The Cruel Theater of Rap Senior Thesis Presented to the Faculty Of
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The Cruel Theater of Rap Senior Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Undergraduate Program in European Cultural Studies Stephen Dowden, Advisor In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts by Jonah B. Trout May 2015 Copyright by Jonah B. Trout Trout 2 The Cruel Theater of Rap By Jonah B. Trout Trout 3 Table of Contents Preface…………………………………………………………………..5 Chapter 1: Cruelty and Art……………………………………..7 Chapter 2: Kitsch, Artistic Cruelty’s Opposite? The Based God, Macklemore, and Kanye…………………….14 Chapter 3: Photography, Lies, Entertainment, and the Tragedy of Cruelty…………………………………………24 Chapter 4: Rick Ross, “Boss” of Naïve Cruelty in Rap Music and the Relationship Between Art and Morality……………………………………………………………….32 Trout 4 Chapter 5: The Calculated Theater of Cruelty in Contemporary Rap Music: Kendrick, Drake, Kanye…………………………………………………………………..45 Works Consulted………………………………………………….67 Trout 5 Preface Academia is not separate from the rest of the world. I am a white, twenty-two year old, male writing about a traditionally black culture and art form. Who am I, who grew up in a fairly rural part of Indiana, who had not even attempted to listen to rap music until I was exposed to it as a first year undergraduate student, to write about the cruelty of rap music? I do not pretend to have experienced the same hardships that are presented in this culture and music but I am writing about this topic because I genuinely love engaging with it, I think it is an especially important aspect of the contemporary popular culture and art world in addition to black American culture, and I want to give as much of myself to the growth (and hopefully not toward the misappropriation) of the culture as I can. Kendrick Lamar states in his song “Ab-Soul’s Outro,” from his 2011 debut studio album Section.80, “I’m not on the outside looking in, I’m not on the inside looking out/ I’m in the dead fucking center, looking around.”1 This is the framework toward which this essay aspires. I cannot claim to be deeply entrenched inside the culture of hip hop—I am not black, this is not music I grew up listening to, but it is a music I have come to love and so I am implicated—I cannot claim to be exactly outside of it looking in either. The interest of this work lies particularly with the aspects of cruelty that the aesthetic experience of rap music presents and as an avid listener, I have a predisposed affinity toward acceptance of even some of the cruelest aspects of the music. I will attempt to inhabit the same space of self-awareness from which Lamar claims to 1 “Kendrick Lamar – Ab-Soul’s Outro Lyrics,” last accessed April 25th, 2015, http://genius.com/271412/Kendrick-lamar-ab-souls-outro/Im-not-on-the-outside- Trout 6 project his perspective, with a critical eye focused on the aspects of cruelty in rap music’s aesthetic experience. It is not my purpose in this work to focus on the origins of cruelty or comment on the socio-political importance of rap music, or even to explore its formal lyrical structures but rather to present reflections on the artistic contribution of cruelty within rap music. These others are interesting aspects of rap music, worthy of their own theses themselves but my interest is strictly aesthetic. Perhaps this is the greatest cruelty of this entire situation: the white, twenty-two year old male writing about the cruelty (often aimed at women) that exists in rap music regardless of the inherent gender-based and racially-based power dynamic. The greatest cruelty is the potential misuse of this power. It is my utmost priority in this paper to lay myself as bare as possible in order to not contribute to these various violences. In view of this priority, it is natural that this discussion of cruelty in rap must inevitably touch upon some of the social politics surrounding rap music and the literary forms that it displays and employs. I do not write without regard to the gender and race-based power dynamics inherent to my writing, but they are not my focus. Wrapped up in this discussion, the essay will eventually arrive at an overarching point, the relationship between art and morality in contemporary spectatorship. In this study of popular culture’s relation to artistic value, it is important to understand the institutions of past aesthetic philosophies, but it is also something of an uncharted territory that must be approached as such. In accordance, I have included personal experiences in addition to interpretations of some classic works of aesthetic philosophy as well as artistic analyses of rappers, songs, and albums that will hopefully expound upon and impart important insights Trout 7 toward an academically sound, aesthetic perspective on an understanding of the cruelty that exists in hip hop. 1: Cruelty and Art Rap music often displays extremely violent situations and cruel perspectives especially with regard to misogyny and gang-related violence. Hip hop has even been considered by some as indicative of decay in the moral values of society. Rap music in particular is the medium through which hip hop culture is most often presented today, so much so that the distinction between “hip hop” (culture) and “rap” (an artistic expression or medium of the culture) has all but disintegrated in popular culture. A central question in the discussion of rap music is whether the violence it often exhibits is bad for the world—à la the usual criticisms, “it is misogynist, it is violent, and it is entrenching these things in the minds of the youth.” This is a loaded question. The short answer is that music can be extremely influential and so rap music’s cruelty is indeed a negative for society. The space that rap music occupies in popular culture is situated on a particularly influential pedestal. This essay will focus on this question of the cruelty of rap music as it relates to the connection between art and morality. It is above all, a philosophical question that must be answered through aesthetic analysis of cruelty in art as well as through an historical orientation. Rap is hardly the first genre of artwork that has exhibited violence, or even glorified it but to understand the difference between the manifestations of cruelty in rap music from many other cruel arts, it is important to first look at the context of the themes of cruelty in art generally. Trout 8 Artistic relevance is an eternal struggle. How does one continue to make work that speaks to and satisfies the essential aesthetic needs of a society? In essence, this becomes a question of authenticity, a form of which, known as “realness,” also exists prominently in rap music. How does an artist make art that is perceived as “true”? Art is in a constant state of anxious and tumultuous flux—call it innovation, call it decay, it has probably been both. In 1938, French playwright and aesthetic philosopher (madman) Antonin Artaud published The Theater and Its Double, a volume of manifestos concerning theater arts, and in it he describes the “theater of cruelty.” Artaud expressed the sentiment that in order to rescue theater as an apparently “petrified” artistic medium that is “connected with [the] petrified idea of culture,” it had to be injected with a fresh approach, one that essentially destroyed all of the traditional conventions of theater and crafted a completely new form of aesthetic experience from its smoking ruin.2 Central to this new form was his principle of cruelty. Artaud was hardly the first to employ cruelty as an essential aspect of art, Marquis de Sade wrote his infamous libertine works much before Artaud ventured into the realm of cruel theater. Evidently, Western academia found (and still finds) something spiritually, or perhaps societally, important about artistic cruelty. As Maggie Nelson notes in the opening sentences of her book, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Friedrich Nietzsche too alludes to the importance of cruelty in his 1881 work, Beyond Good and Evil. He states, “One should open one’s eyes and take a new look at cruelty.”3 Artaud, like Nietzsche, believed that a total break from the Judeo-Christian system of morality was necessary for societal progress out of 2 Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 12. 3 Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty; A Reckoning, (New York: Norton, 2011), 3. Trout 9 the alienating ennui brought about by the mechanized modernism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “But ‘theater of cruelty’ means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all,”—it is not at all explicit what Artaud means by “cruelty,” although I believe this quote has a distinct flavor of tragic art that will prove to be important in understanding the aesthetic mechanisms of cruelty in rap music.4 Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” is further confused by his adamant denial that his proposal necessarily entailed blood and violence because in the “literal interpretation of his cruelty, when the time came to get theatrically specific, his examples of potential subjects were tales of literalized bloodshed,” often accompanied by actors’ bloodcurdling screams, guttural sounds, and flashing lights, all apparently designed in attempt to shock the viewers awake into a new state of mind and body.5 The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning examines a huge array of art including literature, performances, films, and paintings, as well as artists from Marquis de Sade to Chris Burden and others whose work might be considered cruel.