Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Tommy J. Curry
Access provided by Mount Saint Marys University (15 Sep 2017 03:16 GMT)
Pessimistic Themes in Kanye Wests
Necrophobic Aesthetic: Moving beyond
Subjects of Perfection to Understand the
New Slave as a Paradigm of Anti-Black Violence
tommy j. curry
Texas A&M University
Introduction
The release of Kanye Wests Yeezus was indelibly marked by the provoca-
tion of his hit song entitled New Slaves, which introduced a pessimistic
terminology to capture the paradoxical condition whereby Black freedom
from enslavement only resulted in the capturing of Black people psychically
in the neo-liberal entanglements of poverty, servitude, and corporatism. His
analysis, not unlike currently en vogue theories of Afro-pessimism or Criti-
cal Race Theorys (racial) realist lens, maintains that despite all the rhetoric
and symbols of progress to the contrary, Black people are simply not free in
America. Wests performance of New Slaves on Saturday Night Live was
only amplified by the Not For Sale insignia projected behind him.1 Wests
Not For Sale insignia was a symbol of independence, as well as a public
declaration of his anti-corporatism. It signaled Wests resistance against com-
modification, and announced his confrontational posture toward the rap
industry; a posture that ignited the Hip-Hop community and academia alike
over this artistic radicalism. However, such a provocation, despite its rhetori-
cal flare and allure, was immediately cast as disingenuous and inauthentic.
Kanye West is a Black man torn: at moments by his brilliance and at
times by his banality. The lack of attention to his discography in Hip-Hop
studies and his performances in philosophical aesthetics is not because his
work is not worthwhile; to the contrary, Wests analyses of anti-Black death,
corporatism, and neo-liberal aspiration are enough to warrant more than one
serious study of his art. The refusal to study West is not at all due to his lack
of correctness about the world around him. In reality, West is not studied
because his body, his Black male body, lacks the symbolic currency to mo-
tivate reverence for his thinking. Regardless of his popularity, Wests ideas,
specifically his analysis of the New Slave, implicate all arenas of knowledge
and political production hailing from the academy, and while his life and
public proclamations are at tension with some of his work, it nonetheless
necessitates serious study, rather than sophistry and condemnation. This
article is an attempt to draw out some of the themes concerning anti-Black
racism in Wests New Slaves. Unlike many scholarly works on Hip-Hop,
this article does not attempt to center the artist, in this case Kanye West,
as the sole creator of the art, but rather evaluates his aesthetics as a starting
point of dialogue between Black men about death. This article explores the
articulations, the signification(s), and the unexplored meanings of his work
given that it was co-authored with Che Rhymefest Smith, and remixed by
Jasiri X. It is my view that Wests work is an attempt to articulate the continu-
ation of Black enslavement despite the artificial political and social changes
that are attributed to racial progress and social equality through the lens of
(the anxiety and fears endemic to) Black manhood. Wests aesthetics com-
municate the ever-looming threat of death, violence, and erasure seemingly
married to the Black male body.
about change. Black popular culture scholars and progressives have inscribed
any number of psychoanalytic pathologies to West, his contradictions rep-
resenting more than the complexities of an oppressed subject attempting to
navigate the anti-Black world before him, but rather the actual deficiencies
of mind and morals. West has become demonized, where his public rants
against corporatism, while true, have been dismissed as nonsense and irrel-
evant because he does not embody, perform, or internalize the perfect subject
living out his revolutionary proclamations.
Like John Kennedys opinion piece appearing on Vibe.com, many aca-
demics have simply decided that [c]orporations are profiting, while the
underclass and rich rappers who refuse to read paperwork are under the psy-
chological spell of materialism. Or as Yeezy puts it, new slavery. ... Kanye
isnt just the victim; hes part of the problem (Kennedy). But this criticism
is not about the contradictions found in arguing against corporatism while
seeking to establish oneself as a corporate brand, any more than it is about
the contradiction between allegedly attacking the university while seeking
permanent membership within it; this criticism is about Kanye West being
the wrong subject, the Black male subject, who must concede moral ground
to the idealization of revolution without regard for his own materiality at
risk during the revolt. This is about condemnation, not the irreconcilable
conundrum of oppression that makes the victims of anti-Blackness mythical
individuals who are supposed to live our choices that have been empirically
proven to be ineffective against the structures, both material and ideologi-
cal, that impede freedom. But this moral condemnation, which revels in the
character found wanting in West, is the stuff Hip-Hop scholarship is made
of; it is the material of bourgeois condemnation that maintains intellectual
and moral judgment of Hip-Hop artists as if they are characters/caricatures
of the academics own creation.
Rather than being a conceptual device of inquiry into the cultural, his-
torical, and political catalysts behind Hip-Hop and the consequences of this
radical Black aesthetic on the horizons of disciplinary taxonomy, Hip-Hop
scholarship in the academy follows the disciplinary categories that continue
to confine Black cultural expression and constrain Black aesthetic voice. These
scholars choose apologetics over inquiry, picking and choosing subjects based
on their intersectional identities and political declarations rather than the
content of their arguments and substance of their stances on social problems
and political realities. When Beyonc independently released her self-titled
album on December 13, 2013, the blogosphere as well as the popular culture
scholars who deem social media their homes took to the airways to defend
supposed to say no? / You already seen me turn a man to a G.O.A.T. Beyonc
takes up the repetition crown, crown in the style of Jay-Z; she says Im
so crown, crown, bow down bitches! Beyonc appropriates the dominative
style of ownership and property relations common to Americas imperial
economy, pitting herself against corporations, but establishing herself as her
own corporate brand.
She corporatizes her artistic productions to gain control over profit, not
to address the conditions that generate inequity. She makes no call for the
abolition of any systems, despite the work her feminist public urges readers
to accept as ever-present in and lurking behind her performative intentions.
Instead of singing, Beyonc spits (raps) the verses of Haunted Lyrics: Im
climbing up the walls cause all the shit I hear is boring / All the shit I do is
boring, all these record labels boring / I dont trust these record labels, Im
torn / All these people on the planet working 9 to 5 just to stay alive. Like
Kanye, she claims to stand against the profit-motivated production of music
under an allegedly faux radicality. She asserts that her Soul not for sale /
Probably wont make any money off this, while celebrating the highest sales
of any record this year (Caulfield). Drawing parallels between Kanye West and
Beyonc, Ben Beaumont-Thomas applauded the move of these Black artists
to establish themselves as brands beyond the reach of PR firms and labels,
yet with few exceptions, there has been little scholarship engaging Beyoncs
profit-driven mode as problematic.3 Similar to Kanye, Beyonc criticizes the
corporatism of Black music while benefiting from the position she has within
this economic system as the artist, yet there is an apologetic for her position;
there are moralizations to demonize overly critical assessments of her work,
and scholarship dedicated to humanizing her contradictions as nothing more
than the inconsequential complexities of being a Black woman.
West, however, is denied such complexity. His humanity, like his various
moments of profundity and ambiguity, are contested categorically as mere
pathologies of his Black masculinity.4 He is castigated as a profit-driven Black
man and, as such, condemned for any capitalist pursuits since his desire of
wealth is a moral errorthe unjustifiable growth of patriarchy. His corporate
dreams become demonized as part of the problem: the white supremacist,
capitalist structure that continues to exploit and alienate the poor Black
worker. He has no symbolic worth in the eyes of the academy, not because
his actual existence is detrimental to the condition of Black people, but rather
because he is the wrong subjecta Black male subjectwho must be sanc-
tioned for pursuing resistance outside of the idealizations of revolutiona
patriarch. His works, like his public testaments, exist to be problematized,
critiqued, and displaced for more ideal subjects and solutions. Hip-Hop
scholarship demands nothing less than complete decolonization from him,
while celebrating Beyoncs capitalist leanings as well-deserved reparations
long overdue the intersectional subject par excellence: the Black woman.5
This selective deployment of intersectionality to protect ones preferred
subject is not new to the literature. Sirma Bliges Intersectionality Undone:
Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies, for instance,
argues that
intersectionality, originally focused on transformative and counter-
hegemonic knowledge production and radical politics of social justice,
has been commodified and colonized for neoliberal regimes. A depo-
liticized intersectionality is particularly useful to a neoliberalism that
reframes all values as market values: identity-based radical politics are
often turned into corporatized diversity tools leveraged by dominant
groups to attain various ideological and institutional goals. (40708)
Under the neo-liberal regime of disciplines, identity is not simply a marker
of historical exclusion, but also a commodity made marketable in the uni-
versity. The identity of a group in these disciplinary systems is actually quite
distant from the actual social condition of people oppressed by racism, sexual
violence, or poverty because the identities in the academy are rooted in my-
thologized histories that justify mobility throughout the ranks of these par-
ticular academic institutions, rather than the understanding and redress of
the conditions that materially oppress racialized groups in society. As such,
the subject, or rather the perfect (intersectional) subjectfree of moral fault
and absolved of the consequences of their economic and political rise within
empire, the Black-woman-laborer rather than the consequences of oppression
articulated by the voices, bodies and deaths of the oppressedbecomes the
focus of race, class, and gendered inquiry.
Bliges work repeats the concerns post-intersectionality theorists raised
concerning Kimberl Crenshaws original formulation of the theory decades
ago. Nancy Ehrenreichs Subordination and Symbiosis: Mechanisms of Mu-
tual Support between Subordinating Systems as well as Peter Kwans Jeffrey
Dahmer and the Cosynthesis of Categories both point to an essentialization
of the Black heterosexual female subject as the foundational representation of
intersectional analysis. In short, this intersectional allusion to the bourgeois
Black woman, her indemnification against all critique, has long been the
unquestionable norm operating within the political assertions of Black femi-
nism and the conceptual pluralization supposedly gained through utilizing
intersectionality as a method. Carole Boyce Davies describes this tendency
the Black woman, and the Black child who survive in the bare conditions of
wretchedness nurtured by anti-Blacknessthe poverty, death, and violence
of racial oppressionare never seen. They are spoken about as secondary
factors worth mentioning, but never considered to be primary subjects worth
motivating independent study. Intersectionality, its synonymy with the ideal
bourgeois Black woman, is an errant axiom that denies Black study for the
elevation of one (powerful, Black, female) identity taken to be the finality of
all Black morality.6
Derrick Bell made the same point we get from Wildersons critical inquiry
in straightforward historical terms, namely that we have never understood
that the essence of racism we contended against was not simply that we were
exploited in slavery, degraded by segregation, and frustrated by the unmet
promises of equal opportunity. The essence of racism in America was the
hope that we who were black would not exist (23).
By most popular accounts, Kanye Wests New Slaves revolves around
the idea that broke Nigga racism (segregation) where Blacks were denied the
ability to purchase goods, has been replaced with new Nigga racism (corpo-
ratism and economic exploitation), where Blacks are kept poor by spending
all their earnings on worthless materialism, keeping white corporations and
owners rich. This analysis is certainly present in New Slaves, but to suggest
this is the extent of the idea meant to be conveyed by the song confines the
meaning and over-determines the imagery of the lyrics to its first verse. A
closer examination of New Slaves reveals a different theme in the music.
West says: I know that we the new slaves / I see the blood on the leaves
(New Slaves). Here, West suggests that the blood on the leaves makes him
aware of his position as a slave. This is not the economic alienation of the
relatively deprived Black citizen who notices his inferior social position; rather,
West articulates the language and imagery of death, specifically lynching, as
the revelation of his enslaved, non-human, status. Death, not disadvantage,
is whats at stake in Wests analysis.
Besides being a historical reference to lynching, Blood on the Leaves
is also a track on Yeezus. West starts that song with a sample from Nina Sim-
ones Strange Fruit: Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees / Blood
on the leaves (Blood on the Leaves). Nina Simone describes lynching as
terrorisma recurring punishment for being Black in the South: Southern
trees / Bear strange fruit / Blood on the leaves / And blood at the roots / Black
bodies / Swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hangin / From the
poplar trees (Simone, Strange Fruit). The lyrics draw the listener into the
horror. Her words demand the attention of the listener to Black deathto
how the murder, the corpse of Blacks, changes the tree into a bloodstained
instrument of death. Simones version of Strange Fruit is a redo of Billie
Holidays original by the same name recorded in 1939. The reproduction, or
sampling of these songs present Black death and suffering as a burden with
continuity throughout the political eras of Black civil rights. Inspired by
Wests song Blood on the Leaves and his sampling of Strange Fruit, Jasiri
X created a remix dealing with the problem of anti-Black death and what the
contingency of Black life means for how we think about Black existence in
has capital, his own economic venture as retort. Despite his riches, West is
not gifted in the categorical dogmas of race, class, and gendera phrase
whose mere utterance is assumed to be synonymous with critical truth. West
is literally in the world, and unlike the academic, who is offered an ivory
tower far enough from the world so that he or she may freely observe it, the
consequences of his thoughts and speech are attributed solely to his mela-
ninated male body. This is not to excuse his complicity, but an attempt to
demoralize the alleged sacredness of the (Black) academic who elevates his
or her positionality as observer to moral adjudicator.
Conclusion
Kanye West is judged by the extent to which he embodies and lives out
some unannounced, but already agreed-upon utopianismthose ideal so-
lutions to (moralizations of ) the world and its problems he describesas if
the conditions for those solutions are ever present in this anti-Black chaos.
Rather than seeing his aesthetic reflections as a diagnosis establishing the
continuity of slavery through our supposedly sacred Obama era, his work
and rhetoric is simply announced by a seemingly endless series of cumulative
ad hominems. West offers a paradigmatic lens through which scholars and
thinkers can view the world, an aesthetic provocation against the accepted
narrative of racial progress that calls for the racially oppressed to consider the
possibility that slavery never ended. Is this a conceptual impossibility? What
is at stake for those who insist on denying West a position as a thinker, or
from consideration as a theorist? What is lost in valuing the signification of
the New Slave as indicative of not only these allegedly free Black Americans,
but descriptive of a neo-colonial oppressiona real slaveocracy functioning
within Americawhere corporations who have a stake in the death and dy-
ing of Black Americans and the imprisonment of Black men have tyrannical
degrees of power in government, policymaking, and economic institutions. Is
notes
1. See Kanye Wests Black Skinhead video on Saturday Night Live.
2. A similar conflict ensued when Charlemagne tha God confronted Kanye West on
the Breakfast Club; see BreakfastClub, 105.1, Kanye West Interview at Breakfast Club
Power 105.1.
3. The debate on Beyonc is pretty clear-cut for academic feminists. While there have
been works like Mia McKenzies On Defending Beyonc: Black Feminists, White Femi-
nists, and the Line in the Sand, and Tamara Winfrey Harriss All Hail the Queen?,
many, if not most, of the public intellectual works praise Beyonc and these contradic-
tions as part of the rich complexities of womanhood and femininity. Christina Cole-
mans That Time Beyoncs Album Invalidated Every Criticism of Feminism Ever sees
no tension in the various capitalist and egoistic drives of Beyonc; similarly, Danielle
Moodie-Millss Can Beyoncs Celebrity Reshape Feminism? and Daniel DAddarios
Beyoncs Feminist Statement Shouldnt Come as a Surprise take pride that such a
famous and rich celebrity is spreading the ideology of feminism, despite the intellectual
and political praxis that accompanies it. Here again, the questions, concepts, and praxis
that would seriously challenge empire, imperial womanhoodincluding Black feminist
bourgeois ideologyis relinquished for growing the ideological base.
4. See Ronald B. Neals Kanye West Is Not a Feminist But . . .
5. The post-intersectionality literature has criticized the ideal subject of the Black
woman placed at the center of intersectionality. Kimberl Crenshaws believes:
Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white womens
experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men. Yet
often they experience double-discriminationthe combined effects of practices
which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes,
they experience discrimination as Black womennot the sum of race and sex dis-
crimination, but as Black women. (149)
Crenshaws view has been challenged by Peter Kwan as a re-essentialization. Kwan argues:
[S]cholars who wrote about intersectionality responded to marginalization by cre-
ating new marginal categories that, by their very nature, themselves encourage the
idea of categorical hegemony. It is not just that intersectionality slighted issues of
sexual orientation, as Eskridge puts it, but that by focusing, for example, on the
particularities of black womens experience, intersectionality stands in danger of
pushing to its margins issues of class, religion, and able-bodiedness, as well as issues
of sexual orientation. Thus, without a more developed theory of how to factor in
these issues, as Crenshaw predicted, intersectionality stands in danger of perpetu-
ating the very dangers to which it alerted with regard to male dominance in racial
discourses, and white supremacy in feminist discourses. (1276)
6. See Sylvia Wynter, Interview with Sylvia Wynter, where she argues:
references
AbduSalaam, Ismael. Rhymefest: Hip-Hop Is Scared of Revolution? AllHipHop.com
11 May 2010. <http://allhiphop.com/2010/05/11/rhymefest-hip-hop-is-scared-of
-revolution/>.
Adiche, Chimamanda Ngozi. TED | We Should All Be FeministsChimamanda Ngozi
Adichie at TEDxEuston [transcript]. Vialogue 30 Dec. 2013. <http://vialogue.wordpress
.com/2013/12/30/ted-we-should-all-be-feminists-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-at
-tedxeuston-transcript/>.
Beaumont-Thomas, Ben. Beyoncs New Album and the Revolution in PR. Guardian
13 Dec. 2013. <http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/13/beyonce-new-album
-revolution-pr>.
Bell, Derrick. Gospel Choirs: Psalms of Survival for an Alien Land Called Home. New York:
Basic Books, 1996.
Beyonc. Flawless. Beyonc. Columbia Records, 2013. MP3.
. Haunted Lyrics. Beyonc. Columbia Records, 2013. MP3.