What's up with bling?

The use of bling in hip hop culture troubles social structures of inequality even as it gives them power. The term and the style have been around for a while. Common knowledge (the internet, urban dictionary) says Lil’ Wayne invented it, and he claims he did, first mentioning it in his 1998 song "Millionaire Dream." But it was probably floating around even before that, with comedians like Martin Lawrence using it in sketches in the ‘80s, at least according to Wikipedia.

So what’s up with bling? In some ways it seems to be an oppositional representation of Black masculinity like, “What? You think all Black people are poor, well look how much money I just poured around my neck, or on my fingers, or over my teeth.” But by adopting clear signs of wealth, in some ways wearers of bling are reifying class power. They are showing that being rich matters. They are showing that representing wealth matters.

Then again they aren’t wearing nicely tailored suits, fancy cufflinks, or designer ties. They are wearing gaudy, in your face, totally out of mainstream style larger-than-life jewelry that in some ways echoes Africa even as it drips in blood diamonds. (Some rappers have made explicit ties between bling and violence in Africa in documentary films.)

So one of the common sense ideas about bling is that it shows the stupidity of rappers, wasting their money on useless commodities. Which, I mean, I kind of agree with. But I also think that spending thousands of dollars on a suit or an engagement ring is just as gross, we just don’t notice it because it is sneakier and more discreet.

So I’m not quite sure that bling is the best counter-strategy to representations of Black poverty, but it’s certainly working on dominant notions in an in-your-face kinda way.

And how’s bling evolved? Well, the most popular definition for bling bling on urban dictionary says:

n. synonym for expensive, often flashy jewelry sported mostly by African American hip-hop artists and middle class Caucasian adolescents.

Like so much of hip hop culture, you know it’s both made it to mainstream and died when the middle class suburban folk are co-opting it. Mitt Romey even used the term on the campaign trail, which for some reason makes me feel ick. President Sarkozy is derisively called President Bling Bling in the media.

So, like most of the representations in hip hop, it’s complicated. Bling honors conspicuous consumption. It fucks with understandings of how to rep wealth. It challenges notions of class/race lines. And, like so much of hip hop, bad or good, it does so unapologetically.

Response to “The Thug(s) and the Candidate: Musings on Black Masculinity”

Instead of reading this blog, you should probably just read the article, here: http://blogs.vibe.com/man/2008/10/the-thugs-and-the-candidate-musings-on-black-masculinity/

Mark Anthony Neal looks at Black masculinity in his Vibe.com blog article, “The Thug(s) and the Candidate: Musings on Black Masculinity.” He writes about the nigga-ness of rappers like 50 Cent and their contrast to Obama’s portrayal of Blackness. Pulling on writing from Vershawn Ashanti Young’s book, “Your Average Nigga,” Neal talks about how Middle Class Black identity gets played out in direct opposition to the thug image, even though each is desirous of the other.

Thinking about Stuart Hall and Daniel Banks, and their critiques of representation and race performance respectively, I wonder what both Obama’s and, say, David Banner’s representations of Black masculinity are doing, and how they are in conversation with each other. Both Hall and Banks make it clear that by acting in direct opposition to a stereotype, that very image is often reified by the practice that needs to define itself as NOT that.

So when Obama, or other middle class Black professionals, talk in “Standard” English, wear suits, and enter into the mainstream world of politics, are they deepening the Black stereotype(s), the binaries, or, as Neal puts it, the radical dichotomies, the “…perceptions about black masculinity [that] have been finely shaped by a market culture that makes it easier for us to go to sleep at night, because we can so effectively distinguish the niggas from the black men.”

I think Michelle Obama is staging interventions into that binary when she says, as Neal mentions, that she is worried Barak might get shot at a gas station in Chicago, rather than assassinated at a political rally, and when she gives him a ‘fist bump’ after a speech.

And how is David Banner doing that when he speaks eloquently at trials but raps hypermasculine and dirty as shit? And how might he do that more, perhaps with a blog like NewBlackMan?

300 words is not enough for this…

I ain’t scared to get freaky wit cha – “Hey There Girl,” Yo Majesty

Listening to Yo Majesty feels like Missy Elliot and Peaches running a train on Lil Wayne on the dancefloor of a Miami club. Their shit is raw, its dirty dirty, and it blows the sides off the hip hop genre box. It’s fuckin’ radical – it pulls your hair and intervenes all over your dominant narratives. Yo Majesty is also as explicit as they come (their latest EP was labeled Kryptonite Pussy), spelling their aesthetics out for us in case we just didn’t get it.

“Hey There Girl” (hot off the presses from their October 7, 2008 released album Futuristically Speaking…Never Be Afraid) is a perfect example of the sexy subversive signifyin’ these ladies do. I just don’t know why not a single review mentions it – maybe because they can’t figure it out. I think it’s reppin the complexities of the female sexual subject without letting your ass miss a down beat.

a couple notes of context

Yo Majesty hails from Tampa, Florida, a small town that they say still doesn’t appreciate their talent and range (plus they were royally screwed by some early producers there, pun somewhat intended.) Although people don’t always consider Florida a part of the South, much less the Dirty South, Yo Majesty’s music is being judged by critics as a part of the body of crunk work. Matt Miller writes, quoting Wikipedians, that, “Dirty South Rap is largely characterized by its bouncy, upbeat, exuberant, club-friendly tunes and simplistic, heavily rhythmic lyrical delivery.”

But their album spans a whole range of genres, with “beats that, from track to track, swing unapologetically from dancehall to bootybass/ghetto-tech to housey to darkcore to minimal, and of course being Floridians, Miami Bass” (Subba-Cultcha). They work with UK-based electro duo Hard Feelings UK. No matter, some listeners want them to be just about that ‘simple’ crunk party stuff. Nate Patrin, of Pitchfork media, thinks their upbeat club stuff is good but that their, “stylistic digressions like the furious, violent punk rock tirade ‘Fucked Up’, downtempo funk cut ‘Get Down on the Floor’, and the semi-acoustic R&B slow jam ‘Buy Love’ feel so out of place it's actually kind of hard to tell that they're not actually bad songs.” Try listening harder next time, Nate.

In this genre-fied world, reviewers have become too lazy to look at the intersecting practices to see why a “funk cut” or an “R&B slow jam” might actually not be out of place at all. The Afro-diasporic practices in Yo Majesty’s work are apparent all the way through. I mean Lil Jon, quoted in Miller’s piece, realizes that “crunk music is something parallel to…punk rock because of the energy it gives you.” Maybe we should leave the writing about the music to the musicians….

Shunda K talks about this aesthetic of collective energy, both in its power and in the need for abandon noted in both Keyes and Miller’s work. She says, “Yo Majesty is a forum where people can get real love, and release all that bullshit, dancing they asses off for like 45 minutes to an hour. And then they’re empowered by the time the show is done.”

The duo both come from strong Christian backgrounds, and they talk often in interviews about the relationship between them, their music, and God. They are well aware that, as Keyes highlights Michael Eric Dyson quoting Cornel West, “the rap artist combines the potent tradition in black culture: the preacher and singer, [who] appeal to the rhetorical practices eloquently honed in African American religious practices.” Jwl says she is a “minister of music,” and Shunda that she is doin it all for God.

But they’re not all about the religion, they’re also about the raunch. A reviewer from Metrolife, a UK paper, writes, “A 'clean' version of this album seems inconceivable - even without lyrics, the beats and basslines sound thrillingly filthy.” It’s true. Can’t get much more “dirty dirty” than that.

Yo Majesty is a duo of out lesbians, something writers are quick to point out. Zach Baron, of the Village Voice, dismisses their sexuality and their music in one fell swoop by reducing it to novelty: “As rappers, they’re poor-to-fair, which means they’re better than Kid Sister and a bit worse than Saigon: If not for the fact that both of ’em are gay, that’d put Yo Majesty right around Pitbull in the Florida rap hierarchy.” Damn. Then again this is the guy who wrote that he “[doesn’t] think M.I.A. is really a rapper in any meaningful way.” And I haven’t read a single positive piece by him about hip-hop, so why the fuck is he still writing about it?!

Other reviewers just don’t know how to talk about Yo Majesty’s sexuality. Black Book Mag writes, “Finally, The L Word has its own Salt-N-Pepa,” which, I mean really? I guess I gotta thank them for letting us know the lack of common cultural currency for lesbians because I’m not sure what the fuck that bourgie-professional-controlled-overly-styled-nails-painted-mostly-white-passing-for-straight version of gay female has to do with Yo Majesty.

hey there girl, can I rock your world?

I think “Hey There Girl” is one of the most fun, badass, signifyin’, and ingenious tracks on the record. There is so much to talk about, Ima focus in on the representation of sexuality, with a brief mention first of some of its core aesthetics.

“Hey There Girl” utilizes many crunk and Afro-diasporic practices, some of which I mentioned earlier. There is the call and response in the numerous repetitions of “hey there girl” throughout the song, and there is the challenge/counter-challenge as each of the rappers responds to the other’s “hey there” with wassup or another greeting. This is also used as part of what Keye’s calls the tonal semantics, which is the voice rhythm/flow of a piece.

Yo Majesty’s use of voice, the timbre and texture, the straining, also calls to mind a whole range of Afro-diasporic traditions, from the singin’ of some blues to the grunts in contemporary rap. There is a guttural quality to the voice that is super intense, it’s gritty and grimy, hard but liquid smooth like a silicone strap-on coated in Astroglide . They punctuate their lines with sharp inhales that give a sense of how much of the body is involved in the production of their sound and, of course, makes you think about sex. They holler, pant, sing, chant, moan, draws out their essesssssss and shout at cha, sometimes in unison, sometimes layered, and sometimes just over the beats.

“Hey There Girl,” like many Afro-diasporic influenced songs, plays with the idea of outer and inner time (Keyes). It’s got that slow tempo, the heavy deep steady bass (so prominent in Miami), the pre-written beats, and then its got Shuda’s and Jwl’s crazy fuckin flows that move at the speed of light one verse and slow down to talking speed the next. Sometimes you can’t even catch their words you just know you want them to be talking to you.

Yo Majesty plays with gangsta trope of hip hop hardness, rapping “I aint no gangsta/ but best believe I will sing ya/ I’m not afraid to bust back.” They seem to be signifyin they know something you don’t: that you don’t need to sing about violence or selling drugs to be a rapper. In their interviews time and time again they say things like, “Why rap about selling weed on the corner if you never did? Just be real.”

Yo Majesty get real on a lot of things, but often their sexuality, which makes sense because crunk is so much about sex and “often relies upon the display of the female body for male consumption” (Miller). Females are objects in so much of hip hop, Yo Majesty’s work included. But in Yo’s work they are not just the objects, nor just the subjects, they are both. WTF?!

So for sure, hollering at girls in the club through a hip hop song is nothing new, but it is when another woman is doing it. Yo Majesty takes one of the oldest tropes (and one of the most subtly oppressive tools of misogyny I might add) and busts it to pieces. Because the song intervenes in the traditional man picks up woman narrative at an entrance point we may have never even seen, it acts as a powerful counter narrative to the dominant heterosexism of hip hop (and American) culture.

Hall writes, “To reverse the stereotype is not necessarily to overturn and subvert it.” So a woman hollering at man or a woman shutting a man’s hollering down might well wind up reifying the very representations it is trying undo. This song works as a counter-strategy because it is doing what Hall calls contesting it from within. “Instead of avoiding the dangerous terrain opened up by the interweaving of ‘race’, gender and sexuality, it deliberately contests the dominant gendered and sexual definitions of racial difference by working on black sexuality.”

It “contests from within” both by using one of the tools of misogyny and by dealing directly with the issue. Although hip hop is by no means the origin or the primary site of misogyny in America it is, for better of for worse, one of the most recognizable and popular spaces of it (see Don Imus hearings, Miller’s work, Greg Tate, and Patricia Hill Collins for more on this.)

But Collins, in her book Black Sexual Politics, helps us to see why rap might be the perfect site for this. “Because rap revolves around self-promotion, female rappers are able to avoid accusations of being self-centered or narcissistic when they use the form to promote Black female power.” Yo Majesty is doubling this effect by promoting not only their own female power, but other women’s, in that particular way that only women-loving-women can.

So “Hey There Girl” “de-familiarizes” a once familiar notion of the black sexual body. It’s over-sexed, so it must be male, common sense goes. (And I can definitely hear this coming out of a man’s mouth: “hey girl wanna smoke some trees/ we can get high/ and fuck all night.”) Oh, but it’s female, so it must be a jezebel out to get a man’s money or power. But, they rap, “I don’t do boys/ but I might get your sister/ that is if I like her.” So where does Yo Majesty fit into the stereotypical image of black sexuality?

Are they womanizers, re-objectifying women? (like “I wanna see some ass shake in my face” and “bitch.”) Or are they feminist pleasure givers? (“Can I rock your world?” and “I just made that pussy purr.”) Are they doing a bit of both? I mean, I would argue a little bit of objectification is necessary to experience the full physical pleasures of sex.

“Hey There Girl” is complex. It is problematizing binaries – man/woman, subject/object, pursuer/pursued, hard/soft, feminist/sex symbol – and gender norms. It is returning agency to women in a form (world) that would often take it away. But it’s doing that while celebrating many of the things that have been used against women, like rump shaking (a core crunk aesthetic), dance floor seduction, and sex for sex’s sake.

I think Stuart Hall would be impressed.

Afro-diasporic links to crunk

The thing that struck me most about the Singing Fishermen of Ghana was the intricacy of rhythm. There was a drummer and someone with a bell of sorts creating complex, but steady polyrhythms. Then there was the slower simpler rhythm of the lyrical line and the beat keeping of the feet or the oars striking the water in time to the song. Everyone was participating in the rhythmic quality of the music in some way. I imagine the women, shown in clusters to the sides, were grinding food or weaving in rhytm as well. This reminds me of being in the club or seeing Top Notch freestyling, he is making the lyrics while someone else makes the beat and the others are there grooving or at least bobbing their heads.

There is a reason that ‘Black people have rhythm’ (and white people don’t) is a stereotype. I haven’t seen any rock and roll with such rhythm and, although I love it and dancing to it, electronica is so inaccessible to people in the club because there isn’t anything obviously rhythmic to cling on to. But take stepping, children’s games, worksongs, hip hop, even toasts have a rhythmic quality to them. The simultaneously complication and accessibility of rhythm is a core aesthetic of Afro-diasporic music.

I also noticed that the community/solo role in many ways seemed to parallel hip hop and other forms of Black music. It is clear that this is in line with Afro-diasporic tradition. Although the worksongs had more collective singing, there was still often a leader. This leader would sing a bit and then the chorus would join it. Then, at certain times, other people would take the lead for a few lines. This reminded me of how artists will bring in other rappers to do a verse. I think crunk in particular plays on that notion of bringing others in both to do a verse and having very singable choruses (who can resist singing along to an OutKast song chorus, or a Gnarls Barkley riff or sample?)

The Banner Manner

David Banner plays with a wide range of aesthetics in his album Mississippi, drawing on Afro-diasporic practices from gospel to the blues. His music is singable, it’s mean, it bounces and it rages against the dominant whiteness. It is black in the many multiple meanings of the word. bell hooks, in her piece An Aesthetic of Blackness, illuminates some of those meanings for us. Her analysis can be used to see the ways in which Banner foregrounds three traditional black aesthetic practices, struggle, collectivity, and history.


we bout to free da slaves nigga

It is easy to get lost in Banner’s anger. At times I wanna turn his album off because I can’t bear to hear one more “fuck em niggaz,” even if it is being used as more of a vocal rhythm than anything else. We hear the anger through the straining of his voice, see it in the grimace and swagger of his performance, feel it in the tensing of our bodies to the beat, taste it in our repetition of the gritty nasty lyrics, and smell it steam off the overheated bodies that dance around us.

Common sense tells us Banner is just another angry black man, can’t control himself, why are you listening to that shit anyway? What does anger do but cause violence and pain? Well it fo sho causes both those things, but maybe the white majority deserves to be on the other end of pain sometimes. I’m not advocating violence against white people as some kind of retribution (I follow MLK and Ghandi in their tradition of struggle), but I am saying that there is a place for anger.

bell hooks writes about the black community’s need for artistic expressiveness that serves as “testimony, bearing witness” Ya can’t bear witness to the reality of life in the Mississippi Delta without being angry.

Banner is working with a long tradition of an aesthetic of struggle, in his case an anger aesthetic. Black art in the United States has always been about struggle in some way, the struggle to get through the work day, the struggle to escape slavery, the struggle to create community, home, and spirituality amongst hostility, the struggle to make a living and a life- a pleasure-filled, beautiful life, despite racism, economic disenfranchisement, and continued disinvestment of resources both material and otherwise.

Anger gears us up for struggle. Banner’s songs are like the best protest speeches: they get you fired up about injustice, they make you scream/chant with them, and they celebrate the fragile yet vigorous community that is being created. Anger as an aesthetic is about making us strain at our chains. As I mentioned earlier, Banner’s anger is a full body experience. So when we think about music being about struggle we can examine all those things: does it make our throats go raw, our bodies sweat, our heartbeat increase?

How is Banner’s work following the tradition of struggle? Does it make us fall out and speak in tongues, like in church as we listen to the preacher? Does it make us work harder, even when the work might be chopping cotton or working for the prison? Does it teach us to struggle together (but not in unison), ‘cause we need the beats and the chants and the raps, or the sopranos, altos, tenors to make music/change? Is anger what’s needed now when black people have space to make noise but only so much?


know what I’m talkin bout

Making art together, but not in unison, is a core aesthetic of blackness. hooks writes that in the black community there is a “belief that beauty, especially that created in a collective context, should be an integrated aspect of everyday life, enhancing the survival and development of community.”

Art and beauty, in this context, do not belong to upper class, to the universities or to opera houses or whatever gilded stages of cultural production the artistic elite like to claim. Art belongs to everyone, it is rooted in vernacular, in the “everyday.” Banner plays with this aesthetic by employing a variety of voices, noises, and everyday sounds.

The voices in his songs are almost always layered, giving a sense of the power of the voice. In What It Do the pop, pop, drop, drop, top, top, etc are keeping the rhythm as much as the beat. Like a Pimp, has multiple voices on the key words, telling us what to pay attention to and letting us know when to sing along. And in Fast Life, Banner opens with an inhaaaaale, cough, familiar sounds of smoking weed put straight into the music.

Collective self-expression is also seen in the vast range of musical traditions Banner samples (I use the term loosely here to mean ‘incorporates bits of.’) There is brass like a marching band in Fuck Em, an electric guitar classic rock sounding open in Mississippi, folk guitar like the beginning of a James Taylor song in Cadillacs on 22s, a John Mayer turns Spanish pop rock strumming on Choose Me, and a grunge metal synth and a gospel improve riff in Really Don’t Wanna Go, to name a few examples.


we from a place

Banner histories, that is he reps and makes history in his practice. hooks writes about the importance of history in black cultural production, particularly during the period of black nationalism, which privileged the home(land). hooks writes of artists “constructing a mythic past whose effectiveness could be felt in the present.”

Banner’s mythic past isn’t rose colored. It is murderous, racist, and fucked up. But (his)story is also about survival. Walking past lynchings and murders, tearing rebel noose flags from his neck in the video for Like a Pimp, Banner seems to be signifying “you didn’t kill us all motherfucka!”

In Cadillac on 22s Banner raps about Andre Jones and Reynold Johnson being murdered, about how it might be impossible to go on given the circumstances. But he also says, “Maybe Earth is telling just a place for us to learn/ Bout yo love, yo will and grace.” He seems to be signifying, God has always gotten us through, as the chorus echoes, “Pray to the to the lord for these Mississippi streets.”

In Mississippi, Banner is embracing his place as one of history and struggle as well. It is the place, “Where Medger Evers live and Medger Evers died.” It is significant that his life is captured in Mississippi as well as his death, just as all the others who have gone and will go.

hooks writes about commodification, the yearning for things rather than beauty. I think we often want albums to be things with a dollar value, so we can nail them down, measure how well they are selling, where they hit the charts. We don’t wanna look at their beauty, and their ugliness, in its wide range of representations. Things become ‘worth’ something when we can price them. Beauty is tenuous and it signifies. It requires us to appreciate both the sunflower and the rose, but also to think about how we decide which is more beautiful, which we want on our dining room table.

hooks helps us think about aesthetics, about the “artistry in everyday life, especially the lives of poor people, one that seeks to explore and celebrate the connection between our capacity to engage in critical resistance and our ability to experience pleasure and beauty.”

Banner music sometimes hurts, it leaves us bruised at the ankles and wrists, but it also lets us dance. It makes us be with each other and sing out. The aesthetics of struggle, collective expression, and history are deep rooted and black.

Crunk and place

Southern hip-hop is strongly informed by the significance of place, a sensibility that comes both from a geographic ethic that surrounds national rap production and a very Southern understanding of culture that is both regional and localized.

When I came to the South, I was surprised by the North Carolina pride – I know several people with North Carolina tattoos, for instance. Growing up I never felt rooted to Washington, DC, or to Maryland, where I lived most of my life just across the border, attending school in DC and hanging out with friends from DC, Maryland, and Virginia. Maybe we didn’t have a keen sense of place because we were at the confluence of these three places, crossing daily, never really thinking about the geographic distinctions except to claim that Virginia drivers were definitely the worst. But I also think it’s because the Northeast doesn’t see itself as a cultural region. I can’t think of anything concrete that belongs to the North, but I can think of a hell of a lot of Southern particularities. Sweet tea, grits, y’all, soul food, barbeque, Cheerwine, tobacco, blues, gospel, bluegrass, zydeco, slavery, the confederate flag, lynching, Jim Crow, and the list goes on (I never said they were all good.)

So perhaps Jason Berry’s quote, ("popular music . . . springs from an organic culture: the lyrics, rhythms, and dance patterns reflect a specific consciousness, the values of a given place and time,") has more credence in the North, where we don’t engage place in the same way as you folks down here. I guess East Coast/West Coast reppin’ rappers might disagree, so maybe it’s just missing the point about hip-hop generally, but certainly about hip-hop in the South.

Although Southern hip-hops artists definitely exist in their time and place, reflecting those values in their lyrics and actions, they are also in conversation with their history(ies) and global movements (be they musical or political). Afro-diasporic aesthetics permeate crunk, for example, from the call-and-response to the use of repetition and variation [see Lil’ Jon’s Get Low and OutKast’s ATLiens for two.] Other musical traditions are consciously engaged as well, like in OutKast’s use of the B-52s song Bombs Over Baghdad in B.O.B.

B.O.B. is a great demonstration of the ways in which hip-hop artists are making pointed and specific decisions about what cultural elements to engage with – the B-52s are from Georgia as well. David Banner thinks critically about place too, devoting an entire album to his home state of Mississipi. OutKast creates an album (re)claiming the ATL. Goodie Mobb sings about the Dirty South and Soul Food. And Lil’ Wayne sings about New Orleans on any number of tracks, Tie My Hands being one of the most moving.

So Southern hip hop artists aren’t just being impacted unknowingly by their place(s), they are seriously considering it – it’s values, history, food, crime, culture, music, and it’s possibilities for change. Perhaps, in the process, they are even changing it themselves.

What you really know about the Dirty South?

The Dirty South is raw – like an open wound it pusses with the inflammatory lyrics of crunk, the black body’s immune response to the violence of (white) history.

Growing up in Washington, DC, I heard that the biggest mistake we ever made was not letting the South secede. Although this was meant as a statement of liberal frustration with white Southern bigots in solidarity with African Americans, it was also part of a cultural representation that reduced black Southerners to merely a group of the oppressed.

Now, after two years of living in the South, my y’alls are mocked back home as part of a lesser vernacular, even as I use the academic discourse of my women’s studies courses to explain why I prefer its gender neutrality over “you guys.”

So for me, the Dirty South is simultaneously a fucked up place I’m glad not to have to claim and a space I badly want to enter. OutKast’s song “Rosa Parks” illustrates this dichotomy perfectly:


Ah ha, hush that fuss
Everybody move to the back of the bus
Do you wanna bump and slump with us
We the type of people make the club get crunk


We all know the nasty history of that moment, the degradation so many African Americans faced as a result of that injustice and the many other daily oppressions of segregation. But, on the other hand, I wanna be in the back of that bus. I mean, it seems like that’s where all the fun is happening, at least in this particular representation.

OutKast and other crunk artists are in many ways firmly rooted in the “Jim-Crow” car of DuBois’ railroad journey – they consciously create in the context of historical and current marginalization. But they are also generating a metamorphosis of that space through the collective energy of a music so powerful that it has left its mark in train stations around the country and across the globe.

In his testimony to Congress during the Imus hearings, David Banner said, “Hip Hop is sick because America is sick.” He also might’ve said, “Crunk is dirty because the South is dirty.”