The Fire This Time

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miles White
Keyword(s):  
Black Male ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Cultural Complex ◽  
Racial Perceptions ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
Geographical Locations

This chapter focuses on comparisons between minstrelsy and constructions of black masculinity in hip-hop music and culture, particularly the context of hard and hardcore styles of rap performance. Since minstrelsy, blackness has been one of America's primary cultural exports. Furthermore, hip-hop music and culture have been integral in the construction of a new cultural complex of racial perceptions about black masculinity and the black male body. In addition, the chapter shows how black masculinity can be relocated and transposed not simply to other geographical locations, but onto other kinds of bodies in representations that reproduce and perpetuate pejorative understandings of black subjectivities.

Remixing Mixedness

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-214
Author(s):  
Jasmine Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Black Male ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
London 2012 ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
A Site ◽  
Bidding Process

Chapter 5 explores the transnational dimensions of racial imaginings through the vision of Brazil as a mixed-race tropical paradise in both U.S. and Brazilian productions. U.S. hip-hop music videos such as Snoop Dogg and Pharrell’s “Beautiful” (2003), will.i.am’s “I Got It from My Mama” (2007), and the Hollywood film Fast Five (2011) exploit Brazil’s image as a racial paradise and a site of black male independence, based on its reputation as a racial democracy with a large mixed-race population and the imagery of the Brazilian mulata. The chapter ends with how the Brazilian state presented the Rio 2016 Olympics bidding process and the London 2012 handover ceremony on a global stage through images of multiculturalism.

scholarly journals Nobody Knows My Name: The Masquerade of Mourning in the Early 1980s Artistic Productions of Michael Jackson and Prince

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 628-645 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Pochmara ◽  
Justyna Wierzchowska
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
Cultural Scripts ◽  
Flexible Approach ◽  
Cultural Displacement

AbstractThe article analyses Michael Jackson’s album Thriller and Prince’s movie Purple Rain. We explore their camp aesthetics and their recasting of the cultural representations of the black male. Jackson’s and Prince’s performative personas are both liberatory and burdened with the received cultural scripts of black masculinity. We claim that their employment of camp is political rather than escapist and depoliticized. Camp serves them as a platform to mourn the cultural displacement of the black male body in a postslavery America. In particular, the two artists distance themselves from the extensive ideological and physical pressures exerted on the black male body in the early 1980s. As a result, their performances are complexly de-Oedipalized. Prince in Purple Rain refuses to assume the patriarchal position of the Father. Analogously, Jackson fashions himself as a Peter Pan-like eternal adolescent who never makes his final identification as either heterosexual or LGBTQ desiring agent. In the coda to the article, we reach beyond the 1980s to explore a more flexible approach to camp in the artistic output of twenty-first-century African American performers of Queercore and Afrofuturist scenes, which were partially enabled by Jackson’s and Prince’s performances.

Welcome to the candy shop! Conflicting representations of black masculinity

Popular Music ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marita B. Djupvik
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Music Lyrics

AbstractMainstream hip hop videos have long been known for their images of scantily clad women, extreme materialism, and misogynist and homophobic lyrics. In this article I focus on how rapper 50 Cent's masculinity is constructed and expressed through music, lyrics and images in his video ‘Candy Shop’ from 2005. This is a classically modelled hip hop video, replete with markers of hypermasculinity: fancy cars, ‘bling’, and lots of beautiful, sexually available women. Several scholars have discussed how women are exploited in videos like this and reduced to props for the male star. However, few have explored how this macho masculinity is constructed. Through a close reading of this video, using socio-musicology and audiovisual analysis as my approach, I propose that the macho masculinity presented here is threatened when the male body is on display, but 50 Cent reassures himself (and his audience) through selective framing, involving both other performers and the music.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miles White
Keyword(s):  
Black Male ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Black American ◽  
Male Body ◽  
American Power ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Mediated Images

This concluding chapter examines how, in the post-MTV world of video culture and the post-hardcore rap world of commodity thugs, mediated images of the black male body remain a fantasy of masculine desire that encapsulates extreme alternatives of heroism and villainy for white and other youth who often have few other references for black American culture. It reiterates on the conclusions drawn from the previous chapters; and furthermore examines the implications of Barack Obama's 2008 electoral victory, his engagement and association with hip-hop culture, his triumph over American power expressed through whiteness, and his overall role as what the author here terms as “the first hip-hop president.”

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.

“I See Death Around the Corner”: Black Manhood and Vulnerability in Me Against the World

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (7) ◽  
pp. 632-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keven James Rudrow
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Suicide Ideation ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Black Manhood ◽  
The World ◽  
Relational Network

This essay uses Tupac Shakur’s Me Against the World as a case study examining how Black male artists use hip-hop music for articulating the racialized vulnerability organizing their manhood. By thinking about how Shakur understands his Black maleness through his social relationality to the world around him, Shakur’s album creates resistive space for defining Black maleness despite how Black masculinity is often defined and imposed on Black men. Shakur’s album maps a relational network for understanding a brand of Black manhood obscured by dominant discourses about Black men and their masculinity. Specifically, Shakur’s album frames Black maleness through poverty and how it orients Black men, his perpetual susceptibility to harm and death, and suicide ideation as a response to his despair. Connecting Black maleness and vulnerability, Shakur’s album offers insight about being Black and male in a patriarchal White supremacist society.

scholarly journals My Ambitionz az a Qualitative Ridah1: A 2PAC Analysis of the Black Male Baller in Amerikkka2

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 207-219
Author(s):  
C. Keith Harrison ◽  
Rhema Fuller ◽  
Whitney Griffin ◽  
Scott Bukstein ◽  
Danielle McArdle ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Male Athletes ◽  
Male Athlete ◽  
Men Of Color ◽  
Racial Performance

The purpose of this paper is to contextualize and analyze the lyrics of Tupac Shakur by using the research methodological approach of concatenation to merge hip-hop and sport so that the qualitative data from these songs might serve as a cultural map to constructs of identity, race, social class, and black masculinity in the context of sport and the black male athlete experience in America. Applying critical race theory and White’s framework of black masculinity and the politics of racial performance, a connection is made with themes of the artists’ (rapper) social commentary and the athlete (baller). The themes from Tupac Shakur’s lyrics are follows: (a) Trapped, (b) Against the World, (c) The Streetz R Death, and (d) Ambitionz. Synergy with the rapper and baller are articulated, as well as implications for scholars and practitioners that work with high school, collegiate, and professional black male athletes, along with other men of color.

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