Jesus and Postsoul Satire on the Small Screen

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-122
Author(s):  
Eric Thurman
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Racial Diversity ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
First Century ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Gangsta Rap ◽  
Race And Religion

This essay explores how Aaron McGruder’s television show Black Jesus uses satire to critique constructions of race and religion in twenty-first-century America. It begins with an overview of representations of Jesus in popular media, highlighting both the dominant convention of depicting Jesus as white and the increasing racial diversity of representations in pop culture artifacts. The essay suggests that McGruder’s show is best understood as an example of postsoul satire, that is, forms of comedy produced by African American humorists that target stereotypes within black culture as well as the persistence of white racism. To support this claim, the essay discusses how the show’s humor satirizes white-dominated society, including representations of a white Jesus, as well as the ideals of black masculinity expressed in hip-hop culture and gangsta rap. The essay concludes by situating McGruder’s satire in the context of antiracist work by Black Lives Matter activists.

Hip-Hop’s Authentic Masculinity: A Quare Reading of Fox’s Empire

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathian Shae Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Media Content ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Black Gay Men ◽  
And Behavior

Black masculinity in the hip-hop culture often promotes instances of homophobia, effeminophobia, and misogyny. To reify an “authentic” black masculinity, individuals within the hip-hop genre police its boundaries through discourse and behavior. This policing is evident in popular media content like songs, music videos, interviews, television shows, and film. These media depictions can, over time, cultivate the attitudes and opinions of the viewing public about homosexuals and their place within black culture, specifically in hip-hop. Through a quare lens, the study investigates how Fox’s television show Empire helps construct and maintain stereotypical representations of black gay men against the milieu of hip-hop. Empire reifies queer stereotypes and highlights conventions of black masculinity and hip-hop authenticity.

From Jim Crow to Jay-Z

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miles White
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Young Male ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Action Films ◽  
Jay Z

This multilayered study of the representation of black masculinity in musical and cultural performance takes aim at the reduction of African American male culture to stereotypes of deviance, misogyny, and excess. Broadening the significance of hip-hop culture by linking it to other expressive forms within popular culture, the book examines how these representations have both encouraged the demonization of young black males in the United States and abroad and contributed to the construction of their identities. The book traces black male representations to chattel slavery and American minstrelsy as early examples of fetishization and commodification of black male subjectivity. Continuing with diverse discussions including black action films, heavyweight prizefighting, Elvis Presley's performance of blackness, and white rappers such as Vanilla Ice and Eminem, the book establishes a sophisticated framework for interpreting and critiquing black masculinity in hip-hop music and culture. Arguing that black music has undeniably shaped American popular culture and that hip-hop tropes have exerted a defining influence on young male aspirations and behavior, the book draws a critical link between the body, musical sound, and the construction of identity.

An Amalgamation of Power and Paint: Gajin Fujita, Los Angeles Street Art, and Images of Edo Japan

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-356
Author(s):  
Alison J. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
First Century ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Japanese Painting

The paintings of Gajin Fujita (b. 1972) express the urban Asian diasporic experience in vivid images filled with historic and contemporary cultural references. Creating an amalgamation of contemporary sports figures, hip-hop culture, historic Japanese painting conventions, street art, and the visual language of Edo Japan (1600–1868), Fujita reflects his diverse experiences as a citizen of twenty-first century Los Angeles in his paintings. This article introduces the artist and provides a nuanced examination of his works vis-à-vis an understanding of the larger issues addressed in both Edo artistic practice and contemporary street art culture. By specifying the agents of power and performance in Fujita’s works, a greater understanding of the hybrid world of his colourful graphic paintings can be found.

Vocal Vulnerabilities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Lappas
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Distress ◽  
Generation X ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Millennial Generation ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Pitch Range ◽  
Musical Representations ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article explores vocal trends associated with hip hop artists of the millennial generation. New vocal techniques such as the use of stylized Auto-Tune, a widening of pitch range, and increased use of paralinguistic utterances associated with emotional distress have permeated the soundscape of hip hop in the twenty-first century. These techniques starkly contrast with the vocal styles associated with Generation X rappers in the 1980s and 1990s, affectively embedding vulnerability into the voices of underground and mainstream hip hop. This chapter approaches the shift in the soundscape of hip hop vocality as a point of embarkation in exploring evolving musical representations of Black masculinity by rappers of the millennial generation.

“His Master’s Voice” and (R)evolutionary Signifyin’

2021 ◽  
pp. 199-240
Author(s):  
M.I. Franklin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Black American ◽  
Music Business ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Cultural Borrowing ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 6 turns to sampling as it is usually understood: integral to Hip-Hop culture. The track in point is “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” by Gil Scott-Heron, a track that others have sampled, or alluded to, countless times since its release in 1970. The chapter analyses this well-known track for its other, equally formative sonic dimensions. Lyrics do matter here for they are part of African and African American practices of “signifyin’.” Through her “sampling back,” namely, a form of answer rap, Sarah Jones inverts this iconic track thirty years later to launch a blistering critique of sexism in not only the Rap/Hip-Hop business but also the music business in general. The chapter considers the ways in which Jones’s signifyin’ on “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” literally and sonically, illustrates how musico-cultural borrowing and or as sampling are part of a broader repertoire of African American signifyin’ practices, as these are, in turn, understood as Black culture and, thereby, Black American politics.

Pit Bulls and Dogfighting as Symbols of Masculinity in Hip Hop Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 852-871
Author(s):  
Claudia Alonso-Recarte
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
The Other ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Gangsta Rap ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
Dog Breed ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Cultural Connections

This article explores the aesthetic and cultural connections between the hyper-masculinization inherent to hip hop culture (and particularly to gangsta rap), the pit bull dog breed, and dogfighting. Building on recent scholarship that has identified the racial and racist assumptions underlying the pit bull controversy, I provide further evidence and arguments on how the highly racialized and genderized hip hop discourses inoculate the pit bull body and suffuse it with multiple meanings reminiscent of America’s traumatic encounter with otherness. As a palimpsest that attests to both mainstream and countercultural explorations of racialized masculinities, the pit bull body is made to “perform” its role as both an agent and a victim within the nation’s compulsive need to control and monitor the “other.”

scholarly journals HIP-HOP AND CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP ON KENYA'S ‘SWAHILI COAST’

Africa ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 556-578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Eisenberg
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Cultural Citizenship ◽  
First Century ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Swahili Coast ◽  
Young Subjects ◽  
Youth Music ◽  
Rich Data

ABSTRACTThe Muslim-dominated ‘Swahili coast’ has always served as a conceptual as well as physical periphery for post-colonial Kenya. This article takes Kenyan youth music under the influence of global hip-hop as an ethnographic entry into the dynamics of identity and citizenship in this region. Kenyan youth music borrows from global hip-hop culture the idea that an artist must ‘represent the real’. The ways in which these regional artists construct their public personae thus provide rich data on ‘cultural citizenship’, in Aihwa Ong's (1996) sense of citizenship as subjectification. I focus here on youth music production in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa between 2004 and 2007. During this time, some local artists adopted a representational strategy that subtly reinscribed the symbolic violence to which members of the coast's Muslim-Swahili society have long been subjected. I examine the representational strategies that were adopted during this period by Mombasan artists who happened to be members of the Muslim-Swahili society (‘subjects of the Swahili coast’, as I name them), with an ethnographic eye and ear trained on what they say about the ways in which young subjects of the Swahili coast are objectified and subjectified as ‘Kenyan youth’ in the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals Hip-Hop and Cultural Citizenship on Kenya’s ‘Swahili Coast’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Jarad Eisenberg
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Cultural Citizenship ◽  
First Century ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Swahili Coast ◽  
Young Subjects ◽  
Youth Music ◽  
Rich Data

The Muslim-dominated ‘Swahili coast’ has always served as a conceptual as well as physical periphery for post-colonial Kenya. This article takes Kenyan youth music under the influence of global hip-hop as an ethnographic entry into the dynamics of identity and citizenship in this region. Kenyan youth music borrows from global hip-hop culture the idea that an artist must ‘represent the real’. The ways in which these regional artists construct their public personae thus provide rich data on ‘cultural citizenship’, in Aihwa Ong’s (1996) sense of citizenship as subjectification. I focus here on youth music production in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa between 2004 and 2007. During this time, some local artists adopted a representational strategy that subtly reinscribed the symbolic violence to which members of the coast’s Muslim-Swahili society have long been subjected. I examine the representational strategies that were adopted during this period by Mombasan artists who happened to be members of the Muslim- Swahili society (‘subjects of the Swahili coast’, as I name them), with an ethnographic eye and ear trained on what they say about the ways in which young subjects of the Swahili coast are objectified and subjectified as ‘Kenyan youth’ in the twenty-first century.

Introduction

Renegades ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Trevor Boffone
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Entry Point ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Extant Literature ◽  
Digital Communities ◽  
Youth Identity ◽  
Digital Spaces

The Introduction begins with an overview of the Renegade dance’s popularity and the major players who made the dance challenge go viral—namely, TikTok sensation Charli D’Amelio who is the app’s most-followed account, and Georgia teen Jalaiah Harmon who created the dance but wasn’t given any credit for it until the Dubsmash community mobilized around her. The story of the Renegade dance challenge, D’Amelio, and Harmon serves as an entry point into a conversation about the teen artists of color in this book, whom the book labels “Renegades.” Riffing off the viral “Renegade” dance to K-Camp’s “Lottery,” the book reappropriates the term to embody the nuanced ways that Dubsmash users, or self-professed Dubsmashers, use digital hip hop culture and platforms to push again the pervasive Whiteness in mainstream US pop culture, as evidenced on apps such as TikTok. Renegades take up visual and sonic space on social media apps to self-fashion identity, form supportive digital communities, and exert agency to take up space that is often denied to them in other facets of their lives. The Introduction continues with a review of extant literature in social media and youth identity formation, with a particular focus on how Black teens engage with digital spaces. From there, it lays the groundwork for a theory of “Renegades.”

Brithop

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin A. Williams
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
First Century ◽  
British Society ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Twenty First Century

Brithop investigates rap music’s politics in the twenty-first-century United Kingdom. In it, the author argues that this music is partly an extension of, or often a counter to, political discourses happening in other realms of British society. These rappers are essentially responding through rap to mainstream Britain’s political discourses. The rappers in this book critique the United Kingdom’s more conservative narratives, and they express their relationship to Britain in the politically turbulent climate of the new century, providing valuable perspectives which can go unnoticed by those skeptical of or ignorant of hip-hop culture. Through themes of nationalism, history, subculture, politics, humor, and identity, this book looks at multiple forms of politics in rap discourses from Wales, Scotland, and England. It covers selected hip-hop scenes from 2002 to 2017, featuring rappers and groups such as The Streets, Goldie Lookin Chain, Akala, Lowkey, Stanley Odd, Loki, Speech Debelle, Lady Sovereign, Shadia Mansour, Shay D, Stormzy, Sleaford Mods, Riz MC, and Lethal Bizzle. It investigates how rappers in the United Kingdom respond to the “postcolonial melancholia” (Gilroy) of post-Empire Britain. In contrast to more visible narratives of national identity in Britain, Brithop tells a different, arguably more important, story.

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