Gangster rap as black face?

After watching Bamboozled, learning more about the history of minstrelsy and thinking about racism within visual representations, all I could think about for the past few weeks was Spike Lee’s comment Jillian mentioned in class: Gangster rap is the new black face. My initial thoughts on the comment were directed more towards mainstream images of “gangster rap;” black men essentially rapping about money, pretty ladies, and gin and juice. The way I interpreted Lee’s comment was how gangster rap, initially a way for African-Americans (predominantly men) to rant about their oppressed state, has become an outlet for mainstream African-American rap artists to express how they’re living the “American” dream.

A lot of the mainstream videos I’ve seen are of well-dressed rappers who are showered with scantily-clad women and expensive champagne. Because of my own personal leftist political views, I feel these rap artists are simply purporting the status quo: being rich should be your sole goal in life. I guess I interpret “gangster” artists on yachts as simply reflecting the “American” dream back for white people to enjoy. The realm of gangster rap has essentially become more enjoyable for white people than perhaps its initial, intended audience.

These sentiments were reaffirmed a few weeks after discussing minstrelsy, in my final Women and Popular Music class. Because a presentation ran short and our professor hadn’t really prepared anything new, we all ended showcasing various Youtube clips we found enlightening, representative of what we’ve been learning in class, or simply entertaining. “Search, ‘I’m on a boat!’” yelled one of my classmates. What was shown was one of the newest endeavours of ‘The Lonely Island,’ a trio of comics who are regularly featured on SNL: A comedic rendition of “gangster rap.”

As I watched most of my class (comprised largely of white students) laughing at the video, I thought about Spike Lee’s comment. Was Adam Samberg, rapping about his “flippy-floppies,” participating in black face? This made me think of comedy in general, and how satire and parody are routinely utilized for laughs. What does the appropriation of “gangster rap” by white comedians mean? What is so funny about “gangster rap”? Can it not be utilized “seriously” by white musicians? Eminem was a huge deal back when he started out, essentially because he was white and he was utilizing an “authentically black” form of musical expression. Is Eminem racist?

I’m beginning to realize the complexities of race and representation within visual culture.

shop till you drop

I went to go see Confessions of a Shopaholic a couple weeks ago and surprise, surprise the “shopaholic” was of course a woman, and the audience was 98% female. Although consumer society is pervasive in the lives of most of us living in the West, I would argue women, more than ever, are represented within visual culture, such as film, as “shopaholics.” We will apparently sacrifice a hefty portion of our paycheques for designer shoes, like Carrie from Sex and the City. We will work in fashion, primarily for the major discounts, like Rachel from Friends. And of course, we will dig ourselves deep into debt for that special Denny and George scarf, like Rebecca from Confessions of a Shopaholic. I can’t help but connect the rampant images of shoe-buying, fashion-obsessed women of popular culture to the fact that gender inequality continues to be a problem within our society.

I feel consumerism, to some extent, has gained considerably with the great strides taken by the Women’s Liberation movement. Consumer society has gained a massive population of female shopaholics within the last century, with the opportunity of women to become more independent from men, and often even make the same amount of money as men (though the glass ceiling continues to remain unbroken). Of course, women were able to shop before, but primarily with their husbands’ salaries. It seems many advertisements, however, attach the messages of female empowerment and independence to products (like the Nike ad in Chapter 7 of Practices of Looking), essentially to make women feel empowered by their ability to make their own living and spend their own hard-earned cash on themselves. I feel the proliferation of characters such as Carrie and Rachel in pop culture is often intended to give a feminist twist to the modern city gal, yet work to keep women focused on designer handbags and shoes as opposed to the continuing prevalence of patriarchy within our society.

One of the final scenes of the recent Sex and the City movie depicts the elusive Mr. Big slipping a pretty high-heeled shoe on Carrie’s foot, in the place of a diamond ring on her left ring finger. Although the intentions of the creators of the film may have had the intention to show the traditional wedding proposal with a diamond as old-fashioned, I thought this scene was doubly patriarchal. This scene seems to reiterate my thoughts exactly: Men and shopping ultimately complete women.

Thanks to allmoviephotos.com for the pic

Reproducing the Tragedy

Reading through “Visual Technologies, Image Reproduction and the Copy” in Practices of Looking, made me reflect back on a recent arts article I read on CBC, called “Reliving the Tragedy.” One of the newest Canadian historical dramas to hit theatres is Polytechnique, a film based on the Montreal massacre of ten women from Ecole Polytechnique in 1989. The medium of film has been particularly influential in blurring the lines between reality and fiction, especially with the documentary genre but also with the use of real, historical events and people as blockbuster inspiration. Thinking about the reproduction of so many historical events and people through the dramatic and consumable medium of film has made me think about how we continually reshape and reiterate the “ugly” parts of human history in time for the next Academy Awards.

Among the Oscar nominees of 2009, as with many past Academy Awards, are a handful of Hollywood dramatizations of historically significant people and events, including Milk, The Reader and Frost/Nixon. It seems as if you are almost guaranteed an Oscar with a big-budget tear-jerker on the darker instances of humanity, such as the Holocaust or any of the wars in the world. But is wining an Oscar really the only motivation to retell these often tragic happenings in human history? I wonder what purpose these “reproductions” of history serve. And as Sturken and Cartwright question in their analysis of the proliferation of images of the Leftist icon Che Guevara, does consistently reproducing tragic events via cinema alter the meaning and
significance of them?

My guess would be yes. But I wonder how, and it what ways. Do these stories lose their significance when they are told through Hollywood actors and actresses? Are we doing the victims of these atrocities justice by allowing the masses to view their stories for $10.00 each? Do these films provide a serious commentary to these events, or are they pure “entertainment”? Can cinema capture the “truth” of these events?

I personally don’t think I’ll be watching Polytechnique.

Have Brangelina entered your thoughts this week?

What struck me most from Stuart Hall’s seminal lecture, Representation & the Media, was the issue of “identity claim” and “identification” with the images we are confronted with on a daily basis. While Hall’s focus was more on how we, as the audience to different forms of visual culture, find ourselves increasingly emotionally invested and engaged with the images we are often presented with, I thought more about how much we have come to utilize images in attempts to represent ourselves. With the growth of the internet as a means of communication and connecting to other people (friends, strangers, prospective love matches, etc.) in particular, we are increasingly dependent upon the use of digital pixels as stand-ins for our material selves.

Facebook, MySpace, Lavalife and even good ol’ Blogger allow users to pick out a ‘profile’ picture as a means of visually representing yourself. Why is it so important for us to visually depict ourselves? Or perhaps more importantly, why is it so important we visually differentiate ourselves from one another? After just barely grasping the ideas of Jean Baudrillard last semester, my guess would be the fact that humanity is becoming more and more homogeneous largely because of mass media. Baudrillard argues we consume because our identities depend on it. We purchase CDs, clothes, and Hannah Montana gear to differentiate ourselves from certain groups of people, while also aligning ourselves with others. And we need to make these identity claims because mass media (among other factors such as urbanization) have left us all wondering where Brangelina are going to adopt from next and what kind of dog the Obama’s have settled on (Have they already settled that?). In other words, we’re all becoming the same because we read, see and absorb a lot of the same stories.

Though Brangelina is probably not the best example, I see evidence of the local becoming more and more global everyday. Those ‘Daily’ newspapers for instance—despite our complaints about the poor quality of local news, are we really better off absorbing the same headlines as the rest of Canada? And as we become more and more saturated into the World Wide Web, where we’re all stuck with the same standard white and ‘IKEA blue’ Facebook layout, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish ourselves as individual human beings. Perhaps we are just as dependent upon consumption as we are on visuals to help satisfy the need to be unique and individual. Mass media is making us so self-conscious!

PS – It was a poor choice on my part to bring in Baudrillard into my first blog post.