Necrophobic Aesthetics

P t Th n n t N r ph b th t :v n b nd bj t f P rf t n t nd r t ndth N l v P r d f nt Bl V l n

Tommy J. Curry

The Pluralist, Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2014, pp. 18-37 (Article)

P bl h d b n v r t f ll n PrDOI: 10.1353/plu.2014.0026

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the pluralist Volume 9, Number 3 Fall 2014 : pp. 18–37 18 ©2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Pessimistic Themes in Kanye West’s Necrophobic Aesthetic: Moving beyond Subjects of Perfection to Understand the New Slave as a Paradigm of Anti-Black Violence

tommy j. curryTexas A&M University

Introduction

The release of Kanye West’s 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 Theory’s (racial) realist lens, maintains that despite all the rhetoric and symbols of progress to the contrary, Black people are simply not free in America. West’s performance of “New Slaves” on Saturday Night Live was only amplified by the “Not For Sale” insignia projected behind him.1 West’s “Not For Sale” insignia was a symbol of independence, as well as a public declaration of his anti-corporatism. It signaled West’s 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, West’s 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, West’s ideas,

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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 West’s “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 West’s 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. West’s aesthetics com-municate the ever-looming threat of death, violence, and erasure seemingly married to the Black male body.

On Subjects Par Excellence: Dismissing West for His Corporate Dreams While Embracing Beyoncé as the Deserving Capitalist

Less than a month after West’s Saturday Night Live performance, Vladimir Lyubovny (DJ Vlad) conducted an interview with Charlamagne Tha God, who criticized West’s newfound radicalism as little more than a publicity stunt, saying: “[Kanye’s] a Gemini, so he’s two sided; so I guess it’s like two different personalities . . . but you can’t denounce corporations when you are in business with corporations. . . . [D]on’t be a fake revolutionary for profit. Kanye is being a walking contradiction. We are all walking contradictions but damn don’t be so blatant with it” (Charlamagne Tha God).2 Similarly, Jessica Ann Mitchell’s piece entitled “Kanye’s Frantz Fanon Complex” argued that “Kanye’s commentary has shifted from calling out racism because it’s wrong, to calling out racism because he didn’t get a seat at the table. This is the bigger issue.” Mitchell even suggests that West suffers from a racial psy-chosis that is envious of the oppressor class, rather than enraged by it. For Mitchell, “[w]ith every new Kanye rant we are witnessing a public display of internal conflict consisting of Fanon’s ‘dreams of possession’ and Dubois’ double consciousness. Ultimately, he cares more about having a seat at the table with the same people he accuses of racism and classism, than bringing


20 the pluralist 9 : 3 2014

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 Kennedy’s 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 isn’t just the victim; he’s 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 Beyoncé 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



her first lyrical articulations of Black feminism. Ignited by her signature track “Flawless,” which sampled Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s speech “We Should All Be Feminists,” Beyoncé quotes Adichie, saying: “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller / We say to girls: ‘You can have ambition, but not too much / You should aim to be successful, but not too successful / Otherwise you will threaten the man.’ . . . / We raise girls to see each other as competitors / Not for jobs or for accomplishments, which I think would be a good thing / But for the attention of men.” Beyoncé concludes her sampling with a definition of a feminist, mistakenly attributed to Adichie, as “a person who believes in the social / Political, and economic equality of the sexes” (“Flawless”). Adichie is clear that the definition used by Beyoncé was the definition given in the dictionary, not the one that Adichie sees herself operating under, or shown to her through the life of her grand-mother. Adichie actually defines a feminist as “a man or a woman who says, ‘Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better.’” Ironically, the person who best embodies this ideal for Adichie is her (masculine) brother, but this male embodiment of gendered resistance has been ignored altogether. I want to be clear: I am arguing that the authors of the litany of moralizations defending Beyoncé as a Black feminist icon based on her sampling of Adichie did not listen to or chose to ignore her actual definition of a feminist to maintain their specific ideological program of feminism being politically liberal and subjectively Black and female. Contrary to Adichie’s actual feminist call urging people to see the prob-lem of gender, Beyoncé resists offering a feminist treatise that problematizes gender, and instead offers her fans a neo-liberal track warning her competi-tors of her power, be it economic or otherwise. She replaces the eradication of gender hierarchy with capitalist gain, and offers homo economicus to the world as the capitalist Black woman protected by the language, the political sentiments, and moralism of Black feminism. Her first verse in “Flawless” says: “I know when you were little girls / You dreamt of being in my world / Don’t forget it, don’t forget it / Respect that, bow down bitches (crown).” This line “bow down bitches (crown)” is much more than an ambiguous call for reverence. In fact, the voice saying “crown,” is that of her husband Jay-Z, whose album Magna Carta . . . Holy Grail was released July of 2013. Jay-Z’s interlude on “Crown” is the call for market superiority against challengers: “If fear is your only God / Get y’all to fear me is my only job / crown, crown / crown, crown.” “Crown” is the reclamation of transfiguration narrative of Jesus, the meeting of the corporeal with the eternal. There is no mistaking Jay-Z on this; his testimony of this says: “Bitch asked if I was God, fuck I’m



supposed to say no? / You already seen me turn a man to a G.O.A.T.” Beyoncé takes up the repetition “crown, crown” in the style of Jay-Z; she says “I’m so crown, crown, bow down bitches!” Beyoncé appropriates the dominative style of ownership and property relations common to America’s 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, Beyoncé spits (raps) the verses of “Haunted Lyrics”: “I’m 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 don’t trust these record labels, I’m 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 won’t make any money off this,” while celebrating the highest sales of any record this year (Caulfield). Drawing parallels between Kanye West and Beyoncé, 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 Beyoncé’s profit-driven mode as problematic.3 Similar to Kanye, Beyoncé 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 error—the 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 subject—a Black male subject—who must be sanc-tioned for pursuing resistance outside of the idealizations of revolution—a 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 Beyoncé’s capitalist leanings as well-deserved reparations long overdue the intersectional subject par excellence: the Black woman.5

This selective deployment of intersectionality to protect one’s preferred subject is not new to the literature. Sirma Blige’s “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. (407–08)

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) subject—free 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 oppressed—becomes the focus of race, class, and gendered inquiry. Blige’s work repeats the concerns post-intersectionality theorists raised concerning Kimberlé Crenshaw’s original formulation of the theory decades ago. Nancy Ehrenreich’s “Subordination and Symbiosis: Mechanisms of Mu-tual Support between Subordinating Systems” as well as Peter Kwan’s “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



toward protecting the ascension of the Black feminist subject as condification; “a project perhaps, a behavioral process which marks the rise of a certain neo-colonial elite in the U.S. imperial context, operating for the benefit of the dominant state and its rulers” (14). Davies argues that “[c]ondification marks the limit . . . but can also be seen as the ultimate manifestation of a domestic black and/or feminist bourgeois discourse” (14), and presents a concrete crisis for Black feminist calls for social, economic, and political equality. Since there is no accountability to the buttressing up of empire and inequality in their march toward capitalist freedom, Black feminist politics ultimately strive to participate in structures that materially drive social ills (capitalism, patriarchy, racism, etc.) to gain actual profit and power in universities, governments, and corporations, as a way to remedy their marginalization, while suggesting all other bodies that attempt the same march toward freedom are immoral, decadent, and complacent in the capitalist-heteropatriarchial system that fails to address their cause. Davies is not alone in this analysis of Black feminism; Elaine Brown has gone as far as to say: “[F]eminism, assuming this word, which I don’t assume (let’s just call it that for now, women’s liberation, the liberation of all human beings), is part of my agenda. If you take their analysis, as strict analysis, you can end up having a woman like Condoleezza Rice. So they are incorrect in their ideological commitment. Condoleezza Rice would be the ultimate Black feminist icon. So they’re wrong” (3). The inability of Black feminism to move beyond the defense of the Black female individual through abstract accounts of subjectivity and agency, despite the concrete economic and political inequities perpetuated by the Black female agent, more accurately describes an apologia rather than a paradigm of analysis. Simply put, Black feminism continues to assert that agency and subjectivity regardless of their consequences are ultimately goods-in-themselves, and as such cannot be judged or evaluated by any other means outside of the Black feminist project. These Black feminist apologetics are not revolutionary, but reformist. Gaining power within the already established system, regardless of the means or consequences, is justified as the moral call for gender progress, and ratio-nalized as the necessary trajectory toward political freedom. However, these authors offer no criteria for liberation, only axioms urging the accumulation of representatives that are Black and female, who command the recognition of systems previously blind to their existence. The now common practice of lifting up the immaterial subject, the ideal abstraction of the (Black) feminist self, represented by the mere utterance of race, class, and gender, destroys our ability to truly understand the suffering of Black people. The Black man,



the Black woman, and the Black child who survive in the bare conditions of wretchedness nurtured by anti-Blackness—the poverty, death, and violence of racial oppression—are 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

Necrophobia: The Fear of Death and Dying in Kanye West’s “New Slaves”

Kanye West’s “New Slaves” asks a question similar to that posed by Frank Wilderson in Red, White & Black: “[W]hy should we think of today’s Blacks in the United States as Slaves, and everyone else (with the exception of In-dians) as Masters?” (10). What series of events have transpired, or what mo-ment has failed to occur in both the mind and matter of the American state that confines Black Americans to their previous state of being, literally the non-(human) Being? How could we conceptualize this problem in such a way that gives substance to the magnitude of the problem without explod-ing its scope beyond comprehension, or spurring quixotic appeals to our traditional civil rights narratives, which demand one concede racial progress has occurred despite the material oppression that remains. Wilderson poses the problem in this way:

If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer, but an anti-Human, a position against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corpo-real integrity; if the Slave is . . . generally dishonored, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society. (11)

Because anti-Blackness is birthed into the world through violence, the death of Black people naturally follows. This is an enduring condition that has per-sisted since enslavement to citizenship. It is not remedied by the class stratifi-cations within the Black community, nor arrested by the alleged integration of Black people into the already established white supremacist order that still insists upon the underclass status of Black Americans. This is not simply a theoretical mode of inquiry situated upon high theory. Over a decade ago,



Derrick Bell made the same point we get from Wilderson’s 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 West’s “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 what’s at stake in West’s 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-one’s “Strange Fruit:” “Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees / Blood on the leaves” (“Blood on the Leaves”). Nina Simone describes lynching as terrorism—a 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 death—to how the murder, the corpse of Blacks, changes the tree into a bloodstained instrument of death. Simone’s version of “Strange Fruit” is a redo of Billie Holiday’s 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 West’s 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



America. In a comment explaining his “Blood on the Leaves Remix,” Jasiri X argued:

I chose to remix Kanye’s song “Blood on the Leaves” because I felt like the sample he used from Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” is even more relevant today. Whether it’s the over 500 murders last year in Chicago or the 313 Black people killed last year by the police, security guards, and people like Zimmerman. Our blood is on the leaves, and it seems like it’s in the best interest of America and these corporations. (“Why I Remixed Kanye West’s ‘Blood on the Leaves’”)

What worth does a Black life have if it must retreat in fear from white-ness, if it lacks any resistance to challenges of its meaning? The problem of racism is not a problem of misunderstanding; it is a problem of existence, or rather who deserves to exist when challenged by the will of another. This problem of being, where every white citizen is permitted by his or her alleged racial superiority to murder the Black, impresses fear. This is a fear cultivated in the minds of Blacks who live to see the terrorized corpses of the Blacks who die. Racism socializes complacency in the minds of the oppressed. It prevents them from rising up; it destroys their will for resistance. “Only white life is protected in America / Every Black life is rejected till they bury ya” (Jasiri X, “Blood on the Leaves Remix”). Jasiri X understands that Black life is only corporeal—the lifeless corpses, the chained prisoners, the wretched bodies suffering in America. This configuration of society makes Blacks into disposable things in the very same spaces where whites are made to be the White/Human/Person. Blackness denies racialized people the ability to claim a right to life. The stained melaninated bodies of Black folk are targets of state brutality and white vigilantism alike. Similarly, Wilderson argues:

Whiteness and by extension civil society’s junior partners cannot be solely “represented” as some monumentalized coherence of phallic sig-nifiers but must, in the first ontological instance, be understood as a formation of “contemporaries” who do not magnetize bullets. This is the essence of their construction through an asignifying absence; their signifying presence is manifest in the fact that they are, if only by default deputized against those who do magnetize bullets. (82)

Jasiri X would add sexual specificity to Wilderson’s claim. Jasiri’s work suggests not only that death finds Blacks, but is engineered differently toward different Black bodies. Bullets are not simply magnetized toward all Black bodies equal-ly, because the white supremacist republic maintains itself through specificity. “There’s nothing more dangerous / Than the life of a young Black male the



scales weighted our murder’s premeditated” (Jasiri X, “Blood on the Leaves Remix”). The death and incarceration of Black men and boys serve a different end to that of the impoverished Black woman, who is demonized, sterilized, and sanctioned for her ability to birth the Black male pathogen. The white citizen is not murdered indiscriminately for the interests of Blacks. The white citizen, while stratified along class, religion, and political ideology, is not di-vided from humanity itself—the white citizen is not killed in service of some racial goal, and their deaths do not go unrecognized for the sake of demo-cratic order. The anti-Black manifestations of white supremacy are far from uniform. Contrary to the liberal mythos, segregation is not the primary man-ifestation of racism, and its legal dissolution is not the ending or the emergent possibility for the eradication of racism. The dynamism of white supremacism reveals itself in the violence, the actual death, and the poverty that remains constant—sharing a symbiotic relationship to Blackness—despite the political, legal, and social decrees suggesting that the ameliorative symbols and discourse of racial progress indicate a dawning equality. The inevitability of death for Black people generally, but the Black male specifically, nurtures an eschatological quality in Hip-Hop, and is heard throughout West’s corpus. As Jasiri X says on his “Blood on the Leaves” remix, Black life has no resistance against the white will to extinguish it: “Blood on the pavement / No saving no statements / No detainment no arraignment / No ability to change it / In death we become famous” (“Blood on the Leaves Remix”). Jasiri X understands that the inevitability of death, the inability of Black people to prevent themselves from becoming corpses, is the powerless forced on the oppressed under racism. In an anti-Black society, there is no accountability to the Black life lost, only those moments of remembrance asked to recount joy of a life ultimately summarized in the physical death of a Blackened thing. Jasiri X’s “Blood on the Leaves Remix” was inspired by Kanye West’s reflection on anti-Black death. In both songs, we hear the anger behind the beats, the frustration and anxiety expressed by the screams borne out of these Black men’s necrophobia; their visceral fear of death—of being murdered. Necrophobia, far from being a debilitating nihilism for Black men, is turned into a work of art standing against racism, which aims to call out the white supremacism creating the agents and funding the institutions perpetrating this violence against Black people. Black men, lyrically respond-ing and artistically challenging their physical erasures through death, are at-tempting to expose the machinations of murder. These necrophobic aesthetics are human trepidations ignited by the trauma of encountering one’s finality. Just as they may become mythical theodicies and braggadocio or attempts



to escape the brutish reality of death rampant in “Chiraq,” these aesthetics, their pessimistic tone, are resistance—a concrete, actual, and audible rejec-tion of the silence imposed by their murder by the state. Despite the formal failings of such art (e.g., virtue, beauty, etc.), these songs exhibit the courage of these Black men and their struggle against anti-Blackness. These aesthetic performances and lyrics convey the refusal of Blacks to live as the corpse craved by the white supremacist logics of America. The Black man is not a normative subject; there is no query made to him in this society where the action resulting from him answering the “should” question (What should I/we do?) does not imply his death. Huey P. Newton’s “Fear and Doubt,” points out the ontological problem posed to the thinker aiming to describe and animate the Black man as a political subject capable of political life and social participation. Newton maintains that “society responds to [the lower socio-economic Black man] as a thing, a beast, a nonentity, something to be ignored or stepped on. He is asked to respect laws that do not respect him. He is asked to digest a code of ethics that acts upon him but not for him” (17). The consequence of this “non-being” is dire, as there are no historical patterns of rationality or ethicality that project Black male existence into the futurity—that normative plane of academic thought. West fights for this existence and attempts to solidify his presence in a capitalist world through being more than the “Nigger” he is confined to. His fear (of death, of poverty, of Chiraq), his tragedy, is not based on delusion, but the illusion of transcending the confines of anti-Blackness. The mirage of personhood offered to him as a rich Black man cannot overcome the brutal force racism has on his Black male body. He is still vulnerable to anti-Black violence, the myth of the Black rapist, and death. His humanity is simply denied in real-ity. Despite his fame, there is no success, no triumph, and no amelioration of the conditions of oppression that we find within the borders of empire. Whereas the academic rationalizes this very same contradiction of claim-ing to be oppressed while belonging to an economic class quite distant from the material oppression of the groups they adopt, housed within by the walls of the university—hiding behind the various moralizations of their identity politics, where their race, gender, or sexual orientation justifies their capital-ist pursuits—West has no such moralizations that are valued by institutions. He is simply a product utilized, a commodity fetishized, and devalued by the machinations of the industry. The Black academic (progressive/feminist) is allowed the luxury of being represented as diversity, a currency traded and possessed to aid in the legitimacy of the sociality of the university. Being of society and worldly, West is debased precisely by his “Nigger-ness,” and only



has capital, his own economic venture as retort. Despite his riches, West is not gifted in the categorical dogmas of race, class, and gender—a 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.

Themes of Resistance: Rhymefest on the Meaning of New Slaves

Like the ignored adolescent nerd with a cool popular friend, Hip-Hop studies generally, and the genre of interpretation understood to be under the rubric of Hip-Hop aesthetic theory specifically, craves the attention of producing works acknowledged for their celebrity associations. Driven by the representation and commercial prestige of the celebrity artist, this scholarship pays very little attention to the lyrical text produced by the artist or the artist’s collaborators. This is a methodological problem in these studies, whereby the meaning of a song is largely hypothesized to be a reflection of the character, intention, and temperament of the performer, rather than the accumulation of various perspectives that then result in a lyrical testament of the artists’ perception about the world before them that may or may not be accurately presented in total by the performance of said piece. Because Hip-Hop scholarship is driven largely by appearances, airs of significance determined by the popularity of the subject rather than the analyses produced by the subject, much of the work on Hip-Hop ignores the multiple perspectives and voices contained within a song, mistakenly attributing the divergent perspectives of multiple writ-ers to a singular voice—usually the voice of the celebrity personality rather than other more creative contributors. This way of writing about popular culture, especially Hip-Hop, lacks rigor and is indicative of a sophomoric intellectual curiosity—one preferring popularity to profundity. Distracted by the stardom of the performer, philosophical/conceptual/theoretical inquiry into Hip-Hop is degraded and the multi-vocality of the lyrics and various other aesthetic qualities are collapsed into the commercial allure of the star, ignoring the derivative consequences of the art: the remixes, samples, and rhythms inspired by the original production, as well as the actual activism of artists themselves.



West’s “New Slaves,” which was co-written by Che “Rhymefest” Smith is a typical case of this derelict regarding textual research into popular works. Rhymefest has been a longtime co-writer of West’s discography. He won a Grammy for his work with West on “Jesus Walks” in 2005, and has long been considered the epitome of a raptivist, rap activist (Lindsey). He is co-founder of Donda’s House, a community organization providing arts instruction to the young of Chicago, with Kanye West, and is a strong advocate of the idea that “[a]rts and music programs are routinely the first casualty in schools fac-ing budget crises, specifically institutions in at-risk communities that directly benefit from access to safe environments and developmental opportunities” (Donda’s House). Rhymefest has made a brand of his race-conscious narra-tives of Black history and Black struggle throughout his music (AbduSalaam). Like the sonic revolution of Jasiri X’s verses, Rhymefest focuses his lyrical at-tention to social justice, economic inequality, and racism (“Rhymefest: Jasiri X Is My Hero”). In a recent e-mail exchange, I asked Rhymefest “what inspired his lyrics in New Slaves, and how does it change the popular meaning attached largely to Kanye West’s persona?” Rhymefest said “since the song ‘New Slaves’ had more than one writer, I would venture to say that it had more than one meaning, and was one idea inspired by a collective of frustrations. Kanye’s frustration, seemed to have been the glass ceiling between venture capitalism and creative” (Smith, “Answers”). Instead of simply dismissing West’s concerns, Rhymefest tries to contextualize the tensions, frustrations, and obstacles involved with getting a message out. He says: “People who are artists and creatives many times are expected to splash the colors of music, film, and visual paintings on the world’s wall, but many times are blocked by corporate interests from controlling the business of its presentation. I believe Kanye wanted to con-trol the business of his creativity and was striking out at what he perceived was his obstruction to that goal” (Smith, “Answers”). Rhymefest’s concerns, however, revolved around inequity and injustice. Rhymefest maintains that his “lyrical contribution to ‘New Slaves’ was from a social justice perspec-tive, highlighting private prisons as well as the frustration of Americans that can’t seem to make ends meet while being bombarded with complicated language and contracts from Plantation Style Capitalism in [his] return for convenient products” (Smith, “Answer”). The verse “You throwing contracts at me / you know that Niggaz can’t read” (West, “New Slaves”) takes on a different weight if the listener is confronted with the depravation of Black people suffering from the isolation of urban segregation and economic ex-ploitation. The violence of the inner city leaving Black men either dead or



in jail is not remedied by corporate sponsorship of Black art. Rather than being a means to escape economic deprivation, it emerges as a different kind of labor exploitation—an exploitation that takes advantage of the education and debasement of the racially oppressed. When I suggested that many people have viewed “New Slaves” as just rhetoric, Rhymefest replied that we only need a historical recollection and sociological analysis of the problems confronting the Black community to understand the failure of many in the academy as well as society to com-prehend the gravity of “new slavery.” Rhymefest perceptively acknowledged that “[a]nyone who wants to oppress, deny and restrict the rights of others will always dismiss their complaints as ‘rhetoric,’ until the people rise up. Paul Robeson said ‘artists are the gatekeepers of truth.’ We have to decide if the words in New Slaves are True or Not” (Smith, “Answers”). Rhymefest then asks: “Do private prisons lock up a disproportionate number of black men and women and profit from it?” “Are our communities suffering from literacy & education issues, while we’re constantly being drowned with new information, fees, fines and taxes from an increasing tyrannical big brother government who’ve given corporations the same legal status as human be-ings?” and “Is individualism & materialism destroying our moral fiber and communal spirit?” (Smith, “Answers”). The New Slave is the product of an emergent system of anti-Black oppression; it refers to a vicious organization of social hierarchies that appears to be normal and democratic, but is in fact racialized and repressive, where “the future effect on the black community as well as all Americans will be government and corporate captivity of its customers which is the citizenry through our ignorance, prison labor and economic debt” (Smith, “Answers”). Rhymefest aims to bring consciousness through an understanding of the structural and economic forces that underlie the routine caricatures used to explain Black failure. Instead of depending on instruments traditionally worshiped as the solution to American racism and the continuing political, economic, and social oppression of Black Americans, like the law or discourse, Rhymefest emphasizes independence from the institutions that profit from the Black community’s dependency. He is adamant that “[p]eople of good conscience have to create our own communities, share our talents, barter our goods and have standards of living we can all agree on in a true village based [in] democratic fashion. . . . We have to stop desiring the trinkets this media offers and falling for the tricks of our politicians and create our own communities that we control” (Smith, “Answers”). Rhymefest’s race-conscious sentiment is not only seen in “New Slaves,” but throughout his discography. For instance, in his new song “Heroes,” Rhymefest says: “Fuck the system /



Fuck imperialism / One man’s terrorism is another man’s heroism” (Smith, “Heroes”). He urges listeners to understand that the cyclical reproductions of racial inequality under the guise of racial progress are not mistakes, but sociological justifications used to further the profit interests of various cor-porate and governmental entities that benefit from and memorialize the use of extra-legal violence resulting in Black people’s deaths and incarceration. Black heroes die in anti-Black systems. Their corpses are deterrents to future challenges against the system, not inspiration toward revolt. Rhymefest is crystal clear: “King could have lived but his ass wouldn’t listen / talking about Vietnam / Going international / Stick to civil rights / Keep the shit gradual” (Smith, “Heroes”). The lesson of history is that our heroes, our theorists and thinkers who link the material oppression of Black Americans to the expansion and maintenance of empire, turn up missing. The consequence of oppression is not its inevitable demise, but the rise of various ideological and systemic machinations to preserve the order of the already established hierarchies. Given the seriousness of this cause, perhaps it is time the self-appointed oracle, the Black public intellectual so insistent upon his or her role as critic and commentator, relinquish a stake in recognition and surrender the attention of the masses to the creative genius of the artist.

Conclusion

Kanye West is judged by the extent to which he embodies and lives out some unannounced, but already agreed-upon utopianism—those ideal so-lutions to (moralizations of ) the world and its problems he describes—as 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 oppression—a real slaveocracy functioning within America—where 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



this beyond possibility, or is it simply beyond our unwarranted beliefs in the capacity of Kanye West? Stated differently, if his diagnosis of anti-Blackness is true, then what possible expectations can we demand of his person that we do not first demand of the world that enslaves him?

notes

1. See Kanye West’s “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 Beyoncé is pretty clear-cut for academic feminists. While there have been works like Mia McKenzie’s “On Defending Beyoncé: Black Feminists, White Femi-nists, and the Line in the Sand,” and Tamara Winfrey Harris’s “All Hail the Queen?,” many, if not most, of the public intellectual works praise Beyoncé and these contradic-tions as part of the rich complexities of womanhood and femininity. Christina Cole-man’s “That Time Beyoncé’s Album Invalidated Every Criticism of Feminism Ever” sees no tension in the various capitalist and egoistic drives of Beyoncé; similarly, Danielle Moodie-Mills’s “Can Beyoncé’s Celebrity Reshape Feminism?” and Daniel D’Addario’s “Beyoncé’s Feminist Statement Shouldn’t 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 womanhood—including Black feminist bourgeois ideology—is relinquished for growing the ideological base. 4. See Ronald B. Neal’s “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. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s believes:

Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white women’s experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men. Yet often they experience double-discrimination—the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as Black women—not the sum of race and sex dis-crimination, but as Black women. (149)

Crenshaw’s 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 women’s 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:



It is not that I am against feminism: I’m appalled at what it became. Originally, there was nothing wrong with my seeing myself as a feminist; I thought it was adding to how we were going to understand this world. If you think about the origins of the modern world, because gender was always there, how did we institute ourselves as humans; why was gender a function of that? I’d just like to make a point here that is very important. Although I use the term “race,” and I have to use the term “race,” “race” itself is a function of something else which is much closer to “gender.” Once you say, “besides ontogeny, there’s sociogeny,” then there cannot be only one mode of sociogeny; there cannot be only one mode of being human; there are a multi-plicity of modes. So I coined the word “genre,” or I adapted it, because “genre” and “gender” come from the same root. They mean “kind,” one of the meanings is “kind.” Now what I am suggesting is that “gender” has always been a function of the instituting of “kind.” For example, in our order, which is a bourgeois order of kind, a bourgeois order of the human, the woman was supposed to be the housewife and the man was supposed to be the breadwinner. Each was as locked into their roles. By making the feminist movement into a bourgeois movement, what they’ve done is to fight to be equal breadwinners. This means that the breadwinning man and the breadwinning woman become a new class, so that the woman who remains in her role becomes a part of a subordinated class. . . . What we are witnessing is the incorporation of the bourgeoisie. . . . Now when I speak at a feminist gathering and I come up with “genre” and say “gender” is a function of “genre,” they don’t want to hear that. Look at the tre-mendous perks that feminism has given to some Black women, for example, and “of color” women as they call themselves. Right? This is what I am trying to say about the temptations, you see; and then you say you’re a “Black feminist,” but what is happening to Black women? . . . Black women’s struggle is quite other. Our struggle as Black women has to do with the destruction of the genre; with the displacement of the genre of the human of “Man,” of which the Black population group—men, women and children—must function as the negation. (23–25)

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