Mike Otherz
All Star
Whats 50 Grand to a Revolutionary Like Me?: Watch the Throne and the New Black Power
cord jefferson
When Jay-Z and Kanye West released Watch the Throne last year, they did so, at least in part, to glorify things. Thing-glorification is a pursuit with a rich and not wholly invalid history in mainstream rap music. And from its opulent golden cover to its braggadocio about cars, clothes, jewelry, and women, Watch the Throne makes sense in the way that Paula Deen using whole tubs of butter makes senseJay-Z and Kanye West are rich men who like to revel in rich things.
Simple, and good for them. But then came Watch the Throne's latest video.
Released at the end of May, the music video for "No Church in the Wild," the driving, bass-heavy first track on Watch the Throne, was filmed in the streets of Prague. It was about 23 years ago that revolutionary students, holding flowers in their hands, took to those same streets and collapsed communism in Czechoslovakia. Directed by Romain Gavras, whose bread and butter is rapid-fire images of dystopian madness, "No Church in the Wild" also deals with revolution, although a far less gentle one.
Throughout its five minutes, the video features a quick succession of brutal riot police, keffiyehs over faces (a sure sign of hip uprisings), tear gas canisters, Molotov cocktails, and blood. In one scene, armored police on armored horses chase people down an alley and beat them with batons. In another, a snarling attack dog snaps at a handcuffed black boy, whose eyes go wide with fright. The Civil Rights allusions extend when, every now and again, the viewer is given a glimpse of police using fire hoses to spray down members of the unruly crowd, a la 1960s Birmingham.
Like with many of Gavras' videos, there is no direct point to "No Church in the Wild," but the message seems to be one that's been a favorite of musicians for decades now: The kids aren't all right, and The State is oppressive.
When Gavras touched on similar themes with M.I.A. for her "Born Free" video, it sort of made sense. Though the ethnically Sri Lankan artist belied some of her radically proletariat leanings when she became enamored of an ultra-wealthy beverage brand scion and agreed to an order of truffle fries, her art has always had at least one foot somewhere in the mud of political upheaval. Her songs, like her videos, are frequently about terrorism, violence, war, Orientalism, and imperialism. She speaks openly about her leftist politics in interviews, and on numerous occasions she's also expressed empathy with the repressed Tamil people in Sri Lanka. Those expressions have at times found M.I.A. branded a "terrorist sympathizer," an accusation to which she doesn't pay much mind. In a way, Gavras' stylings were made for M.I.A., and vice versa. His relationship with Jay-Z and West, however, is less obvious, although it's certainly telling about where American culture is headed.
It's one of the strangest celebrity phenomena of the past couple years: Jay-Z and Kanye West styled, by themselves and others, as voices of revolution. Today it's Gavras video. Last October it was West showing up to Occupy Wall Street and standing around awkwardly while Russell Simmons spoke for him to the press. And before all of that, there was the plentiful and fawning discussion of Watch the Throne as being a weapon of insurgency upon its release.
"f I submit that this thingWatch the Throneis a Black Nationalist Masterpiece for the New Millenium," asked Ava DuVernay in the Huffington Post. "Too much?" She went on to call the album "militant." Writing in UK paper The Observer, Kitty Empire said Watch the Throne was all about "black power." And on occasional-Kanye-mouthpiece Russell Simmons' website, Global Grind, Brittany Lewis went further than anyone in her reverence, theorizing that Jay-Z and West are part of what groundbreaking black sociologist W.E.B. Dubois dubbed the "Talented Tenth," an elite class of African-American charged with "guiding the mass away from the contamination and death of the worst." "The sentiments of black power and black pride ooze through many of the tracks on Watch the Throne," Lewis wrote.
If you're wondering what Jay and West have done, exactly, to deserve the title of neo-black power icons, the answer appears to be both straightforward and confusing: They've gotten rich. Today's black power, today's black revolution, seems to be indistinguishable from, say, Donald Trump's power, the power that comes from being able to possess a lot of stuff. You needn't take my or Global Grind's word for it; just listen to Watch the Throne for a whole host of revelations about what its creators deem worthy of celebrating. The album's second single, "Otis," finds Jay-Z proclaiming, "New watch alert!" in reference to Hublot, a Swiss watchmaker whose wares go for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Later on the same song, West boasts about his "other, other Benz." On Watch the Throne's biggest hit, "nikkas in Paris," which Jay-Z and West have been performing several times a night on their current European Watch the Throne tour, Jay says he's totally forgotten the worth of $50,000.
cord jefferson
When Jay-Z and Kanye West released Watch the Throne last year, they did so, at least in part, to glorify things. Thing-glorification is a pursuit with a rich and not wholly invalid history in mainstream rap music. And from its opulent golden cover to its braggadocio about cars, clothes, jewelry, and women, Watch the Throne makes sense in the way that Paula Deen using whole tubs of butter makes senseJay-Z and Kanye West are rich men who like to revel in rich things.
Simple, and good for them. But then came Watch the Throne's latest video.
Released at the end of May, the music video for "No Church in the Wild," the driving, bass-heavy first track on Watch the Throne, was filmed in the streets of Prague. It was about 23 years ago that revolutionary students, holding flowers in their hands, took to those same streets and collapsed communism in Czechoslovakia. Directed by Romain Gavras, whose bread and butter is rapid-fire images of dystopian madness, "No Church in the Wild" also deals with revolution, although a far less gentle one.
Throughout its five minutes, the video features a quick succession of brutal riot police, keffiyehs over faces (a sure sign of hip uprisings), tear gas canisters, Molotov cocktails, and blood. In one scene, armored police on armored horses chase people down an alley and beat them with batons. In another, a snarling attack dog snaps at a handcuffed black boy, whose eyes go wide with fright. The Civil Rights allusions extend when, every now and again, the viewer is given a glimpse of police using fire hoses to spray down members of the unruly crowd, a la 1960s Birmingham.
Like with many of Gavras' videos, there is no direct point to "No Church in the Wild," but the message seems to be one that's been a favorite of musicians for decades now: The kids aren't all right, and The State is oppressive.
When Gavras touched on similar themes with M.I.A. for her "Born Free" video, it sort of made sense. Though the ethnically Sri Lankan artist belied some of her radically proletariat leanings when she became enamored of an ultra-wealthy beverage brand scion and agreed to an order of truffle fries, her art has always had at least one foot somewhere in the mud of political upheaval. Her songs, like her videos, are frequently about terrorism, violence, war, Orientalism, and imperialism. She speaks openly about her leftist politics in interviews, and on numerous occasions she's also expressed empathy with the repressed Tamil people in Sri Lanka. Those expressions have at times found M.I.A. branded a "terrorist sympathizer," an accusation to which she doesn't pay much mind. In a way, Gavras' stylings were made for M.I.A., and vice versa. His relationship with Jay-Z and West, however, is less obvious, although it's certainly telling about where American culture is headed.
It's one of the strangest celebrity phenomena of the past couple years: Jay-Z and Kanye West styled, by themselves and others, as voices of revolution. Today it's Gavras video. Last October it was West showing up to Occupy Wall Street and standing around awkwardly while Russell Simmons spoke for him to the press. And before all of that, there was the plentiful and fawning discussion of Watch the Throne as being a weapon of insurgency upon its release.
"f I submit that this thingWatch the Throneis a Black Nationalist Masterpiece for the New Millenium," asked Ava DuVernay in the Huffington Post. "Too much?" She went on to call the album "militant." Writing in UK paper The Observer, Kitty Empire said Watch the Throne was all about "black power." And on occasional-Kanye-mouthpiece Russell Simmons' website, Global Grind, Brittany Lewis went further than anyone in her reverence, theorizing that Jay-Z and West are part of what groundbreaking black sociologist W.E.B. Dubois dubbed the "Talented Tenth," an elite class of African-American charged with "guiding the mass away from the contamination and death of the worst." "The sentiments of black power and black pride ooze through many of the tracks on Watch the Throne," Lewis wrote.
If you're wondering what Jay and West have done, exactly, to deserve the title of neo-black power icons, the answer appears to be both straightforward and confusing: They've gotten rich. Today's black power, today's black revolution, seems to be indistinguishable from, say, Donald Trump's power, the power that comes from being able to possess a lot of stuff. You needn't take my or Global Grind's word for it; just listen to Watch the Throne for a whole host of revelations about what its creators deem worthy of celebrating. The album's second single, "Otis," finds Jay-Z proclaiming, "New watch alert!" in reference to Hublot, a Swiss watchmaker whose wares go for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Later on the same song, West boasts about his "other, other Benz." On Watch the Throne's biggest hit, "nikkas in Paris," which Jay-Z and West have been performing several times a night on their current European Watch the Throne tour, Jay says he's totally forgotten the worth of $50,000.
It doesn't take an entire article to get that point across though, as someone who sells crack to their own mother is often on such a shortlist.
