Katie Cercone for PLAYspace Volume 1
Katie Cercone released a wonderful prose piece in PLAYspace volume 1. But she also submitted this article that we really wanted you to see titled:
Eat This Mlack Busic
My
working creative thesis, what I loosely call, ‘the spirituality of hip hop,’
comes from a complicated and at times contradictory constellation of terms.
Through an interdisciplinary inquiry I have developed what I affectionately
term a derelict cosmogony of the spiritualism of hip hop via the embodied
freedom encompassed in its interdynamic gestures of power, symbolism, triple
metaphor, dance and song as metalanguage.
Through
the phantasmagoric ‘veil’ of my own distorted magnitude I’ll posit hip hop as
an expressive, holistic and activating collective form of liberatory
spiritualism. Numerous cultural theorists have illustrated how we live in a
culture of avoidance and escape. Collective
experience has purportedly been reduced to simultaneous private experiences
distributed across the field of a highly dispersed media culture in which
passive consumers enjoy leisure time like sleep. But the genius of music, like
sensuality, is that it traverses the body. Hip hop as an immersive microclimate
hemorrhages psycho-pedagogy. We can conceive of hip hop in all its incantations
as a dynamic form of esotericism or neo-Jungian ‘cultural dreaming’ in which
the authors, coauthors and fans of the genre use powerful symbols and lingering
sounds that engage body, mind and group soul.
Historically
avant-garde practice has entailed an interculturalism of appropriation that
always relies on white hegemony as its veritable backbone.
Any
foray into the territory of race – the fashionable mantle of the hip hop industry
(industry as opposed to hip hop community) - must address the issue of sexual fetish. Appropriation as ‘border crossing’ speaks to issues of the ownership of cultural
property. The aestheticized
“objectified” other as intimate source of pleasure/desire/fear is a reoccurring
trope art historically which has served to denigrate oppressed groups,
particularly racial minorities, gays and women.
As scholar
bell hooks notes, ‘young white consumers utilize black vernacular popular
culture to disrupt bourgeois values.’ Calling out Madonna, widely known for her
appropriation of gay and black subcultures, hooks asserts the queen of the
sexual revolution cashes in by ‘mirroring the role of plantation overseer in a
slave based economy.’ She further states that this moment is indicative of
sociocultural climate in which ‘white people and the rest of us are being asked
by the marketplace to let our prejudices and xenophobia (fear of difference)
go, and happily ‘eat the other.’ My work
interrogates hooks’ explosive ‘moment’ as the abysmal residue of capitalist
commodity fetishism, an illusive, psychosexual chimera.
As
expressed by cultural theorist Norman Kelley, black
music exists in a neo-colonial relationship with the $12 billion music
industry. In classic neo-colonial style, black inner cities act as ‘raw cites
of cultural production’ whereby conditions (low per capita income, high birth
rate, economic dependence on external markets, labor as major export) resemble
a third world country and produce a ‘product’ – hip hop – that is sold back to
the ‘motherland’ (in this case suburbs teeming with bored white youth bloated
by privilege). As Mos Def echoes, ‘Old white men is runnin’ this rap shit.’
Despite the fanfare of industry moguls like Jay Z and Lil Wayne, there are in
fact no blacks, none, in top executive positions at the companies that parent
successful black owned companies.
It’s
also disconcerting to note how the money earning potential of hip hop is
largely reliant on an industry produced image of black ghetto life which
serves to buttress the prison industrial complex, a contemporary ‘leviathan’ of
racial inequality maintained through a ferocious combination of government law,
private corporations, police terrorism and racist cultural attitudes.
The constant turn to ’ghetto blackness’ as a model of ‘authenticity’ and
hipness in rap music limits ‘blackness’ to ‘a primal connection to sex and violence, a big penis and
relief from the onus of upward mobility.’
As scholar
Tricia Rose notes, ‘hip hop merely displays in phantasmagorical form the
cultural logic of late capitalism.’ Hip hop is
a multi-billion dollar industry and vital creative enterprise of the African
diasporic community (where is houstatlantavegas located approximately?) the
germinating stage of which occurred in the aftermath of 1977’s devastating New
York city black out. While the Times
reading set was gaping at hallowing images of the desolate looted Bronx as if
the borough were the city’s dangling excoriated appendage, black youth were congregating
in the streets to dance, brag, paint, swagger and rhyme as a practice in
collectivity and spontaneous reciprocity. They were creatively repurposing boxy
electronics left dusty by outsourced industries that once put food on their
family’s tables. Says Rose, rap videos satisfy ‘poor young black people’s
profound need to have their territories acknowledged, recognized and
celebrated,’ as they converge around the ‘local posse, crew or support system.’Fusing the racially disparate post-industrial conditions of urbanity with the
sensate fury of the African drum which once called the community to war – hip
hop, like spiritual practice, is a matrix concerned with territory, belonging
and identity.
I was born in 1984 at the very moment hip hop irrupted as an
overwhelmingly lucrative genre with MTV to cement its aesthetic as a hip style.
White youth of my generation consume this music in a fashion 20th
century German musicologist Theodor Adorno termed ‘culinary’ appreciation. We
thereby feed exclusively on the music’s, ‘Certain over sweet sounds and
colors… like musical cookies or candies.’
Music, the art form possessing the most efficient means of accessing the
pleasure receptors in the subconscious brain, when manufactured purely as an ‘object of exchange,’ serves as ‘a reservoir of a secondary,
infantile satisfactions and magical authority.’ Whereas real art in music is
the ‘transcription of historical suffering,’ Adorno condones produced music for
insisting that its listeners are ‘forced to passive sensual and emotional
acceptance of predigested yet disconnected qualities, whereas those qualities
at the same time become mummified and magicized.
My
interest in hip hop culture drinks at the trough of my neuroses. It forever
pays homage to the tripartite pleasures of my bulimic youth in suburban
California. My first car, my first taste of Wild 94.9 and 106.1 kmel jamz on
subwoofers, my flight from anorexia into bulimia – these three instances
together culminated in an unmitigated feeling of sensory overload, danger and
freedom. The ‘fantasy,’ of a perfect love union set forth in the musical lyrics
doomed to cold oscillation just as the repeated abuse of food persisted only as
a lucid and shameful false transgression.
Lil
Wayne was my first consciously spiritual experience with hip hop. Weezy loved
candy. Weezy got high, drank syzzurp,
ate candy, ate pussy, ate beats. Weezy legally postponed his imprisonment to
undergo eight urgently needed root canals and my father was an orthodontist.
Weezy sang about ‘Ice Cream Paint Jobs’ and ‘Young Money.’ To the artist Mya in
her hit Lock U Down, the subject of
many a personal flash fantasy, Weezy sings ‘got a sweet tooth, Miss Caramel, I
need 3 scoops.’ Weezy coughed, growled,
heaved. Weezy’s style is part of a few subgenres. One being a slower,
southern-derived approach in which the artist drags out vowels and leaves
breathy spaces, as if ‘hot air’ lives in the rhymes. The other being ‘swag,’ an abbreviation
of swagger - the evocation of style and guts, also connected to the African
tradition of boasting or bragging - considered a non-genre or meta-genre in
which artists engage in excessive bragging about their ‘swag,’ (money, cars and
clothes). Swag not only has a triple function (genre, action, baggage), it also
serves to illustrate the way in which ‘swag’ style as the parody of a die-hard
materialist culture means swag objects function in my hip hop spiritualist
cosmogony as a type of ‘occult bric-a-brac,an economy of excess which cleanses meanings by metaphorical loops.
Weezy
Baby – the lyrics, the locks, the lawlessness
and constant spinning out into pleasure – cranked up my transcendental limits.
Weezy appealed to me in so much that he represented the purity of recklessness,
youth, and abuse of power hinging on one’s ability to overspend, to binge – to
reinscribe the law at the very moment one breaks it. Lil Wayne was the epitome of the prosthetic boyfriend I had
experienced through the surrogate of music and food since adolescence.
Remarks
Slovenian continental philosopher and critical theorist Slavoj Žižek, ‘The singing voice at it most elementary [is] the embodiment
of ‘surplus-enjoyment’…the paradoxical ‘pleasure in pain.Singing raises vibrations in the body. Popular music entails a partisanship
based on a private, sensual contract. ‘Surplus-enjoyment’ in the purest sense
here is the return of the energy invested in the fetish, the invocation of a
spiritual longing for connection to a distant, majestic and mysterious force.
It is epitomized in the bulimic’s privileged relationship to capitalism’s
compulsory over-consumption and endlessly deferred gratification. What Žižek
suggests here is that desire can
essentially be boiled down to the thinking human’s unique ability to create a
law that is a defense against the body’s full expression of jouissance.
The hunger to repeatedly ‘eat the other’ (and his ‘distant danger’)
is one and the same with the desire to break the self-imposed dietetic rules.
This concept is one Adorno fleshes out in a problematic passage of Current of Music on the development of
Jazz: ‘Even if the girl enjoys unconsciously the idea of making
herself prey of a strong colored fellow, she certainly also wants unconsciously
to punish herself for the crime of her imagination…for the unlawful pleasure
which she wants to give and to deny herself at the same time.
It is the typical Romantic gesture in which one ‘Elevates the longing as such,
at the expense of the object one longs for.
Neuroses is perhaps both a generative creative condition as much as
a ‘luxury problem’ of the rich
typically treated with anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medications. It often
manifests in the form of obsessive compulsive behaviors and eating disorders
and its historical predecessors would be neurasthenia and hysteria. Commodity
fetishism has crystallized our imaginations into dominions where anxiety and
ecstasy are twins, whereby the market and its depotentiated subjects are forced
to always and only ‘reproduce by way of borrowing
from the future. Our
culinary and fetishistic communion with the Other while listening follows the
basic Laconian ontology in which the ‘field of reality has to be ‘sutured’ with
a supplement’ and what is elevated as a positive entity is in reality a
‘negative magnitude.’
According to Susan Sontag, illness as a metaphor or ‘trope’ of the
self is considered an outgrowth of the Romantic period in art and poetry. In
her text Illness as Metaphor, Sontag
outlines the history of illness as ‘fashion’ – melancholy was the disease of 19th
Century Romantics. Insanity, associated with ‘superior sensitivity,’ and hailed
as the conduit of spiritual feelings and ‘critical’ discontent was claimed by
the 20th Century Modernists. She notes the 19th century
physician Bichat who called health the
‘silence of organs’ and illness ‘their revolt.
Exploring
the sensuality of spirituality entails that organs have their ‘revolt’ against
the mandates of a structured society. The ‘pleasure’ of listening holds a
consuming transcendent potential - a glittering alchemy that occurs at the
moment when the subaltern speaks in the visual, when the symbol is transgressed
and all the energy falsely invested in cognitive distance provides an explosive
gateway into the infinite.
Hip
hop culture as appropriated by white hipsters may disrupt bourgeois values, but
as a d.i.y. tradition of black underprivileged youths it is an undoubtedly
ideological act of insubordination traced back to the ritual singing and
dancing of slaves and what theorist Fred Moten identifies as the root of the
black radical tradition: ‘The commodity whose speech sound embodies the
critique of value, of private property, of the sign. According
to Marx, the commodity who speaks is an impossibility. The slave who enacted
verbal insubordination in various forms – screaming, grunting, singing – defied
his objecthood through unmediated experiential and vibratory collective action
causing spatio-temporal dislocation. A singer at work is no longer at work. He
is no longer bound to the structure of time defining his bindedness.
Fred
Moten pinpoints this moment of dislocation as the ‘generative break,’ at the
root of the black radical tradition, a space ‘wherein action becomes possible,
one in which it is our duty to linger in the name of the ensemble and its
performance.Again, this
calls to mind bodily activation in the form of dance, song and bodily
expression as a revolutionary practice undoing the divisive laws of language,
capitalism, commodity, and perhaps most important, time as a definitive
distinction: labor or leisure. As if epitomizing this temporal freedom, says
rapper Nas during the intro to N.Y. State
of Mind (released on the 1994 Illmatic
album, what has been called one of the greatest hip hop albums of all time)
‘Black is time.’
In
yet another, particularly poignant articulation of the power of hip hop,
Birdman, Lil Wayne’s industry father figure rhymes,
In
a quick succession of speech lasting merely a few seconds, Birdman had burned
through several double and triple metaphors, speaking to racism, masculinism,
power, luxury, ownership, God, radical rebellion, food, sexuality and
abundance. Black cultural theorists and feminists have rightly referred to
African-Americans as the first post-moderns marked by a pluralistic or shifting
notion of self. Remarks artist Lorraine O’Grady of the West’s monotheism in
respect to African-American holistic folk wisdom, in which ‘Self revolves about a series of variable
centers, such as sex and food (Hail
Weezy); family and community; and a spiritual life composed sometimes of God or
the gods, at others of esthetics or style.’ She goes on to say the
‘discontinuities of our experience as black slaves in a white world have caused
us to construct subjectivities able to negotiate between centers that, at least, are double.
Hip
hop’s multitudinous meaning in language is an important indictor of the power
of black post-modern subjectivity. The use of slang and triple metaphor as an
expressive medium is an important element of the spirituality of hip hop. Take
for instance the word ‘Swag,’ a term very quickly acquiring a permanent space
in the American vernacular. Swag is
noun, verb, musical meta-genre. Swag is a symbol branded all over the backs of
youth in Atlanta, a major center of hip hop in which the most popular tattoos
of 2010 included musical notes, stars and moneybags. Atlanta Braves player A.
Juney of Rich Kids even went so far as to get a Gucci Bag tattooed on his neck.
Trap occupies similar territory to Swag. It is a southern rapper’s word for a place where drugs are sold, a verb
(to sell drugs) and a subgenre of music: unsmiling dudes rapping in first
person about the drug trade. Snap, another slang term, has a laundry list of
meanings among them (a sexual nap, a bowl of weed packed for a single hit and
the expression SAME HERE!) and is also a subgenre of hip hop utilizing slow
beats characterized by the finger snap effect in place of the snare drum. Snap
music has controversially been called the ‘death of hip hop.’ ‘Crunk,’ a word
which is literally a conflation of ‘drunk’ and ‘crazy’ also moonlights as a
popular genre of rap, named because the music is said to make you crunk.
All margins are dangerous. The
music is powerful because it represents a collective space of unconscious,
instant, unmediated vibratory action upon the psyche, brain and organ systems.
It works in the break of the workday, in the break of the verb, noun, pronoun.
In the break of the pitch: recall how T-Pain
converted the city of Atlanta to auto-tune pitch correction software, so that
most of the hip hop world, professional and amateur, now makes music sliding
around rather than on its notes.To quote
Moten, ‘The radical materiality and syntax that animate black performances
indicates a freedom drive.
Along the French Psychoanalytic school of feminism philosopher Hélène Cixous developed Écriture
feminine to interrogate language as a
libidinal economy of expenditure and loss. Writing in 1975 she imagines new
cultural subjects as, ‘Persons-detached, persons-thought, persons born of
the unconscious, and in each desert, suddenly animated, a springing forth of
self that we did not know about – our women, our monsters, our jackals, our
Arabs, our fellow creatures, our fears…a crystallized network of my
ultrasubjectivities. I is this matter, personal, exuberant, lively masculine,
feminine, or other in which I delights me and distresses me.
Cixous here exploits the binary self-other to
denote a universal and self-reflexive desire to see and be seen. She urges us to break our differences over our
backs.
Feminine ecriture, like hip hop,
suggests a new and freely sensual and aggressively volatile economy. Cixous’
multiple inscriptions of desire meets Moten’s ‘dispersive sensuality’ as we
read hip hop’s triple and quadruple metaphors without the cloak of academic
feminism and the binary terms it has used to mostly demonize the genre:
subject/object, male/female, power/submission, dick/vag… Coming from a strictly
academic feminist background, I’m tired of enacting the same closed slogans,
the circumscribed agendas and consolidation of terms always leading back to the
same predictable questions…feminism must look beyond the ‘penetrative gaze’ into
the ‘break’ into linguistic discontinuity. Does this put feminism and radical political aesthetic reason on a shaky intellectual
edifice? It knocks the edifice on its backside and shouts ‘Yeeeeeeaaaw!’ from
its perch at the edge of the abyss.
Pop Culture is a vital source of
gender pedagogy. Even the most commercial, formula-driven music videos feature
bodies and gestures, the enactment of which proceed beyond decorative
value. In the popular artist
Ciara’s video Ride, her dance is
comprised of a squatting posture closely resembling the yogic asana known as
Goddess. Asanas (yogic postures) are ritualistic gestures that balance or
enhance our state of consciousness. Goddess pose stimulates the uro-genital,
respiratory and cardiovascular systems.
Interspersed with other gladiatorial gestures of sports and combat are
erotic 2nd chakra gyrations, making Ciara’s body proper an
undeniable symbol of divine female sensuality and strength.
Leonard
Schlain, notable for his bestseller The
Alphabet and the Goddess, notes that Goddess worship and female power
depend on the ubiquity of female archetypal images. A Laparoscopic surgeon from
Northern California, Schlain contends that the shift from matriarchal to
patriarchal society corresponds to the introduction of written language and the
subsequent cultural shift from right brain to left brain dominated thinking and
comprehension. In Schlain’s lights, hip hop as a contemporary form of worship
appeals to the non-verbal right brain which is responsible for the
comprehension of the language of cries, gestures, grimaces, cuddling, suckling,
touching and body stance. Hip hop, to use Schlain’s terminology is a veritable
‘kaleidoscopic religious event’ involving all the senses experienced in a
collective state of Dionysian madness. Schlain’s final and most profound point
is that ironically, modern advancements in technology have made a huge cultural
turn back to the image, particularly in terms of the internet.
With
thousands of individuals across the globe downloading music and watching music
videos online, not to mention taking these sounds and images with them wherever
they go via their ipod/pad/phone – hip hop emerges as not only a collective
form of worship but a free and ubiquitous, multi-sensory spiritual holism.
Rather than conceive internet-age image reception as merely an act of
alienated, passive consumption weighed against some lost dream of utopian
community; let us situate musical fetishism in terms of its relationship to
powerful pre-linguistic devotional practices involving idols, animal totems,
images of female deities and nature. –Katie
Cercone
KatieCercone.com
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