that contradiction. Gratitude and resentment. Confidence and insecurity. Wanting intimacy and simultaneously protecting herself from it.
This is not someone presenting herself as healed. These are the observations of someone beginning to recognize her own patterns.
That is why the chorus may be the most important part of “Vulnerability.” Shenseea is not announcing that she has become vulnerable. She is asking to be taught how.
That distinction matters.
And if Shenseea genuinely continues down that road, I think it could unlock something powerful in her artistry.
Great artistes do not connect with people simply because they can sing, write or perform exceptionally well. The deepest connection happens when an artiste manages to tell an emotional truth so honestly that someone listening recognizes themselves in it.
There are flashes of that truth all over “Vulnerability.”
The absent father. The unanswered questions for a dead mother. The complicated relationship with intimacy. The distrust. The tendency to leave before she can be hurt. The dependence on success for peace. The anger that still sits alongside the desire to heal.
Shenseea has not arrived at vulnerability yet.
But maybe, for the first time, she has stopped pretending she does not need it.
And that might be the most vulnerable thing she has done.
