Happy New Year Black America!

Before Thursday 25th December 2014 the name Azealia Banks meant absolutely nothing to me. My moment of awareness arrived while browsing through The Guardian’s online pages, a headline ‘Iggy Azalea, Azealia Banks and hip-hop's appropriation problem’[1] caught my attention. As the introductory lines indicated, the writer of the feature was concerned with the issue of hip-hop’s ‘complex relationship with race and identity’. As I was to discover, there has been a war between two artists raging in the hip-hop community, which prompted the discussion. On the face of it, the incident seemed to be a case of mild identity theft. In general terms, a young and emerging ‘Harlem girl’, Azealia Banks, feels that her image (brand, perhaps) has been appropriated by a ‘white Australian’, who, named herself Iggy Azalea. Iggy is making waves and in some circles, being celebrated as a ‘big’ hip-hop artist.

There is indeed nothing new about this situation. In the long history of the encounter between African and Europe, this assertion of ‘white privilege’ and the intrinsic right to ‘appropriation’ is a defining factor in that relationship. It underlines the acquisition of major resources for the slavery/capitalism/colonialism project. It also underlines the ways in which ‘primitivism’, and by extension, Africa and Africans, have been appropriated and commoditized in the process of constructing and propagating Western modernity and its associated ideas and ideologies of freedom, innovation, greatness, individualism - now celebrated in the cult of ‘me’, of which celebrity and the ‘selfie’ are manifestations .

As has been discussed elsewhere, African-American music and its cultures and styles, by the post-1945 years, were well established as ‘a metaphor for notions of freedom and influenced many trends that emerge in popular culture’[2] . This is undoubtedly a facet of the ‘modern/tribal encounter’ explored by many writers and cultural analysts. Among of these, Hal Foster makes the salient observation that within the dominant expressions of Western modernism ‘Picasso did intuit one apotropaic function of tribal objects-and adopted them as such, as "weapons"…’. Hence, ‘primitivism emerges as a fetishistic discourse, a recognition and disavowal not only of primitive difference but of the fact that the West- its patriarchal subjectivity and socius-is threatened by loss, by lack, by others’[3] .

What can be indeed interrogated from these perspectives is the ways in which Capitalism has succeeded in managing the perceived threat of the ‘African’, by its appropriation, through commodification and ultimate domestification. This has succeeded to the extent that, as Azealia Banks agonized, a ‘cultural smudging’ has been normalized and recurs to dispossess black artists, and their communities of ownership and determination over, as she termed it, ‘the right to my fucking identity’.

This as the article highlighted was at the root of Azealia Banks’ outrage, which she had expressed on Twitter where it had gone viral. Fortunately for myself, a person not being part of the Twittersphere, the article made reference to a radio interview on which Azealia Banks had been able to speak at length about what was concerning her. On YouTube the video had nearly 1.5 million hits by the twenty-sixth of December. Following on from my initial interest in the article it seemed natural to take the time to listen to the interview, all forty-seven minutes of it. As it turned out, this was not so much a getting to know who is Azealia Banks, but a lesson in the condition of young African-Americans (even as I generalize with caution).

Here was a young woman, of 23 years, making waves with an album of reasonably interesting music over which she spurted lyrics, typical of her style which one of the radio presenters on the interview described as ‘filthy mouth’. Acclaimed within hip-hop circles, the album obviously has its audience and its particular appeal. In spite of my aversion to the ‘lyrics’, there was nothing new in the content. Jamaican dance-hall and older hip-hop artists have been trading on these messages and expressions for some time. However, what I have long sensed with dance-hall, and what became dramatically obvious during the course of Azealia Banks’ interview, was the existence of deep internal pain, dislocation and violence.

On two occasions during the interview Azealia Banks became virtually incomprehensible. Overwhelmed by anger, emotion and angst, she at times was literally speaking in tongues, such was the passion that was erupting somewhere within her as tried to express what the cynical ‘fuck you’ of her nemesis Iggy Azalea, had sparked. On the two moments in the interview when these eruptions of passion occurred, I could think of James Brown lost for words and surrendering to one of his characteristic screams; or perhaps John Coltrane in fully abandoned expression; or the Sun Ra Arkestra in full cosmic cry! All of these analogies are employed here to suggest, or to remind that Azealia Banks’ experience and new-found awareness has all happened before. The significant difference however, seems to be in the ways in which others, as symbolized by the names mentioned above, may have articulated the situation and dealt with it.

The observation that I make is that Azealia Banks and her brand of hip-hop, like the dance-hall type of comparable ilk, trades on the commodification of their self-degradation. The paradox of the situation comes to light when, in the interview, and in contrast to her sincere hurt and feelings of dispossession, a casual reference is made to a relationship with a record company who had terminated a contract with her after spending $2 million on the making of a record, on which they could find no top-forty material. This is all normal in the course of show business, whether you are Azealia Banks or Iggy Azalea.

Iggy Azalea, however, is dancing all the way to the Grammys, while Azealia Banks is agonizing. This young lady is not an ignoramus. There is enough to suggest that she is and can be articulate. However, what seems to take precedence is being a ‘Harlem girl’, with all the brashness, branding and attitude that this personifies. Her posturing makes a stark contrast with the vulnerability and hurt that by her own admission, the movie 12 Years A Slave seemed to trigger within her deepest sensibility. As with all of her other expressed sentiments of loss, of anger about mis-education (no black heroes, or validation of her African heritage), and the feeling of a constant attempt to ‘erase us’, the condition of the hip-hop generation is as tragic as it is apocalyptic.

Ironic as it may be, what Azealia Banks is essentially laying claim to in her media event with Iggy Azalea, is the brand, the fashion statement, the only currency assumedly at her disposal in the performance of being an American. Iggy Azalea has, therefore, barged on to the ball court and once again, disrupted the game in which ‘the Bad Nigger has become commodified in commercial rap music and rather than being a disruptive force in present day society has actually become a role that the mainstream is quite comfortable with…’[4] . In effect, against the background of an African-American president in the White House, (euphemistically in my terms) ‘…the Good Nigga who terrorises their own community and fills the courts and prisons’[5] , the social culling of African-American youth (under whatever pretext), for which the name Ferguson has become a synonym, takes place. Here it seems, new policy-practices for the management of the plantation in the twenty-first century are being defined.

African-American culture within popular global culture is often received as ‘American’ culture. Along with the pervasive cultural smudging out, this perception is in turn often part of the rhetoric and posturing of being ‘an American’, with all of its arrogance and privilege. By extension, therefore, much the same sentiments resonate within the significations of the ‘West’, its freedoms and its desirability. Within the perceived logic of Foster’s discussion cited above in relation to ‘modern-primitivist’ (Picasso et al), there is an inevitable denial of ‘difference’. This I would argue is a tendency that now seeks refuge in an insidious neo-liberal humanism propagated casually as ‘post-racial’ ideology seeking to maintain racial hierarchy and privilege.

Unfortunately, for Azealia Banks’ hip-hop generation, and like their dance-hall (and to some extent, British) counterparts, the illusion of the ‘American Dream’ and its nightmare reality of nihilistic consumerism and vulgar waste is the new futurism living in the present. This is where, in the global world of the twenty-first century, the ‘post-racial’ plays hide-and-seek with the residual and persistent forms of racism. As Northup’s predicament in 12 Years A Slave has illustrated, ‘black’ liberty is a frail and precarious organism. In fact, bondage and being the victim of a ‘white’ sadist with a salacious appetite to consume some contemporary African primitivism, might only be a wine glass, a champagne glass, a cocktail shaker, a six-pack, or a fashion statement away. Happy New Year…

* Imruh Bakari is a filmmaker and writer. He lectures in Film Studies at the University of Winchester, and is a specialist in African and Caribbean cultural affairs and media issues.

END NOTES

[1] Jeff Chang in The Guardian, Wednesday 24 December 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/dec/24/iggy-azalea-azealia-banks-hip-hop-appropriation-problem
[2] Imruh Bakari, ‘Exploding Silence: African-Caribbean and African-American music in British culture towards 2000’, in Living Through Pop, ed. Andrew Blake (Routledge, 1999), p.100
[3] Hal Foster, ‘The "Primitive" Unconscious of Modern Art’, October, Vol. 34 (Autumn, 1985), p.45/p.46
[4] Kehinde Andrews, ‘Policing the plantation: Legalised killings of the ‘Bad Nigger’’, posted on December 8, 2014, http://ncccs.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/policing-the-plantation-legalised-killings-of-the-bad-nigger-2
[5] Ibid. (In no way do I validate a privileged usage of the ‘N’ word. Its use in my view is always pejorative and insulting.)

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