"Where ever you are (shine!). Who ever you are (shine!)" - Swizz Beatz, Top Down
I highly recommend you go read Tiffany's Krista Thompson "Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels" and thoughts on Class and Aesthetics before you dig in here. She's going to make much more sense of things than I will in what follows.
I've spent the last day trying to process all of the thought storms that this lecture sparked. I haven't even come close to making a dent or form clear theories about the myriad of topics this one hour of Art History brought up. Well, there's one thing: Krista Thompson puts form to a nagging sensation I've had for years but couldn't place -- this feeling that we don't take hip hop and it's creative outpouring seriously.
I was reminded of this today, as I read about the Texas Board of Education's recent nonsense around Social Studies education and their shooting down of the inclusion of Hip Hop as a significant sociocultural movement.
I was reminded yesterday, when the first question after the lecture tried to simplify what Dr. Thompson clearly stated was a complex and nuanced view, into a common and wrong-headed hypothesis "Isn't hip hop ruining our young people and, by extension, Black America, by focusing on bling? By all this conspicuous and gross consumption?"
Thompson had, obviously, heard this kind of thing before. She immediately referenced Dave Chappelle's Block Party. She noted that while Chappelle is seeking to invoke the spirit of Wattstax, he's aware of the world he's living in. It's a world beyond the Civil Rights movement, one where neither the people who will come to the event nor the artists who would perform have common issues, common enemies, or even common backgrounds. They might align under the umbrella of hip hop, they might have a similar creative spirit, but, well, it's just so much more complicated than that.
Complicated because The Civil Rights Movement--the Soul Era--was very much about the Black Middle Class and the Black Bourgoisie gaining access to the aspects of the American Dream that had been denied them. The Civil Rights Movement was about the righteous and respectable getting what they deserved because they were righteous and respectable. So, we celebrate education and piety, integration and an honest day's work, non-violence and community.
Hip Hop imagery and arts turns all of this on it's head, right? Hip hop is a celebration of individualism, of the battle, of getting ahead by any means necessary, and by letting everybody know you made it.
Huh, which one of those is truly a reflection of what America truly is?
In this Post-Soul era, there's this obvious tension between the ideals of the Black Middle Class and the realities of the streets with which our pop cultural outpouring comes. And, so, as with most cultural issues that go along class lines, the wealthier among us tend to marginalize and belittle the power of those images and sounds. Hip hop isn't music. Graffiti isn't art. Breakdancing isn't dancing. MCs aren't poets. These are low arts if they are art at all and not deserving our respect or any critical thought so when Dr. Thompson spends much time delving into the technical choices of Hip Hop visual artists, it's jarring to those of us who don't want to take Hip hop seriously.
And while she spent much of this hour focusing on a recognized and generally respected artist like Kehinde Wiley, I was more interested in the works of Hank Willis Thomas.
Thomas's work looks explicitly at how we brand ourselves, how brands seek to take advantage of that, and the relationship between the two. In a cultural phenomenon where visual displays of wealth and success get more ostentatious by the day, in a world where logos are commodity and artists are a key part of the puzzle, where does art live?
And this is but one of the things to think about. There's so much more if we give up following the narrative that hip hop isn't really art and give it a more critical and academic eye. Community vs. individualization. A new exploration of objectification. A view of the American Dream through the prism of the street. A different perspective on wealth, on masculinity, on Blackness.
Yes, even that.
Fuck a Post-Racial America, Black people are still trying to figure out who we are in the age after we supposedly found our Soul.
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