THE BEST IS YET TO COME

Writing any kind of appropriate summation of this year seemed for some reason, particularly difficult. Maybe it was the riveting wave of political action that swept the globe. Perhaps the terrifying economic changes we’re still very much feeling the effects of. Maybe it is the much-repeated prophecy of the impending end of times, or all the ecological factors that make it seem like a viable possiblity. To think back about the events of 2011, is to look at a year in which “the real and the unreal, the historic, the mundane—this year they all rushed together, passing through the absurd en route to the grotesque,” as The Observer’s Dana Vachon writes. 

The visual was at the heart of it all. We watched people in the street, public space suddenly exhilaratingly reactivated. When Osama bin Laden was killed, some morbid part of us yearned so badly for the proof, the pictures that falsified, photoshopped corpses meme’d their way into our view. The screens that increasingly frame our lives did even more so. Children now roam the streets aimlessly asking their mobile telephones: “Siri, what’s the meaning of life?” Entire art fairs exist digitally. The nature of looking and its implications for how we relate to other people, and other nations, has changed. Artists, and the sometimes maniacal workings of the world and market operating around them, reacted and participated. It’s been a rough year, but like really important things happened.

When I look back on the year in contemporary art, what I remember best is what I looked forward to most. Things seem different now, though the world around us increasingly complicated. In this sense, here’s the best of 2011 in the New York art world, but really the best of what an overwhelmingly charged, exciting new year calls out. 

To 2012.  

HANNA LIDEN’S OUT OF MY MIND, BACK IN 5 MINUTES 
MACCARONE 

In mid-March of this past spring, the Greenwich Village’s palatial Maccarone, the solo project launched in 2001 by the Michelle Maccarone, former director of recently, and controversially, re-located Luhrig Augustine, presented three distinct solo shows. Through the storefront windows of the gallery’s facade, green neon light illuminating Mark Floods’ boredly pessimistic text works, reading: Do The Math. Millions Will Die.Billions Will Die. You Will Die.

“A gallery is all smoke and mirrors,” Maccarone said in an interview for Vice Magazine, accompanied by a portrait of the gallerist by represented artist Hana Liden. Perhaps it is the illusory aspects of a gallery show Maccarone hints at that contributed to the magical quality Liden’s show conjured. In Out of My Mind, Back in 5 Minutes, Liden, trained initially as a photographer, presented a collection of sculptural works that filled the gallery’s industrially-tinged front room. Out of My Mind is of a starkly different tone than that of the work that first confronted visitors to the trio of shows. There was a kind of darkness, sure, a quality of an occult-like mysticism that has run through Liden’s work, across media. But the sculptures that seemed to naturally bubble up into the space emanated something else: Liden harnessed a sanctity present in the mundane icons of urbanity. 

Black plastic bags, bulging with a confusing sense of weight, formed a forest of seemingly tenuous towers. Each bag is filled with plaster, then stacked in staggering vertical groupings. The effect is an odd one: there’s an acute discomfort to seeing inconsequential objects, more often discarded into the untouchable world of waste, replicated and used as building blocks. The towers lean, as if prone to collapse at any moment. Our sense of weight becomes discombobulated, yet there’s a kind of refreshingly precise aesthetic to the matte black forms. If the bag works make what was once hollow full, the t-shirt replicas achieve the inverse. The latex formed t-shirt structures a monument to absent bodies, to what was once there but is no longer. We are having a disembodied experience, as the shows title suggests.

In many ways, the Liden show is about about mortality, about time passing, what stays with us, and what fades away. By foundationally recontextualizing the very stuff of the urban landscape, objects so ubiquitous as to be invisible, Liden insists we see. Liden seems to be suggesting a mythology of sorts, the kind heavily palpable in the eerily dream-like photographs of some strange Scandanavian world, where masked, nude nymphs run through fields and black-faced swamp walkers carry fire through water, like the photographs included in the Whitney’s 2006 biennial Day For Night. There’s something to believe in within Liden’s work, yet a lingering darkness. Out of My Mind conjures up an unknown spell through disparaged relics of urbanity, keeping us on our toes as we wonder what exactly the magic does.   

RYAN TRECARTIN’S ANY EVER 
MoMA PS1

“I curocrat teen experience into loopform for archival setbacks in the market liability,” the artist yelps into the screen, his pitch glitchily twirked out to a gratingly amphetamine-paced degree. In one segment of the quartet Re’Search Wait’S, covered in patchy red-brownface make-up, and sporting a slightly askew orange wig, he writhes incessantly, spouting a non-sensical, vaguely corporate, broken-technic monologue. The video is emblematic of what has become his signature style: a kind of phantasmagorical collision of the spectacular of the aesthetics of late capitalism, part the mumbo-jumbo of marketing departments, part the hair flips and girl fights of reality television. The work is painfully edited, with unnerving and unrelenting mash-ups of imagery and sources, at a pace that is, to say the least, paralyzingly overwhelming. Yet, you’re numbed into a transfixed, consumptive trance, just watching the excesses of a world that seems so completely unbelievable, but so very familiar. This is Ryan Trecartin’s world. Once you take a trip there, you’ll never be quite the same.    

In June, MoMA PS1 presented seven of Trecartin’s movies — a trilogy, Trill-ogy Comp and aforementioned quartet, Re’Search Wait’S — as part of a Any Ever, a solo show. But Trecartin’s work, and the element of beserk transcendence his style induces, owes just as much to an elaborate installation. Each of the seven rooms of the show presented not only an overactive screen, but an oddly amalgamated landscape of Ikea-tasting furniture, of objects familiar, in some altogether other context. Airplane seating, conference tables, lawn chairs, increasingly worn couches form a hepped-up set for a television show, a wonky rendering of not a rendition of the real, but another universe all together. 

It’s been a big year for Trecartin, Any Ever just one chapter: after dropping his New York representation, jetting off to Paris, and publishing his first monograph, Trecartin put the cherry on the party-planning-with-PS1 cake by hosting a much talked about Kim Kardashian-themed event thrown in honor of the artist and his collaborator Lizzie Fitch, presented by DIS Magazine during Miami Art Week. Any Ever is the complete fulfillment of a vision we first witnessed a glimpse of in the New Museum’s inaugural triennial,Younger Than Jesus. The show was unsettling and exciting, drawing the same aura about those early video-installations but with the volume turned way, way up. 

The thing about watching Trecartin’s videos is that they can’t really be contained, not even in painstakingly weird built environments. His characters jerk around the screen, wiggling in and out of a world full of indistinguishable digital detritus, speaking a manic tongue. Once you’ve looked, you can’t look away. Things around you — on television, Subway advertisements, in pop-up windows and search bars — seem to posses a Trecartin quality. Like some kind of addict, his work creeps into your dreams and seems more and more to be rendering of something very, very rational. Any Ever drew me back continually, hoping for a fix of the electricity of the first hit, whose traces perpetually ripple into reality. 

ANDREW NORMAN WILSON’S VIRTUAL ASSISTANCE
PRESENTED BY HYPERALLERGIC 

Get Friday is a virtual personal assistant service based in Bangalore, India. The company provides remote administrative assistance, providing men in suits in offices with virtual assistance from a real human they will most likely never meet. “Life gets better with Get Friday,” the organization’s website promises, employing a kind of emptily optimistic corporate language. When Chicago-based artist Andrew Norman Wilson subscribed to the service, he began paying his new assistant, a man named Akhil. Unlike most of Get Friday’s clientele, Wilson didn’t want his calendar managed, shipments scheduled, or data analyzed. In a complicated, long-term collaborative project Wilson attempted to throw a wrench in the transnational flow of globalization. Since 2009, Wilson and Akhil have learned about each other, sharing information as the two complete various art actions as part of Virtual Assistance. In August, in the Williamsburg headquarters of art blogazine Hyperallergic, Wilson presented a collection of documentation, reflection, and works in a lecture-based performance. 

Norman sat at a small table in the center of a room full of metal folding chairs, a projector and Macbook in front of him. In what might very well be a quintessential embodiment of the corporate visual aesthetic, the story of Akhil and Norman, of Bangalore and America, unraveled before our eyes via Microsoft PowerPoint. Wilson’s performance positions the artist as lecturer, a kind of guide leading captive viewers through a narrative that confuses the delineations between classroom, boardroom, and gallery in a fascinating way. Wilson twists the limits of privilege in Virtual Assistance, providing a glimpse of wiggle room in what often feels like the overwhelming, immovable hold of global capital. As the performance came to a close, Wilson fielded questions from an inquisitive audience, with direct help from Akhil himself, via the pinging window of Facebook chat. It became clear, quickly, that for all the nuanced criticism and practical push back Wilson’s project embodies, his work is part of a larger cross-disciplinary conversation. This is only the beginning. 

BLIND SPOT
AIRPLANE 

After much anticipation, in late October 2011 a newly formed artist-run space presented its first group show. As part of the bi-annual neighborhood-wide Beat Nite event, Bushwick based AIRPLANE, run by Lars Kremer, Liz Atzberger and Kevin Curran, Blind Spot presented works by eight international artists, integrated into the irregularities of the rough, near dangerous basement gallery space. The trio seemed to reminding us what well an artist-run space can do: subvert the limiting formalism of a traditional gallery, short-circuit the space between production and exhibition, as artists become curators acting on other creators’ art objects.

London-born, Miami-based Tom Scicluna presented a site-specific installation. He shipped a box of sand to the gallery, not just any sand, but South Beach sand. The powder ran the length of the gallery in a cocaine-like line. By removing a natural element from the highly stylized, and flashy locus of art world value, location of Miami Beach, Scicluna plays one on the art world — hard. His contribution to AIRPLANE’s first show seems a fitting start for an exhibition space that will clearly play by its own rules. There are no white walls here, and no pretensions. Just artists, ideas, and really, really good work.

Blind Spot also featured Rico Gatson, Meredith Pingree, Erica Ando, Kate Gilmore, John Aveluto, Adam Parker Smith and Austin Thomas, a roster that highlights the best of Bushwick’s thriving art scene. As the space develops, we can only expect more vibrant, alternative, visions.

FATIMA AL QADIRI’S GENRE SPECIFIC XPERIENCE  
SCREENING PRESENTED BY NEW MUSEUM

In mid-October, the New Museum and Rhizome’s Lauren Cornell presented an installment of her New Silent Series exploring contemporary art engaged with technology. In the museum’s basement theater, Cornell presented a screening of music videos accompanying New York-based artist and musician Fatima Al Qadiri’s Genre Specific X-perience EP. The films — created by Kamau Patton, Tabor Robak, Thunder Horse, Sophia Al-Maria, Ryan Trecartin and Rhett LaRue — employ a spectrum of digitally engaged styles, painting vivid moving pictures to accompany the epicness of the collection’s sound. For the track Vatican Vibes, a kind of dark techno-reimagining of Catholic imagery through Gregorian trance, Al Qadiri teamed up with Brooklyn-based artist Tabor Robak. The resulting video presents a mechanical saga filled with video-game versions of the human form, technology, military equipment. We move in and out of different spaces at a pace just as peculiar as the odd, yet entrancing bouncing ethereal vocals of the track’s sound. At some moments, we are clearly behind some kind of screen, the windows and jumbled symbols drawn from the interfaces of camcorders, CNN, and Xbox alike. 

Al Qadiri’s music is really, truly unlike anything I’ve heard before, in the best possible ways. For that, she’s enjoying an impressive level of success in the precious overlap of the contemporary art world and indie music circuit. Her music draws from blindingly brilliant transnational cultural networks, conflating sonic icons in a kind of new global geography. It’s a Muslimtechno, Arabifuturistic, as much of the streets of Doha, New York, and London all at once. She engages with a kind of religio-techological sanctity as well, questioning the ways in which the screen has become our new altar, the internet our moment’s salvation. “Religion was the first technology,” the artist said in a talkback following the screening, “magic has moved from religion to technology.” 

The video project presented, as the EP’s name alludes to, a Genre Specific X-perience. That is, as Al Qadiri says it, when she makes music, she undergoes “a genre specific experience,” not simply defying genre, but complicating it in fascinating ways. For the five-track EP, the musician also known as Ayshay, so many other worlds are written into the vision Al Qadiri presents. She thinks big, and you can feel this epic quality in this wholly new sonic-scape, whether in her music or as a DJ. It remains unclear what the radical changes the past year will play out in the political, economic, social, even cultural spheres. Yet, Al Qadiri’s work makes one thing crystal clear: this is what the future sounds like.

MYKKI BLANCO : THE MUTANT ANGEL

  

“I’m racing for my place among the gods. Each stride I roll the dice, I wonder where I fall….” writes Mykki Blanco, or Michael David Quattlebaum Jr, the gender-bending performer who has seemingly infiltrated the art world over the past year. After publishing a book with Los Angeles based OHWOW, participating in Performa’s Fluxus Weekend, collaborating with Terry Richardson, Blanco’s unquenchable hustle seems just to be gearing up.

Blanco’s work is absolutely exhilarating: whatever plane he operates on, and I still can’t quite explain it all the way, is one we’ve never quite seen before. Mykki Blanco as an icon creates and performs work through a multi-dimensional, queered dynamism. Blanco’s always on the go, taking us somewhere we may never have been before, but we, clearly, want to be headed. Mykki spits fire: “Mykki’s on her A game, We not in the same lane, I don’t have to drop names. But u droppin my name” Mykki preaches: “nostalgia can be empowering, but it’s time to make sense of these times.” Mykki presents a radically reworked, cross-cutting vision of culture, as a field of study and industry, as one particular tweet attests to: he simply pairs feminist theorist of color Audre Lorde + with reality-television momager Kris Jenner. What is this place? This is the Mykki’s house.

I’ve now seen Blanco in full effect enough to get a sense of a fascinating spectrum of performance. There are gradients of Mykki, as he blurs the lines between disciplines, genres, industries, eventually conflating now-irrelevant delineates between rapper and artist, between the academic and the popular, between male and female. Sometimes, Blanco spits bouncing, relentlessly popping lyrics over ethereal, low-fi hip-hop beats. Sometimes Blanco wears a short wig. Sometimes Blanco goes full force, a capella, letting the prophecy drip off his lips. Sometime Blanco wears a brightly colored bathing suit, like at his performance during Miami Art Week in front of a glittering, lit-up screen created by AIDS 3D. Blanco calls himself the Mutant Angel, a pseudonym that speaks to his engagement with the spiritual, the transcendent, and the possibility of finding that within radical performance. 

Blanco’s forthcoming mixtape is currently in production.

THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE 

GALLATIN GALLERIES,  NYU 

In direct response to the beginning of extraordinary #Occupy movement, head curator of New York University’s Gallatin Galleries Keith Miller rallied students and professional artists to collaborate in a renegade show. Within a few days the storefront gallery space was filled with ephemera, student projects, interactive collaborations, looping footage on a tv screen. As the title suggests, This Is What Democracy Looks Like, borrowing a phrase from canon of protest chants employed by the Occupy Wallstreet Movement, engages quite literally with visual. What does it mean that we’ve watched a radical reimagining of what it means to be a global citizen unfold, often spectacularly, before our eyes? The political power of OWS is as much in the Youtube videos, memeing images, and relentless tweeting as it once was in Zucotti Park itself. 

Perhaps most importantly, the show committed an essential act of inversion, much like the Occupy movement has done in the political sphere. Where a gallery is traditionally a space highly contained both physically and conceptually, through layers of elites and specialization that bolster the art market, Gallatin’s front gallery space flipped the equation. Viewers were invited to enter, participate, then leave and take something with them.

One student-led project presents “an open forum community” entitled Occupedia. Through the distribution, in conjunction with the show and online, collaborators solicited participants to contribute to cards simply stating: Dear 1%, We need…Sincerely, The 99%. The project quickly expanded, compounding and developing into a visual representation of the 99% mass. The future of the movement is yet unwritten, a contemporary history that will continue to unfold in this upcoming year. This reminds us, however, to look, really look, at what has happened so far, and more importantly where we see ourselves within it.

WU TSANG’S FULL BODY QUOTATION 
PRESENTED BY PERFORMA 11

It started with a caveat. After the New Museum’s skyroom was packed full of viewers anticipating LA-based performance artist Wu Tsang’s contribution to this year’s edition of performance-biennial Performa, buzzing with the sounds of fellow Los Angelite and DJ Total Freedom, the space was lit up with night glow of the city below, pulsing with the innovative and exhilarating sound. Tsang, beautiful as ever in black heels and a unitard, slipped in and out of the crowd seamlessly, quickly, seemingly coordinating the final elements in preparation of performing. There was no confusion over when the piece was really in full force, however: before beginning the piece with a troupe of stunning young actors, the artist took the mic and directly addressed the audience: “We’re going to be channeling some voices from Paris Is Burning,” saidTsang, before distributing landed slips of paper listing the sources for those voices we were about to hear. Tsang is currently in residence at the museum as part of the upcoming second installment of the museum’s triennial, The Generational. Yet, as intimate as the artist’s relationship with the host institution clearly may be, we were swiftly reminded: “The New Museum is not necessarily a safe space,” particularly for the communities referenced in Tsang’s Performa work Full Body Quotation. 

As both performer and filmmaker — Wildness, his documentary exploring LA’s queer nightlife, is currently in post-production — Tsang presents a refreshingly optimistic, yet ever realistic queervision of community, power, interrogating space and its limitations. With the help of four fellow performers, Full Body Quotation was just that: in a pile on the floor, limbs interlocking, hands touching flesh the group connected, quite literally, as they performed the appropriative script. The text was written on the body: movement together, in pairs, at points dance-like, others reminiscent of blocking on a theater stage, spoke just as much as the uttered words. Tsang places himself along a long history of queer performance, pulling the work’s canon of references from various relics and traditions of queer, particularly of-color, culture. But as Tsang’s preliminary remarks suggest, his work interjects queerness into the very institutional structure of the artwork. We will speak, Tsang insists, in our way, and you will listen.

In the upcoming year, Tsang will not only take part in the New Museum’s triennial, but also the Whitney’s biennial.

MATTHEW STONE’S OPTIMISM AS CULTURAL REBELLION
THE HOLE 

During the overwhelming slew of art-related events that was this Performa 11, the hip Deitch-derative space The Hole, run by woman-about-town Kathy Grayson, presented a moment of stillness. London-based Matthew Stone showed a collection of new sculptural works he calls Optimism As Cultural Rebellion. Where the world around us moves overwhelmingly fast, pulling us farther from personal connection, his large-scale geometric, photographic sculptures take things slow, insisting we touch, flesh on flesh. Upon the intersecting surfaces of the Optimism’s work, we witness glimpses of seemingly orgiastic masses of flesh. The tone of skin takes on a whole new kind of aesthetic beauty, as the ever-so-slight nuances in the outerwear we all share are heightened and enhanced by their place along a collaborative gradient. There is certainly something erotic, something charged about Stone’s work, yet not necessarily sexual. He seems to suggest that, in the face of the alienating forces of our contemporary moment, we might just have to strip, all the way down, to remember how we fit together. 

Stone operates the Twitter handle @artshaman, where he appropriately shares a running stream of philosophical thought, throwing deeply profound metaphysical questions into the digital world. As the title of this past year’s solo show attests to, Stone’s work is direct, as is his writing. In a world so steeped in cynicism and irony, there is something refreshing, potentially revolutionary, about believing. He throws questions to his audiences, developing ideas in the public-collaborative way the new media platform makes possibly. At times, he fades into a trance of philosophizing that preaches radical cultural ideas in a media that, increasingly, seems to be the most vibrant site of public intellectualism, most recently declaring what he calls a #minifesto: Everything is Possible and Love Changes Everything. 

In Optimism, it becomes clear Stone is grasping for the spiritual through the very tactile human: our flesh, our bones. He suggests that through this kind of sanctity of humanity we might just be able to build completely new structures through which to relate. Stone lays bare a map that, as the Times review of the show suggests, preaches a revelatory “new, mystically inspired choreography of how to be human.” 

MAN BARTLETT, @OCCUPYMAN
DIGITAL PERFORMANCE

“The entirety of my Twitter feed is my ‘Artist Statement,’” Brooklyn-based artist Man Bartlett broadcastedthrough the now-ubiquitous micro-blogging network itself. He regularly uses the new media tool, for research, documentation, and often, the very vehicle of his work. Bartlett’s tweets run the gamut: he’s charming, open, often political, occasionally swelling into the prophetic. In Bartlett’s hands the digital platform becomes a network of production, as his projects are charted, developed and often displayed through the running record of his feed. It’s one of the most dynamic artistic engagements with technology I’ve seen, that manages to make the critic’s unproductive bickering over the delineations of inadequately titled genre of “internet art” irrelevant. The work is in part made about, often through the digital world, yet transcends being only a reflection of that. Something else is happening here.

Beginning on October 19th, Bartlett began an endeavor. Inspired by the refreshing energy coalescing around the Occupy Wall Street movement, he launched @OccupyMan, which takes its name from handlewhere Bartlett has publicly tracked his finances for the past few months. The complete record is presented in a public Google Doc, where we can see every bottle of kombucha, every Metrocard, even the occasional White Castle binge, on which the artist spends money. @OccupyMan is, in part, a kind of performance piece, as the artist makes public and precious the consumptive actions he takes everyday. But something is different here: Bartlett’s project inverts the flow of value of the self-defined, self-contained economy of the art market. The project simultaneously dissolves the need for physical space, as it runs without needing a gallery or museum, yet very much occupies the public sphere. By creating an art object that isn’t, a performance that isn’t quite, and a wholly new kind of intervention into the market, that nonetheless has been recently sold to a collecter, we are forced to consider so many of the not necessarily positive or effective tenets of art economics. 

Bartlett committed to a practice, a regimen that would make his consumption spectacle, recorded and reenacted in its every moment, in a very public way. “Twitter really redefines our notion of public space,”wrote Bartlett in a recent interview with BOMB Magazine held via tweet. For an artist whose practice in general operates in a structured, segmented, if very much conceptually related sphere — Bartlett recently showed his vintage magazine-sourced collages at Bushwick’s Norte Maar and continues to slowly mark away intricate, long-in-production drawings — it makes sense that @OccupyMan is rooted in method. Man bought groceries on New Year’s Eve, and they cost $42.51. What kind of new relationship does this knowledge form between Bartlett as an artist, and us as viewers? @OccupyMan leads by example, insisting that to interrogate our collective consumption, we must change the way we act. Keep record, be diligent, Bartlett suggests, and of course, tweet.

this piece originally ran in Artslant, 03 Jan 2012

GODDESSES IN THE SPIRIT OF THEIR DAY

Baudelaire + The Kardashians

“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”

-Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

Keeping Up With The Kardashians is a near imperfect blend of the permanent and the ephemeral. As Baudelaire writes in the quotation above, this fusion is indicative of the cultural products of modernity. The reality television show, that runs on the cable television network E!, produced by the media titan behind American Idol Ryan Seacrest, documents the extravagant, fascinating life of a nouveau riche blended family. The Kardashians gained notoriety and wealth through their late patriarch Robert Kardashian Sr’s involvement with the epic saga of the 1994 OJ Simpson trial. The television show presents a spectacular blend of the classic and the novel. I approach the series, now in its sixth season with three spin-offs, as a living cultural artifact, continually attempting to build monumentalize itself. Is it Art? Probably not, though there is an undeniable art to the cultivation of the Kardashian empire, a kind of perpetually unfurling public narrative that livestreams on most every surface of our media and cultural landscape. If you truly commit to Keeping Up With The Kardashians, you join the family, entering a fantastical world where the line between performance and reality is nearly disappeared. The Kardashians beg the question: is it performance art if the performers don’t know they’re doing it? And that’s to take a pessimistic perspective on the extent to which the Kardashians understand the their extreme form of televised performativity.  

Through their performance, on and off the screen, as both reality stars and iconic mainstays in the pop media circuit with a seemingly endless stream of promotion of consumer goods, The Kardashians present an adherence, in an interesting pairing of contexts, to what Baudelaire would call the “eternal and invariable” of beauty (392). He mentions this quality again, as an “eternal” and “immovable” aspect of art (403). On one hand, the Kardashians are classic in the most basic of senses. From the perspective of the art historian, one attuned to the canon Western iconography, the television show, and surrounding imagery (related to advertisements, promotional materials, press, and product endorsements), embodies a kind of compositional orthodoxy. The trifecta of the three oldest Kardashian sisters- NBA superwife Khloe, mother Kourtney, and recently married megawatt Kim- have an almost statuesque quality to their sartorial and cosmetic aesthetic. Kim, in particular, the largest earner and arguably most famous of the family, looks like Cleopatra, a Grecian caryatid, La Virgen, almost Armenian-American royalty. In a spread for Harper’s Weekly, Kim posed as Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, dressing in the vintage original wardrobe, embodying a kind of meta-performance: reality megastar as Hollywood icon as iconic historical royalty as told through a dramatic account. The feature, entitled Kim Kardashian: Cleopatra with a ‘K’, molds Kim into a kind of goddess-like figure, placed in front of gleaming golden backgrounds reminiscent of Byzantine mosaics. When either mother Kourtney or aunties Kim and Khloe hold the young Mason Kardashian Disick, their composition always form a kind of inflated Madonna and Child, recast with an Armenian Barbie mother and darling, though homunculus, child.

 
Beyond an aesthetic formalism, and tendency to invoke classical composition and iconography, the Kardashians adhere to a kind of socio-political conservatism that is not classic per say, but traditional. While the Kardashian children are a fantastical sexualized, hedonistic spectacle in one moment, they simultaneously embody the most basic of American values. Fundamentally, Keeping Up With The Kardashians is wildly successful tale of the American dream, a pimped out and sexed up tabloid version of Horatio Alger. The values Kardashians does promote- family, labour, capital accumulation- fall perfectly in line with the “eternal and immovable” of the context from which they spring. At the core of American modernity’s most contemporary moment, the standard which many political and economic forces, and often artistic or cultural, seem to be parading forward is one of consumption and the sanctity of the family unit. The Kardashians live in Calabasas, an incredibly wealthy neighborhood outside of LA, an iconic American urban center.
 
 

When Baudelaire defends the necessity of sporting the day’s fashion, in combination with elements of tradition, he mentions the example of “the goddesses, the nymphs, and sultanas” that “are portraits in the spirit of their day,” (403). As capitalist goddesses, the closest thing to American royalty, the Kardashians embody the “spirit of their day.” The Kardashians are a kind of nouveau elite championing a populist consumerism. In that sense, they are the quintessential “transient, the fleeting, the contingent,” the other component of Baudelaire’s rederning of modernity (403). The Kardashians are newness machines, perpetually cranking out fragrances, clothing lines, new television shows, music, images and media. They maintain a cross-cutting celebrity presence, equally dominating the spheres of reality television, pop music, professional athletics, fashion, politics, contemporary art, and philanthropy. Robert Kardashian Jr. is participating in this season of Dancing With The Stars. Kim Kardashian shared her views about the Troy Davis execution in a tweet. The whole family was present for several shows and parties this past fashion week in New York. Last year, Kim was featured on the cover of W Magazine wearing only a cover design by Barbara Kruger. Each family member maintains an incredibly active Twitter and digital presence, consistently updating their followers with their whereabouts, activities, and mundane thoughts. The Kardashian empire is rapidly and persistently expanding, at a neck-breaking pace that makes keeping up quite the task.
 
 

In The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire praises the dandy for his commitment to being in and of the world, if from the periphery position of cultural observer. “He has gone everywhere,” he writes, “in quest of the ephemeral, the fleeting forms of beauty in the life of our day, the characteristic traits of what…we have called ‘modernity’,” (435). While a Kardashian is no dandy, the family-franchise is unflinching in its pursuit of “the ephemeral, the fleeting.” Simultaneously, the most familiar of aesthetic and moralistic classicism structures the public presentation of the Kardashians. By Baudelaire’s dualistic definition, The Kardashians are fundamentally modern, exhibiting a spectacular fusion of the classic and novel, constantly performing as goddesses in the spirit of their day.

LATE CAPITALIST HIP HOP 

UNPACKING MASCULINITY 

“Hip hop merely displays in phantasmagorphical form the cultural logic of late capitalism.” [i]   

Tricia Rose, Black Noise

WHY LATE CAPITALISM?

The term “Late Capitalism”was first used by German economist Warner Sombart, in his monumental text Der Moderne Kapitalismus, published in 1902. Sombert derives his understanding of the progression of capitalism from a staunchly Marxist perspective. He foresaw, from his place in writing at the turn of the 20^th century, an eventual demise of capitalism, a collapse of the reigning economic organization of much of the Western world. This anxiety around a severe change in the economic order of the day led to much theoretical work anticipating a supposed inevitable fall.

After over one hundred years, that last three decades of which have witnessed the effects of Neoliberal economic, social, and political policy, I can clearly state that Sombart and his contemporaries’ sense of timing was incredibly off. What appeared as a kind of end of days in those early moments of the twentieth was merely the beginning of a new stage of consolidation and expansion of capitalism’s tactics. A traditional Marxist understanding of late capitalism, as by Sombart, represents the third stage of capitalisms progression, on the cusp of an eventual switch to communism. In this regard, late capitalism is a falsehood. Yet, I find thinking through what late capitalism can mean for us, right now, a not only helpful, but necessarily malleable theoretical tool.

In Late Capitalism, economic Theorist Ernest Mandel elaborates an alternative understanding of what the late capitalism moment can mean. For Mandel, it is a time dominated by the fluidity capital. Mandel’s emphasis on the movement of capital is deeply tied to the economic status of our contemporary moment. Processes of globalization initiated from the time of the Middle Passage have become further magnified through the rise and dominance of the multinational corporation, the adoption of free trade, and the reconfiguring of the spatial organization of processes of production and consumption. Hip Hop theorist Tricia Rose writes:

“The growth of multinational telecommunications networks, global economic competition, a major technological revolution, the formation of new international divisions of labor, the increasing power of finance relative to production, and new migration patterns from Third World industrializing nations have all contributed to the economic and social restructuring of urban America.”[ii]  

Rose details the massive global economic changes that have characterized the transition from the 20^th to 21^st century. She makes the crucial connection between these large-scale, transnational shifts that Mandel hints at, and the local effects on the urban American experience. She also stresses the “importance of locating hip hop culture within the context of deindustrialization.”[iii]   These “postindustrial conditions in urban centers across America,” she continues, “reflect a complex set of global forces that continue to shape the contemporary urban metropolis.”[iv]  It is out of these conditions the cultural explosion now known as hip hop burst. It is fitting then to look at the evolution of Hip Hop cultural production parallel to the evolution of the economic climate it is so closely tied to. In his essay “Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” political theorist Frederic Jameson characterizes the third stage of Marx’s story of capitalism as post-industrial, or multinational capital. This late capitalism moment encapsulates the: “purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas. This purer capitalism of our own time thus eliminates the enclaves of precapitalist organization it had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a tributary way.”[v] What about capitalism’s evolution leads Jameson to hail this moment as the “purest form of capital”?

 In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, economic theorist DavidHarvey writes: “redistributive effects and increasing social inequality have in fact been such a persistent feature of neoliberalization as to be regarded as structural to the whole project.”[vi] Harvey defines the concept as such:

“A theory of political economic practices that proposes human well-being can be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” [vii]

Neoliberalism puts total faith in a ruthlessly efficient and all-encompassing market as “it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market.”[viii] In other words, neoliberalism believes that the perfect market, Jameson’s “purest form,” will take care of all the rest of society’s needs. The reality of neoliberal policy is quite the opposite. Fundamentally, the economic and social policies of the Reagan-Thatcher post-industrial era emphasized free market activity, corporate expansion, and an extreme reduction of government involvement in social welfare.

Renowned hip hop historian Jeff Chang characterizes the neoliberal conditions of the late 20^th and early 21^st century as a “politics of abandonment”.[ix] The neoliberal political moment, in which we are still deeply enmeshed and from which we are still recovering from, is closely tied to the origin of hip hop. The changes in the movement global capital, as discussed above, and the resulting effect on the American urban landscape, are the political, economic, and social conditions that formed the sounding board off of which hip hop’s first ideas were bounced. To look critically at hip hop’s evolution, as an increasingly mainstream and transnational culture, we must also consider the parallel, simultaneous, often overlapping progression of capitalism. To think of hip hop cultural production as a “phantasmagorphical form” of late capitalism allows for a number of theoretical moves and discursive focuses that much of Hip Hop scholarship, and most of mainstream popular discourse, miss or deny.[x]

As hip hop has moved throughout the globe and secured its place as the dominant popular vernacular of mainstream culture, the genre itself becomes transformed, unfixed, and destabilized. It is hard to tell which process has dominated the past two decades: the hip hopification of pop or the popification of hip hop. I suggest we are embedded within cyclical exchange of the two, where the language, style, and symbols of hip hop have become enmeshed in the fabric of popular culture at large, and hip hop itself- an increasingly contested category- incorporates sonic and stylistics elements of billboard topping pop anthems, club-banging electro hits, dissonant indie noise, and the sparkling sexy of R&B crooning, alike. In many ways, hip hop is eating itself in an act of “cannibalistic” pop nihilism.[xi] As the genre fluxes and moves, traveling across border and genre, its popularity and mainstream domination has, in many ways, led to collapse from within. From that implosion, a new kind of fluidity of hip hop authenticity, style, and performance emerges. Genre in popular music in general has undergone an implosive collapse- underground and mainstream now engage in a kind of intimate exchange, and the telltale features that once defined genre no longer so clearly delineate. Hip hop eating itself is a part of that, but also the best example of that increasingly fluid delineation of genre.

Within this genre bending contemporary moment, my understanding of “Hip Hop” does not come from a place that looks to delineate what is authentic hip hop and what is not. Rather, I’m looking at what brandishes itself as hip hop. If a person, song, crew, or record label claims a place in hip hop it must be addressed as such. In a digitalized and globalized world, in our Late Capitalist moment, the process of popular image making is wholly transparent. In that sense, what makes itself as hip hop, is. In addition,I do notwant to fight the perpetual battle of reconciling a kind of political impetus hip hop followers find within the inherently oppositional gaze hip hop reflects on its greater cultural context.[xii] I don’t devalue, discount, or deny this radical possibility, one that we have seen the effectiveness of in many parts of the world. Yet, much of popular discourse remains trapped in this attempt to salvage what’s “good” in Hip Hop, what can lead to social change and political action. I agree with Michael P Jeffries’ thoughts: “such an understanding means that cultural production has the potential to trouble social norms and dominant discourses, but there is nothing essentially revolutionary or progressive about hip-hop, despite its beginnings as the product of marginalized peoples.” [xiii]

If we step outside of the limiting question of what Hip Hop should be, what new space can we make? By insisting on that focus, we mandate a kind of clear-cut ethics that is just not a possibility within mainstream Late Capitalist popular culture. I ask instead, what is Hip Hop? When we talk about Hip Hop right now, at this very moment, what are we talking about?  Most importantly, how can we create tools for reading Hip Hop that do carry a potential for critical thinking, and the hopes of resistant action? 

I come to Late Capitalist Hip Hop as both a temporal and stylistic signifier. Late capitalist hip hop fits into a global network of capital exchange, and its producers must negotiate their space within it. We can use this temporally based category as one to signify our present moment, a specific place in the evolution of hip hop cultural production, that is continually unfolding. It is too, a kind of performance, a way of being a rapper.

WHY MASCULINITY?

Masculinity is the space in Hip Hop’s discourse that is most contested. That fixation refers to a long history of emphasis on black masculinity and sexuality within mainstream political and cultural narratives. “The myth of the Black rapist has been methodically conjured up whenever recurrent waves of violence and terror against the Black community have required convincing justification,” writes critic and activist Angela Davis.[xiv] The connection between these representational renderings as rationalization for a terroristic, racist American political and economic agenda insists the crisis of unpacking and working through a history of racialized representation. “Colonialism, slavery, and racial segregation relied upon this discourse of Black sexuality to create tightly bundled ideas about black femininity and Black masculinity that in turn influenced racial ideologies and racial practices,” writes Patricia Hill Collins in Black Sexual Politics.[xv]

This rendering of black masculinity, as always-already hypersexual and aggressive, is “a distinctly political invention” deeply woven into the cultural and social foundation of the American imaginary.[xvi] Much theoretical work has been done around the representational crisis that such a limiting and limited understanding of black masculinity presents. It is in relation to this long and continually reinforced history of racialized and gendered scripts that a discussion about hip hop, itself a cultural reaction to representational violence, must place itself.

My decision to focus on masculinity is a matter of scope and context. I am most interested in shifts surrounding mainstream hip hop of the past two decades. To look critically and analytically at an incredibly contemporary moment, still writing and rewriting itself, we must find a point of entry: some kind of framework, however tenuous, however premature, that can begin a discourse addressing what’s different, new, or intriguing about a fresh moment in cultural production. To begin to adequately unpack the complexities of an array of exciting cultural production by women in our moment’s hip hop would require an entirely additional parallel framework. The long and winding history of women’s participation in hip hop cultural production is, too, shot threw by complicated histories of racialization, sexualization, and gendering. I am engaging with a history of assumed masculinity within mainstream and academic discussion surrounding black cultural production. In The Games Black Girls Play, musicologist Kyra D. Gaunt searches for “a way to privilege women’s musical participation.”[xvii] She finds the playground games of young girls as an alternative site for analysis in response to the continual overemphasis of “black masculinity as the primary, if not sole, signifier of race in mass popular culture.”[xviii]

I walk the line of recommitting that same representational violence Gaunt describes. Yet, I ask: can a proliferation of the ways we can talk about masculinity in hip hop, beyond the criticism-inducing and oft-misread standard of the gangster-rapper, present a necessary foundation in the hopes of finding new language for talking about not only women in hip hop or hip hop in general but the racial complexities of contemporary popular culture at large?

When you talk about Hip Hop and masculinity, what much of mainstream criticism and academic theorizing really means is a reflection on what Tricia Rose calls the “ghetto badman posture-performance.”[xix] This kind of hyper-masculine, hypersexualized rapper performance grows out of a specific turn in hip hop production in the early 1990s. What would become to be called gangster rap presented an aggressive, explicit performative reflection on the increasingly oppressive economic conditions of the American urban experience. “Though the original hip-hopper was a local partier,” writes Michael P. Jeffries, “the dominant image of hip-hop commoditized by record companies and amplified by mass media from the mid-1990s on is that of the nationally recognizable urban gangster celebrity.”[xx]

Jeffries’ Thug Life provides an intervention into the discourse surrounding the gangster rapper, widening the scope of how we understand the gangster, against a limiting mainstream reading that does not allow for the complexities and fluidities of the gangster rapper performance. He unpacks a “spectacular, oppositional ghetto blackness” encapsulated in the thug, that has been successfully marketed as the front man of hip hop the world over.[xxi] From 1980 to the early 2000s, the gangster rapper was solidified as not only the popular and prominent performative posture for the mainstream rapper, but was quickly taken up by the business side of hip hop as a sellable form of rap. The gangster rapper sits well with the traditional American scripts deriving from the myth of the black rapist, and can be consumed as oppositional and aggressive while providing no thorough resistance to the mainstream racist imaginary.

The gangster rapper performance most definitely originates from a specific post-industrial and post-civil rights moment which demanded “a protective shell against real unyielding and harsh social policies and physical environments,” as Rose writes.[xxii] However, as the gangster image became an increasingly profitable kind of performance within mainstream hip hop, its stylistic features were fixed as necessary elements of both authenticity and success. “The ghetto is a necessary prerequisite for narrators’ affirmation of black identity in hip-hop,” writes Jeffries.[xxiii] The “spectacular authenticity” associated with the thug became not only what rappers performed, but what record labels marketed, and consumers devoured, so much so that to gain mainstream authenticity required an adherence to the gangster rapper persona.[xxiv]

This was the norm for about a decade, from the emergence of NWA in 1989 to death of Notorious BIG in 1997.  Something, however, has changed. Beginning in the early 2000s, hip hop witnessed a shift in the kind of rapper performances acceptable to the mainstream. I consider this the fall of the gangster rapper, a kind of post-gangster era. Not to say that it has disappeared completely, or that its influence is any way over, yet as its prominence fades, what fills the void? The political, economic, and cultural climate of our nation, and world, have changed since the emergence of the gangster rapper as cultural icon. What has allowed for a shift from the image of nine-time-shot 50 Cent’s greased up, bulging muscles wrapped up in a bullet proof vest, to the pretty boy child star turned rapper/singer Drake gallivanting in cardigans? Can we see that once dominant racialized and sexualized performance changing? If so, how? In large part, we must consider a significant shift on the business side of hip hop. Rappers are now businessmen, running labels, recruiting and mentoring the next phase of hip hop, themselves. And its not just P Diddy anymore.

I argue that rather than displaying a hood connection, or performing thug authenticity, today’s freshest crop of MCs earn their stars in a different way. The mainstream market is dominated for the most part, by a trifecta of kings, rappers turn label heads. If “the image of the criminal in the American popular consciousness is a black man,” what does it mean those men become CEOs?[xxv] Approval from Kanye West of G.O.O.D. MUSIC, Jay Z of RocNation, and Lil Wayne of Young Money Entertainment are fundamentally all the marker of authenticity a budding lyricist needs. All three rapper-businessmen have developed their own distinct method of marketing new faces of rap. They function as authenticity checkpoints for mainstream success. Get a go from Jay, Weezy, Yeezy, and you are more than good to go. This new quality of authenticity is distinctly late capitalist– no longer does legitimacy rest on attesting, whether truthfully or fabricated, to direct participation in the post-industrial experience. Rather, young rappers of today need the support of their CEO of their label and a cultural knowledge firmly rooted in the middle and upper class experience. It’s a space in cultural production where the lines between the business and the cultural production are becoming increasingly blurry, as they have been since hip hop’s mainstream acknowledgement. What’s different is the kind of performance that correlates to this late capitalist authenticity.

WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?

Late capitalist rappers can be understood through a dual paradigm: 1) negotiation of a new spectrum of the politics of representation and 2) performance of a transnational digital consciousness. We must contextualize the emergence and decline of the gangster rapper through not only a post-industrial lens, as discussed previously, but also as a wholly post-civil rights figure. “If the hip hop generation was the first to enjoy the freedoms of a post-civil rights world,” writes Jeff Chang, “they were also the first to recognize the hollowness of those promises and to bear witness to the effects of the repeal of many of those same freedoms.”[xxvi] Much of the criticism directed at the gangster rapper comes from a Civil Rights based mandate for a performance of respectability. This “politics of respectability” was an attempt at pushing back against the devastating representational burden of carrying hypersexualized racial scripts.[xxvii] For those who were watching the promises of Civil Rights victories fade before their eyes, this call to careful public image making was meaningless. Thus, the gangster rapper performance rose to popularity. In its aftermath, how is respectability negotiated?

In the face of what Collins calls “the new racism” and Jeffries hails a “new era of racial politics,” what happens to the politics of representation as negotiated by mainstream rappers?[xxviii] “Under conditions of racial segregation,” writes Collins, “mass media provides a way that racial difference can safely enter racially segregated private spaces of living rooms and bedrooms.”[xxix] She continues:

Black male images could now ever private White spaces, one step safely removed because these were no longer live performances and Black men no longer appeared in the flesh. These technological advances enabled the reworking of Black male sexuality that became much more visible, yet was safely contained.[xxx]

When our moment’s racial politics are characterized by misnomers such as post-racial and colorblindness, how is the kind of mass media produced sense of intimacy, of proximity, of understanding across racial and class lines changed? For Collins, this new racial climate “relies more heavily on mass media to reproduce and disseminate the ideologies needed to justify racism.”[xxxi] Certainly, the massive influence of digital culture and the internet is a major factor.

“In the new media environment, the consumer is bound by nothing and controls everything. We’ve crept out of the living room…into the vast, dark wilderness of the Internet,” writes journalist David Harrow, calling to mind Collins’ domestic metaphor, “We’ve become roving vagabonds and pirates who create media just as easily as we consume.”[xxxii] Late capitalist rappers are a product of this drastic change in cultural production and consumption.

It is from the new terrain enabled by the internet connectivity and access, that I notice a kind of transnational digital consciousness. Late capitalist rappers are acutely aware of the “information technologies” essential to the neoliberal project that has molded the political and social environment around them.[xxxiii] They possess a literal and conceptual digital awareness. Through expert use of social media tools, like Twitter and Tumblr, this cast of rap performers reaches their fans directly, digitally engaging with the image making necessary to the late capitalist moment. In addition, there’s a kind of encyclopedic, or rather wikipedic, attention to a vast repertoire of cultural references. A rappers’ skill has always been closely tied to the ability to transverse a wide terrain of cultural, historical, social, pop cultural, religious, and musical landscape of references and symbols. Yet, there’s a meta-like quality to the kinds of imagery late capitalist rappers evoke. They linger in a hyper-aware space that acknowledges their Google-ablity, their ablility to self-make or unmake, and carefully articulate their relationship to the mainstream and the underground. Their musical and lyrical influences engage with both mainstream and alternative canons. In this sense, the hardness associated with the gangster rapper dissolves- vulnerability and mortality are often contemplated, an unsureness of self often bubbles up, as well as an acute anxiety around the fast paced fame they are simultaneously desiring of and dependent upon.

Late capitalist rappers are also transnational in their consciousness. Global mobility is a constantly reoccurring theme, and the conceptual spatial framework has moved far outside the reaches of the hood.  Rather than rooting authenticity in a detailed knowledge of the street, Late Capitalist rappers transverse times zones so fast they can’t even keep them straight. They perform rapper bravado through an articulation of their successful negotiation of their place in a global network of capital. Late capitalist rappers architect their own mappings of space that transverse borders, and construct their own legends of symbols that draw from various locales, physical and conceptual. Late Capitalist rappers come from many different places, and build their origin myths in a number of ways. That diversity of origin is distinct from the “from the streets” narrative associated with gangster rappers.

Late Capitalist rappers fall along a new spectrum of representation, that recalibrates masculinity in relation to a post-gangster moment, and embody a transnational digital consciousness in a multitude of ways. I take a small sample of examples as my case studies: J Cole, Drake, Big Sean, and Tyler the Creator. The four represent a spectrum of mainstream success, and embody the markers of late capitalist performance in different ways. I draw my evidence from their work (lyrics, songs, and videos) as well as direct reflections from the artists themselves (social media activity, online presence). 

J COLE  //  ROCNATION, 2009

Born Jermaine Cole in Frankfurt, Germany, J Cole first gained recognition from an authenticating association with Jay Z. Jay Z’s The Blueprint III included the track “A Star Is Born” featuring Cole, produced by Kanye West and No ID. Jay’s first verse traces a genealogy of the rap artists of late 1990s and early 2000s, weaving his own career throughout the narrative, setting up a progression that points towards a new star’s birth: J Cole. Jay asks the listener to applaud his transition from “moving that corner / to this corner office so enormous.”[xxxiv] This is an important distinction between Jay and J: Jay Z firmly roots himself as working his way up from the block to the top. While J Coles acknowledges his mentor and boss “gave him the platform,” here is where we see a difference between a rapper that is a product of the Late Capitalist moment and one whose career helped inform it. Touring with Jay Z, as well as collaborating with Kanye and Drake, and a successful series of digital mixtape releases secured Cole’s bid for the spot.

J Cole’s international origin is an interesting detail, but he roots himself in his North Carolina upbringing, as a “lil broke nigga from the ‘Ville.”[xxxv] While Cole does emphasize his rise to success, much of this discourse is firmly grounded in a middle class context, one that emphasizes community and his college education. Cole isn’t a college rapper persay, but his education is a running theme throughout his lyrics, as both a marker of legitimacy and anxiety. In “Too Deep For The Intro,” a mixtape track over a Erykah Badu sample:

“a ill ass nigga who just so happened to stay in school

still rap for hustlas and muthafuckas that hated school

said that’s for bustas then heard my shit and I made it cool

its safe to say I’m gifted like I’m Christmas shopping

I got gangsta niggas linin up in admission offices” [xxxvi]

In the epic edge of fame “Blow Up,” he laments student loans and a mother pushing law school: “mama say I should reconsider law school / that means I wear a suit and bend the truth and feel awful / hell nah got a degree but what that cost you / you make a good salary just to pay Sallie Mae.”[xxxvii] Cole both roots himself on a middle class foundation and airs a transparency of the anxieties of the late capitalist moment.

“Who Dat,” Cole’s first single, was accompanied by a sparklingly produced single take, HD video. The release of the song and video together reflect a digital awareness of image making. In this internet age of celebrity, a solid music video is enough to launch a career. The content of both video and song reflect a Late Capitalist consciousness. Cole walks along a slightly decaying North Carolina landscape, firmly planting himself in a lower middle class community. Young boys, a high school marching band, cheerleaders join him on his walk, as his image flickers through a stack of abandoned televisions besides him, a nod to his inevitable relationship with mass media. Several dynamite, fire starting explosions accompany the third round of the hook, a metaphorical read on the pop nihilistic turn of hip hop production. As  he eventually loops his way back to the start of the video, passing a sign informing us we are “Now Leaving Fayetteville,” Cole’s hometown. The markers throughout the video of urban decay function as an ironic reminder that while Cole most definitely reps his origins, it is only one marker on his transnational map. The song itself builds around the hook “who dat / who dat / bitch I got that flame / so don’t worry bout my mothafuckin name.” Rather than the name check– a repetitive self shout out that much of mainstream rap utilizes– Cole is putting the skill before himself. He presents us with a song that puts lyricism before braggadocio, while articulating his place in a global network of capital.

J Cole in many ways upholds a politics of respectability: he is college educated, ambitious, shows great respect for the heteronormative family unit and community. Yet, he simultaneously presents a raw sexuality. What allows for him to spit:

“shorty gave me head

hit then I quit it fore she even made the bed

but damn I’m no good

but damn its so good

I’m picturing that body like a camera phone would

something like Rihanna

while I’m in that vagina,”

“so she graduated rich nigga wife trainin

and if you got money man

the head is amazing,”

and finally “get your ass in that position I love to bend you in,” yet still maintain a fundamentally “good” boy image?[xxxviii] It is his emphasis on community and family coupled with an honest, middle class, and thus negligible sexuality. He is not the hyper-phallic gangster who fucks bitches, rather after waking up in a hotel room in Paris, he serenades the beautiful woman lying next to him with “can I hit it in the morning?”[xxxix]

Cole’s first studio album is still forthcoming, but with a seal of approval from Jay Z, we can expect success. He presents a one side of a new spectrum in relation to a politics of responsibility as well performing a consciousness that is transnationally engaged, buy grounded in middle class provincialism.

DRAKE  //  YOUNG MONEY ENTERTAINMENT, 2009

Aubrey Drake Graham first stepped into the public eye as a star on the Canadian teen drama export Degrassi: The Next Generation. It was an unlikely transition, from the clean cut basketball playing Jimmy Brooks to his next even more successful role: pretty boy with an edge rapper persona Drake. It helped that after the overwhelming success of several independently released mixtapes, he was not only signed by Lil Wayne, but played as the forward for Wayne’s impeccable team of young MCs Young Money (which includes other Late Capitalist rappers like Nicki Minaj and Tyga). Wayne has spit his approval of and belief in Drake more than once: “we poppin like champagne bottles but we neva shook / and we gone be alright if we put Drake on every hook” and “damn I be gone till November / but fuck it I aint trippin / I know Drizzy gonna kill em.”[xl]

The map Drake writes for himself, in his lyrics and public commentary, is firmly rooted in Late Capitalist mobility. He reps Toronto, his hometown, but moves with such upper class ease across borders, through time zones, from one studio to the next, one island to another: ”I do resort things / St Lucia Four Springs / and I’m important / so I import things/ I’m flyin planes with six windows and short wings.”[xli] He often shouts out Houstatlantavegas, an imagined amalgam of American markers of both hip hop and upperclass authenticity. Drake possesses a kind of cross genre authenticity enabling a broad appeal that he capitalizes on:

“I always knew that I could figure

how to get these label heads

to offer him good figures

me doin them shows gettin everyone nervous

cuz them hipsters gonna have to get along with them hood niggaz” [xlii]

Drake is the self-conscious cardigan wearing Canadian child star: if there ever was a counterpart to the gangster persona, he is it. In this sense, his management of sexuality in relation to a politics of respectability flies without question through the mainstream. He’s the boyish charmer, Heartbreak Drake, who performs a fusion of clean cut, loveable partyboy sexuality with fast-flowing hard edge bravado: “when my album drops bitches’ll by it for the picture / and niggas’ll buy it too and claim they got it for they sister.”

The video that accompanies “Miss Me,”a collaborative track between Wayne and Drake from Drizzy’s first studio released album Thank Me Later, presents a visual metaphor for Drake’s performance of authenticity. The scene opens without music, with a close up on a Drake’s hand holding a molotov cocktail waiting to be lit, a decaying brick wall in front of him. The video precedes in a phantasmagorical swirl of color, sparks, and flashes, a slew of bright, fast effects lighting up an otherwise minimalistic set. The video has all the elements a stereotypical video should: there’s a scantily clad woman, there’s alcohol, there’s a crowd of paparazzi. Yet, each element is abstracted, exaggerated and reduced- it’s a caricature of stereotypical rapper video performance, its amped up almost to the point of parody. Lil Wayne’s ghostlike presence, on TV screens, projected onto walls, floors, onto Drake himself, legitimizes the production. Drake moves through the video with a kind of boyish aggression, performing, again, a rapper persona that borders on mockery. He’s playing rapper, at one point, drunkenly sitting on the floor of an empty room, a bottle of red wine beside him, as an half-naked dancer spins around him. Throughout Wayne’s verse, he mouths along, again, boyishly playing rapper. There’s an aware irony that is indicative of Late Capitalist hip hop. Drake’s authenticity comes from his legitimized honestly. He may be playing rapper, but he’s doing it damn well.

Because his background comes casts him as an already international actor, Drake’s transnational digital consciousness comes through in his negotiation of image in relation a life already long lived at a face pace under the paradoxical spotlight of celebrity. He articulates himself in relation to globalization through the symbols of success associated with hip hop, Hollywood, and upper middle class cultural consumption

BIG SEAN  //  G.O.O.D. MUSIC, 2007

Born Sean Anderson in Santa Monica, the rapper now known as Big Sean reps Detroit. Big Sean was prominently featured in four of the fifteen G.O.O.D. Fridays tracks, Kanye West’s brilliant free-mp3-a-week marketing strategy. Not only is Big Sean signed and legitimized by West, but he himself has cultivated a high-fashion, rapper turn business man persona similar to that of West’s. Sean started his own label, Finally Famous, this year and receives as much attention for the jackets on his back as the lyrics on his lips.

When placed beside the two previous case studies, J Cole and Drake, Sean emerges as distinctly separate in terms of placing his performance in relation to a politics of respectability. Sean is a playboy, partying and smashing white models with his mentor Kanye. He embodies a kind of exaggerated, again, like Drake, boyish mischeviousness. Yet this is not the cardigan King, but rather the leather jacket badass: “You spend all day with her spoonin / I spend all night with her forkin.”[xliii] He articulates his party boy persona in kind of cartoonish exaggeration, however, so that while he may spit

“fuck a hotel

my nigga we rent houses

my nigga we rent houses

so many wedding rings lost in them couches

I’m just a west side lover

I leave females in my sheets

and all my feelings in a rubber”

the line hits with a tinge of irony.[xliv]

“Greet me with a middle finger when you see me / Its cool cause I can’t see yo ass from this side of the TV,” Sean raps, acknowledging his own role in the transparent production process of image making that is Late Capitalist hip hop performance. Perhaps no better example of his ironic badboy behavior is the collaborative track with UGK’s Bun B, released on a mixtape by Young Money, “Money and Sex.” The song builds around the hook: “All I think about is money and sex / fuckin and checks / in this lifetime I sweat/ you either run or get left,” and we are assured that if Sean “aint gettin rich / I’m prolly in ya bitch / and if I aint there I’m prolly gettin rich.”[xlv] This same cartoonish embodiment of a high-class playboy persona surfaces in the video accompanying Sean’s first single “Bullshittin.” He begins in a drive-in theater with 3D glasses on, sitting in a convertible Cadillac. He’s launched into a jittery, 3D digital world of neon, women, and security cameras. As he bounces around in front of women pillow fighting in front of walls of money, or next to a girl covered in face paint dancing in a cage, Sean looks silly, funny, and over the top exaggeration. When he spits “my frequent flyer miles is in the thousies / I’m Audi / somewhere chillin in Maui / swimming with the scuba fishes / whachudoin? / Bullshittin” he smiles and grabs onto a mermaid, a cartoon-like exclamation bursts out of her mouth.

Big Sean plays the international playboy, whose control of capital both literally, through his record label, and lyrically, shows a late capitalist sensibility. In relation to a spectrum of respectability, Sean performs an acceptable aggressive sexuality in that his performance is exaggerated to the point of caricature.

TYLER THE CREATOR  //  ODD FUTURE RECORDS, 2007

“Yo, yo fuck 2DopeBoyz and fuck NahRight, and any other fuck nigga ass blog that can’t put a 18 year old nigga makin his own fuckin beats, covers, videos and all that shit. Fuck you post-Drake ass cliché Jerkin LA sloshin rappin fuck nigga ass Hypebeast niggas.” [xlvi]

Tyler the Creator

And so enters Tyler the Creator, leading man of the Los Angeles based independent collective Odd Future, onto the scene. As the previous interlude from his first self released mixtape Bastard points to, Tyler is hyper aware of his exact place in the industry and the Late Capitalist space of hip hop cultural production. He is bad, vulgar, crude, so offensive it’s laughable. Any sense of politics of responsibility has no place in Tyler’s performance. He plays the outcast, the artist, the sociopath, but with an artistic perfection that demands your attention. His lyrical draws from a vast canon of cultural reference, yet always deviant, engaging insistently offensive. He jabs at pop culture, in response to female lead behind the chart topping hip pop song “Airplanes”: “Fuck her, Wolf Haley robbin em / I’ll crash that fuckin airplane at that faggot nigga B.o.B is in / and stab Bruno Mars in his goddamn esophagus.”[xlvii] He casts himself as the antichrist, attests to drug use reflecting a whole gamut of class contexts, discusses rape, being gay, hating his mother.

“Got all the black bitches mad / cuz my main bitch vanilla / she trying to get her groove back like Stella,” Tyler spits in his first single “French!”[xlviii] He goes on: “I’m opening the church to sell coke and Led Zeppelin / and fuck Mary in her ass / laughs  yo / I’m fuckin goldilocks up in the forest / in the three bear house eatin they motha fuckin porridge.”[xlix] And it goes on. His performance of sexuality is so magnified and spectacular, he deconstructs the whole history of aggressive, dominant masculinity in hip hop. His overwhelmingly vast cultural framework of references jabs at all our myths, Mary and Goldilocks alike.

Tyler’s legitimacy comes not from an authenticity checkpoint, not even through the alternative realms of the hip hop blogging community (he calls out 2DopeBoyz, NahRight, and Hypebeast for refusing to support his work). Instead through an expertly executed digital consciousness Tyler, and his incredibly young and talented team, have used new media avenues like Twitter, Tumblr, and alternative media sources like Pitckfork and The Village Voice to gain not only recognition but notoriety. Like J Cole’s success with “Who Dat,” Tyler knew too well that a sparkling HD video and a catchy track to match are today’s internet market’s key to launching a successful career. For Tyler, that video was the now infamous “Yonkers.” The video features Tyler sitting on a stool, dramatically lit, the image black and white, rapping right to us. He sports a hipster collared shirt, a Supreme cap, the world kill handwritten on his left hand. Tyler plays with and devours a cockroach, then spits “Jesus called he said he’s sick of the disses / I told him to quit bitchin / this isn’t a fuckin hot line.”[l] He slowly unbuttons his shirt to reveal a several chains, after which his eyes turn deep, black, and animal like, literally morphing into the extreme exaggeration of the black man as criminal monster. Eventually he misses a bar to wipe a nosebleed, and ends the video by standing up on the stool and slipping a noose around his neck. We watch his feet twitch in the center of the frame.

The video is stunning for both its excellent production quality and terrifying visual content. What does Tyler’s performance of black criminal sociopath mean for the spectrum of performance of masculinity? As he embodies the Late Capitalist space of production, I argue that his caricature of stereotypical black masculinity in hip hop flips the scripts on us- what does it mean that a viewing public can see a young black man hanged and not place a long history of violence besides it? For Tyler, the rawness of his persona may be artistic release and marketable shock value. As for his place in Late Capitalist hip hop, he pushes a wholly oppositional avenue towards success and performs a kind of masculinity that makes our jaws drop, then keeps us talking.

CONCLUSION

 J Cole, Drake, Big Sean and Tyler the Creator present examples that run a spectrum of a politics of responsibility in relation to a performance of masculinity in a post-gangster moment. In addition, their presentation of image and negotiation of the production of that persona embodies a transnational digital consciousness. I derive these features of a Late Capitalist moment in the evolution of hip hop cultural production, one that must respond to hip hop’s place as a both global and mainstream form. There is something more happening here than much of the work produced by hip hop scholarship in relation to the gangster era, and most all of the mainstream popular critical discourse. What new space for discussing what the American imaginary considers hip hop? If we use this slightly shifted framework for unpacking masculinity, can we make moves towards a new language for considering but the racial complexities of contemporary popular culture at large?

ENDNOTES

[i] Tricia Rose. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. 21-2

[ii] ibid 27

[iii] ibid 22

[iv] ibid 27

[v] Frederic Jameson. “Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” 77.

[vi] David Harvey. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 16.

[vii] ibid 2.

[viii] ibid 3.

[ix] Jeff Chang. Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006.x.

[x] Rose. Black Noise. 21-2.

[xi] I borrow the phrase pop nihilism from a writer Douglas Haddow’s article “Pop Nihilism: Advertising Eats Itself,” published in Adbusters #84, July/August 2009, Volume 17, Number 4.

[xii] Rose. Black Noise. 22.

[xiii] Michael P. Jeffries. Thug Life: Race, Gender, and The Meaning of Hip-Hop. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. 15.

[xiv] Angela Y Davis. “Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist.” Women, Race & Class. New York: Vintage House, 1983. 173.

[xv] Patricia Hill Collins. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and The New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2005. 29.

[xvi] Angela Y Davis. “Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist.” Women, Race & Class. New York: Vintage House, 1983. 184.

[xvii] Kyra D Gaunt. The Games Black Girls Play: Learning The Ropes From Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 19.

[xviii] ibid 51.

[xix] Rose. Black Noise. 12.

[xx] Jeffries. Thug Life. 02.

[xxi] ibid 06.

[xxii] Rose. Black Noise. 12.

[xxiii] Jeffries. Thug Life.  62.

[xxiv] ibid 68.

[xxv] ibid 83

[xxvi] Jeff Chang. Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006. xi.

[xxvii] Hill Collins. Black Sexual Politics. 72.

[xxviii] Patricia Hill Collins. Black Sexual Politics. 33. + Jeffries. Thug Life. 8.

[xxix] Patricia Hill Collins. Black Sexual Politics. 29.

[xxx] ibid 31.

[xxxi] ibid 34.

[xxxii] Haddow. “Pop Nihilism: Advertising Eats Itself.” Adbusters.

[xxxiii] Patricia Hill Collins. Black Sexual Politics. 3.

[xxxiv] Jay Z feat. J Cole. “A Star Is Born.” The Blueprint III. 2009.

[xxxv] Jay Z feat. J Cole. “A Star is Born.”

[xxxvi] J Cole. “Too Deep For The Intro.” Friday Night Lights Mixtape. 2010.

[xxxvii] J Cole. “Blow Up.” Friday Night Lights Mixtape. 2010.

[xxxviii] J Cole. “Back To The Topic” + “Higher.” “Blow Up.” Friday Night Lights Mixtape. 2010.

[xxxix] J Cole feat. Drake. “In the Morning.” Friday Night Lights Mixtape. 2010.

[xl] Birdman feat. Drake and Lil Wayne. “Money to Blow.” Priceless. 2009. + Drake feat. Lil Wayne. “Miss Me.” Thank Me Now. 2010.

[xli] Drake feat. Nickelus F. “When We Come Around.” No Album. 2007.

[xlii] Drake feat. Lil Wayne. “Ignant Shit.” So Far Gone Mixtape. 2009.

[xliii] Lil Wayne, Big Sean, Drake. “All of the Lights” (Remix). Single, 2011.

[xliv] Kanye West feat. Pusha T, CyHi the Prince,  Big Sean + J Cole. “Looking For Trouble.” G.O.O.D. Fridays single, 2010.

[xlv] Big Sean feat. Bun B. “Money and Sex.” Finally Famous: Vol 3 Mixtape. 2010.

[xlvi] Tyler The Creator. “Bastard.” Bastard Mixtape. 2009.

[xlvii] Tyler The Creator. “Yonkers.” Bastard Mixtape. 2009.

[xlviii] Tyler The Creator feat. Hodgy Beats. “French!.” Bastard Mixtape. 2009.

[xlix] Tyler The Creator feat. Hodgy Beats. “French!.” Bastard Mixtape. 2009.

[l] Tyler The Creator. “Yonkers.” Bastard Mixtape. 2009.