Megan Thee Stallion and Saweetie are just two stars who have recently leveraged their cachet for fast-food marketing. Illustration: Maria Contreras Aravena The commercial opens in a modern-day Wild West. We are at Thee Stallion Saloon. A lone tumbleweed drifts past the gleaming motorcycles and glimmering neon signs outside. Honoring the saloon’s cinematic position as a locus of camaraderie and conflict, the ad follows a familiar script.
The spicy-sweet Hottie Sauce, inspired by the Hot Girl herself and intended to be eaten on pretty much anything, is a vibrant addition to a long line of fast-food marketing tactics that have centered on Black musicians.
The earliest vanguards of Black-celebrity-fronted fast-food franchises were Mahalia Jackson’s Glori-fied Chicken and James Brown’s Gold Platter chain. Both came and went in the late 1960s and ’70s, and attempted to leverage the clout and wealth of a well-respected star as a buttress against the economic peril that plagues the restaurant industry.
In the book Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, Psyche Williams-Forson formulates a counter-history of Black “chicken ladies,” women who found, over the course of several centuries, that the cooking, frying, and selling of chicken proved to be a source of “economic freedom and independence.