I want to take a minute to
reflect on the representations of race, specifically, the representations of
African-American blackness, in US pop culture in 2011. In several blog posts,
and a few of my published works, I’ve argued that stereotypical ghetto-black
masculinity (e.g., the “thug” or “gangsta” identity that is most commonly
trafficked in mainstream US hip hop) has become so thoroughly co-opted that it
no longer functions as a symbol of resistance, oppositionality, radical
politics or aesthetics, etc—representationally, affectively, aesthetically,
“thug life” is no longer something that immediately strikes fear into the
hearts of 21st-C bourgeois parents, politicians, or culture
warriors. To be absolutely clear: I’m not saying that things have gotten better
for actual African Americans, or that anti-black racism has in any way been
ameliorated (in fact, I think these shifts make anti-black racism more
insidious, more difficult to identify, and more firmly entrenched). Representations
of a certain kind of blackness have been co-opted in ways that don’t actually
benefit African-Americans as a whole, or anti-racist projects in general. The
“cultural value” or symbolism of a certain “controlling image” of black
masculinity has shifted; we’ve left the classic “Love & Theft” logic of 20thc
white hipness for a new, postmillennial economy of racial cultural
value/semiotics.
There’s some pretty solid
evidence for this argument about the shifting racial-representational economies
in the mainstream media in 2011. In this post, I want to briefly survey a few
different indices of this shift to what I call elsewhere “postmillennial black
hipness.”
Radical Third-World Woman of Color is the “New Black”
The
appeal of “black” culture for (bourgeois) white (male) audiences was its
apparent oppositionality; now that this very stereotypically “oppositional’
black masculinity has been thoroughly co-opted by the culture industry, white
hipsters need to find new symbols with which to demonstrate their radical
chic—I mean, “cred.” I discuss this extensively in my article on Kanye West and
Shepard Fairey. What’s notable about the cultural/political milieu of 2011 is
the way this same logic of postmillennial hipness got seriously mainstreamed
in/by mainstream media comparisons between OWS and the Arab Spring. OWS
protestors, who are overwhelmingly white (and majority male), were compared,
and sometimes compared themselves, not to African-American civil rights
movements, but to various recent Middle-Eastern (who I’m assuming are not uniformly
“Arab” in ethnicity…) and North African anti-government movements. This is
epitomized in Time magazine’s cover illustration of its’ Person of the
Year, “The Protestor”—an image rendered, notably, by Fairey, in the style of
his other postmillennial portraits of radicalized non-Western women of color
(which I discuss in the article above).
The
image conflates white, overwhelmingly male American OWS protestors with
purportedly “Arab” protestors and revolutionaries (let’s not forget how bloody
things got in, for example, Libya and Syria), via an image that calls on the
“controlling image” of the radicalized “Third-World” woman of color.
Though the cover is based on a photo of an American OWS protestor (which is not
to say that she’s necessarily white, or necessarily native-born), the image
turns on the slippage between the OWS protestor’s anti-teargas protection (the
bandana and hat covering almost her entire face) and Western images of “the
Muslim veil.” It is also interesting that, given the overwhelming
majority of protestors, both in the US and worldwide, have been men,
Fairey and Time chose to portray “the protestor” as a woman. This
choice again, I think, rides on the easy homology between the anti-teargas
armor this specific woman wore, and “the Muslim veil.” The easiest way to
signify “Third-World difference” (to use Cherie Moraga’s term) is via the
bodies/images of women.
Above
all, though, the takeaway from this image is the fact that there exists a
general commonsense notion that the epitome of radical, oppositional,
counter-hegemonic, anti-establishment politics/practices/identities is not a
black man, but a non-Western (preferably Muslim) woman. It’s as if the
very image, the very idea of a “Third-World” woman self-evidently stands
opposed to everything conventionally “American,” hegemonic, etc. It is as if
being a purportedly Muslim woman is itself a form of “protest.” What this view
overlooks is the fact that the very idea of ‘Third-World difference,’ the
very notion of the ‘radical’ or ‘oppositional’ non-Western woman is itself a
thoroughly Western, hegemonic, patriarchal idea. This image of the
radicalized non-Western woman of color is not opposed to Western hegemony—it is Western het-patriarchy’s own
fantasy. This cover is the equivalent of Brendan Frasier and friends
destroying business machines to the tune of “Fuck Tha Police”: it is white
d00ds appropriation of their own stereotypes about non-whites in order to
demonstrate their elite status among white d00ds. As an LATimes blogger noted
in a critique of this cover, “Questioning authority never looked more corporate
or conventional”.
Drake and Black “Skeptical Melancholy”
Philosopher
Robert Gooding-Williams has argued that the other side of the “black people are
more strongly and immediately connected to their bodies” stereotype is the
allocation of “skeptical melancholy”—i.e., doubtable connection to one’s body,
or the inability to get out of one’s “mind” and have contact with one’s
body—solely to whites (or rather, solely to white men). He defines
“skeptical melancholy” as, for example, “loss of intimacy with existence” (50),
or as “ the privately felt melancholy of a skeptic, doubtful of his existence
and dissociated from his body” (54). So, for example, Descartes says “I think
therefore I am”: he is certain that he exists as a thinking thing, but
try as he might, he can’t be certain that he has a body. He has to remain
skeptical about his embodied existence. Such skepticism is melancholic in the
Freudian sense because the body is perceived as a “lost” object. For Freud,
“melancholia” is the inability to “get over” loss. In the second Meditation,
Descartes first thinks he is most certain of his corporeal existence, only to
then realize that he cannot be certain of his corporeal existence. Corporeality
is literally “lost” in Descartes’ own argument. White corporeal skepticism is
melancholic because, as Gooding-Williams argues, whites wish for and long
after immediate bodily pleasure and sensation…and that’s why they attempt
to appropriate stereotypical blackness, to re-connect them, like blacks, to
corporeality, pleasure, etc. A consequence of this distribution of corporeal
immediacy to blacks and skeptical melancholy to whites is that, as
Gooding-Williams argues, blacks never get to make what are perceived to be
legitimate claims to intellectual skepticism. As Gooding-Williams explains,
“the skeptic cannot be black, for then he would not want for the
blackness that supplies intimacy” (54). There is no room, in the logic of
traditional white hipness, for black skeptical melancholy; it is, to use
Gooding-Williams’s terms, “a Jim Crow version of the human capacity for
skepticism” (54). Certainly black
people continually exhibit intellectual skepticism, and, believe it or not,
some black people are quite disconnected from and awkward in their bodies. But the popular imagination erases those two
quite salient facts so that whites can keep on remedying their own issues by
appropriating their mistaken stereotypes of black embodiment.
There
is no room in the popular imagination for black skeptical melancholy, that is,
until Drake. This is key: Whether or not Drake actually expresses or discusses
skeptical melancholy (in the above-defined sense), it is a common view among
white critics and fans that he does. Again: I’m not talking about Drake’s
actual work, his own ideas or experiences. I’m talking about the way Drizzy’s
work is received and interpreted by mainstream white audiences…which may
or may not be accurate, nuanced interpretations of his work. (I would like to
spend some time slogging through the songs and the videos to see if they give
us any ground for this interpretation, but that’s for another post.) A really
solid and telling example of this interpretation is this article from Jon Pareles
in The New York Times. Calling on all the standard characterizations of
“skeptical melancholy” that we see in the Gooding-Williams chapter (lack of
trust, suspicion, floating voice, “impersonal” lack of connection, digital
instruments implying lack of immediacy/authenticity, isolation, etc.), Pareles
says:
The
rapper Drake doesn’t trust himself. He’s proud of his success, ambitious about
his music, thoroughly messed up about women and suspicious of all his newfound
prerogatives. His voice floats amid anxious, impersonal keyboards and
computerized drums; he sounds as isolated as he feels “with fame on my mind and
my girl on my nerves.”
So here we have a white rock
critic arguing that what’s great about Drake is that he’s disconnected from
embodied connection (to music, to himself, to the women he courts), and
traditionally “skeptical” in several ways (lack of trust, suspicion,
isolation). According to Pareles’s interpretation, Drizzy is famous, he sold
out, he’s not “authentically” connected to himself, to women, to his music,
etc. In fact, “with fame on my mind and my girl on my nerves,” he’s more
affectively wrapped up in his own thoughts/worries than he is affectively
connected to his sex drive. Here we have a white person locating, in Drizzy’s
work, a form of black skeptical melancholy. Importantly, while white hipness
frames blackness as the “cure” to white skeptical melancholy that then allows
“rehabilitated” white d00ds pop culture success, Pareles’s interpretation of
Drake couches black skeptical melancholy as the result of excessive pop
success. This is a near total inversion of the logic of traditional white
hipness. What this inversion shows us is that, in the popular/mainstream/white
imagination, blackness = pop culture success = alienation—i.e., stereotypical
“blackness” no longer represents the ‘cure’ to skeptical melancholy.[1]
The content and function of stereotypical black masculinity in pop music has
fundamentally shifted. …Which is why “resistance” and “oppositionality” get
expressed in terms of “Third-World feminine difference,” as we saw above. This
change in the content and function of stereotypical blackness in pop music also
has implications for the reception and interpretation of work by white female
rappers.
White Girls, Rapping, and the (Black Masculine)
“Soul” of Hip Hop
In
contemporary American pop music, stereotypical black masculinity isn’t what it
once was. Or rather: the stereotype of the “thug” is still more or less the
same, but the relative value of this stereotype to whites has changed. Mainstream
whites still eat it up; hipsters, however, in order to demonstrate their elite
status among whites, need to repudiate mainstream white’s taste for
“thug life.” This opens the door for white women to be given credence as
oppositional, rebellious subjects.
I think there are two layers here: (1) Twee white women, like Zoe Deschanel and
Ellie Goulding, who effect a very traditional white femininity; and (2) White
female rappers, who appropriate stereotypical blackness, both in the form of
black masculinity and black femininity. [This is also a good place to ask about
the absence of queerness…] So, regarding (1): If traditional white hipness is
no longer “hip,” but mainstreamed, then this means that stereotypical “thug”
black masculinity is the very mainstream against which white hipsters are
distinguishing themselves. What’s the traditional opposite of hard black
masculinity? Twee white femininity. Regarding (2), which I think is more
complicated and more interesting: While mainstream white audiences might not
tolerate the dissociation of “hip hop” and “black masculine cool,” hipsters are
looking to do precisely this. The distinction between white mainstream and
white hipster audiences is what is missing from Toure’s recent article,[2]
again in the Times, about white female rappers. Considering whether pop
music audiences are ready to give white women credence as rappers, Toure argues
that
There
is nothing about the skills required to be an M.C. that makes it impossible for
white women to rhyme. It’s not that their mouths can’t do it. The true barrier
to entry is that there is an essence at the center of hip-hop that white women
have an extraordinarily hard time exuding or even copying. For many Americans,
black male rappers are entrancing because they give off a sense of black
masculine power — that sense of strength, ego and menace that derives from
being part of the street — or because of the seductive display of black male
cool.
He’s correct that the matter
is not aesthetic, but political: white women have a hard time believably
performing stereotypical “thug” black masculinity, and one might argue, black
masculinity generally. However, “black male cool” is no longer seductive to
hipsters and other culturally ‘elite’ whites. So, white women’s perceived
inability to embody/perform “black male cool” might make them particularly
appealing to white hipster audiences. Hence the recent trendiness of
Kreayshawn. Toure notes as much in his analysis of her track “Gucci, Gucci”
The
song basically attacks a central tenet of hip-hop: Many rappers embrace
labelism as part of their celebration of upward mobility as well as a
postmodern sentiment that you are the brands you wear. Her rejection of that
reeks of white-girl privilege. But similarly privileged people may find her
message refreshing.
The last line here is key:
similarly privileged people do find her message ‘refreshing.’ Well,
“refreshing” isn’t exactly the best word here. Rather, white hipsters use the
fact that they appreciate the work of white female MCs as evidence of their
“enlightened” approach to both music and race/gender politics. Such a
“similarly privileged person” might say to him or herself: “Look, I’m so
progressive, both aestheticially w/respect to hip hop, and politically with
respect to gender and race, that I can find the work of white female MCs
totally legit. Look how transgressive I am.” This move, this attempt to
prove one’s elite status above other hip-hop-loving whites, is part of the
recent buzz over Kreayshawn. It is also further evidence that the race/gender
politics of hip hop are really complicated, not uniform, and not monological. “Black
masculine cool” is the mainstream (even though black men continue to be
politically, socially, and economically disadvantaged); it is no longer scion
of resistance, oppositionality, counter-hegemony, etc. Because “black masculine
cool” has been co-opted by the mainstream, white hipsters turn to different
symbols of “difference”—such as Third-World women of color, white female
rappers, or skeptically melancholy (i.e., not cool) black men (who are subtly
foreign, too).
So, just as racial-political
landscapes change and blacks are now positioned as “border populations” against
newly racialized “brown” peoples from Latin America and South Asia, racial-aesthetic
paradigms are shifting. Stereotypical blackness is no longer the quintessential
symbol of oppositionality because, at least in pop music if nowhere else,
stereotypical blackness has been thoroughly co-opted into the mainstream. Recognizing
this helps us make more sense of a lot of 2011 cultural politics and cultural
criticism.
[1] I wonder if
rock’s continued reliance on precisely this “traditional” stereotype of
blackness is part of what keeps it relatively marginal in the pop charts (Jon
Caramancia, the NYT’s other rock critic named Jon, laments this here). Which is
to say: rock offers a certain brand or flavor of “rebelliousness” or
“oppositionality”—one that is framed in very mid-20th century ways,
i.e., through the traditional logic of white hipness. So perhaps rock’s lack of
general relevance is not so much aesthetic as it is racial-political: it trades
in passé or obsolete “controlling images” of blackness that don’t satisfy
contemporary white audiences’ appetite for “eating the other.”
[2] Two other
problems with TOure’s article: (1) it’s sorta horribly gender-normative. He
compares white female rappers to butches/FTM Xdressers, as though such things
are patently absurd. (2) He says that the “soul” of hip hop lies in black
masculinity. “Hip-hop…remains unbreakably connected to the spirit of black
masculinity ,” he claims. Sure, there are strong cultural associations btw hip
hop and a certain flavor of black masculinity, but (a) this is not the
universal, homogeneous “spirit” of black masculinity, and (b) ladies have been
there from the first (Roxanne, what?), so hip hop is not “unbreakably”
connected to black masculinity.
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