Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Home Box Office introduced me to Heather Hunter.
Sassy, sexy and confident, Heather Hunter, the mainstream face of African American pornography for over a decade, first appeared before my puberty-glazed brown eyes sometime in the mid-Nineties, during the affirmative action segment of an early episode of HBO's Real Sex. In bed with Akineyele to film a sex show, in a meeting to write an adults only comic book, and in a studio to promote a radio show, Heather Hunter emerged as a prostitute for all seasons, an idyllic muse for art if Norman Rockwell ever caught jungle fever. Her gaudy sexuality aside, Double H developed into the only African American female performer of recent memory to display the business savvy found in sex starlets such as Jenna Jameson and Danni Ashe. The first and only African American female inductee into the Adult Film Hall of Fame, Heather Hunter enjoyed constant referencing and name-dropping by hip-hop artists throughout her career, including Lil' Kim, LL Cool J, and Snoop Dogg. Given today's pop culture climate, one shouldn't be surprised that, eventually, Heather Hunter would record a hip hop album.
Heather Hunter personifies race and sex oppression's demise through individual agency; this B-list Bronx feminist does not possess Jennifer Lopez's fame or fortune, yet operates similarly on-screen to provide brazen, sleazy sexual arousal to male film viewers willing to pay-per-erection. The point? Whenever men watch Heather Hunter on film, she offers the fantasy of sexual possession; to view Double H ramrodded by Lexington Steele or Sean Michaels or Peter North is to indulge in a taboo phantasmagoria of Black female possession by virile, turgid, unstoppable masculine power, Sally Hemings cowed and timid and spread eagle for the man in her life.
Heather Hunter, a street-level capitalist in every respect, lies sore and sweaty and spent on plasma television screens the world over, drips lewdly from used, raw, reddened orifices slimy with the mother-of-pearl ejaculate her clients' concrete pillars spray without concern. Radio playable Jazze Pha Southern crunk stripper bass pounds incessantly in the background; pussy-popping, booty-shaking, low-budget audio lechery provides the appropriate soundtrack. Without a moment's respite, another arrogant anonymous member invades whatever remains of Heather Hunter's inner sanctum, her God-given temple of life's promise, without remorse or pity or sorrow for the unholy perversion her worn, loose, malleable genitals allow for profit. Meanwhile, many men's furious palms frenzy about tired, sweaty, barely lubricated phalluses, hoping in worried vain for momentary bliss; their warped minds absorb devalued femininity and wanton whorishness as the divine, natural state of all women. The numerous men's glossy fixed stares - green, hazel, blue, brown - drink Heather's defiant submission, relish Hunter's easy physicality. This isn't love, this is ownership. Not sex, control. Without warning, the pitiful anonymous watch Heather Hunter's chiseled brown back arch violently, her immaculate Revlon lashes squeeze with oncoming delight. A grimace. A gasp. A scream. Double H's mascara runs. Panasonics the world over require immediate Windex attention. Big Tigger, longtime host of Black Entertainment Television's Rap City, cuts to commercial.
Heather Hunter is hip hop. I used to lust H.E.R.
Lust, not love. Hip hop's syncopated streetwalker never presents wholesome Americana; Snoop Dogg, darling of Long Beach and Park Avenue, translated the apathetic delinquency of inner-city killers not yet old enough to shave to the mainstream Music Television audience, including one perennially uncool African American thirteen-year-old lover of astronomy, Jeopardy, and ancient Greece. "Gin & Juice" began my lifelong trysts with hip hop; she was already hollow and morose and licentious before she bothered to arouse my pubescent sensibilities. The archetypal video vixen, hip hop transformed a straight-laced, stalwart, Clark Kent squarejaw into a down brother in a reverse Pygmalion straight-to-video featuring Beyonce Knowles and scored by The RZA. Notice the economic genius of hip hop: with cable television, incessant Clear Channel radio airplay and foolishly expensive compact discs, international record conglomerates could produce scientifically quantified urban culture to middle-class and upper middle-class multicultural America for virtually nonexistent startup cost, through the promise of lavish rockstar hedonism to the few poor African American rap musicians who could stir today's colored proletariat masses with rhyming couplets in the revolutionary manner of last generation's Eldridge Cleaver and Fred Hampton and Huey Newton. Incidentally, that was the marketing blueprint for intellectual thug scion Tupac Shakur, and the reason he's still a platinum artist today, years after his death. In reality, hip hop quenches the unceasing demand by mainstream soccer mom, red state, fair and balanced Fox News Channel Americana for easily attainable, personal immersion in underclass chic, drenches the majority in the counterculture cool of the minority. Double H was always a whore, above empathy or affection, beyond good and evil. Absent any paltry moralistic concerns, hip hop fertilizes street creditability with corporate greed to birth global profit, unites the entire industrialized world population with the infectious self-interest of attainable Negro style. Hip hop is prepackaged, shipped, distributed. Hip hop, is Blackness commodified.
Blackness. Not just Black culture, or Black people, but the very indefinable essence of what it means to be Black, from the macro to the micro, for the many and the few, or the one. Hip hop unmasks to reveal commercialized melanin. This natural pigment prophecies danger, allure, exotica, erotic fear and uncivilized fury for all non-Blacks in the American sociopolitical sphere of influence. All humans possess some quantity of melanin, yet those members of the African Diaspora have melanin more abundantly. Americans craft long standing traditional and new age skin color prejudices around melanin content; we shape our conceptions of safety, beauty, intelligence, virility, and power around our proximity to and possession of melanin. The color controls our lives.
Color has certainly laid claim to my brief existence so far. Recent online discussions over the indefensible antics of Jeremy Parker, a.k.a. Tha Pumpsta, led me to a brief inventory of the voluminous attempts non-Blacks make publicly to don neo-blackface, to attempt transracial immersion into African American youth culture and history without absorbing racial stigmatization. It's a basic question: if Blackness can be commodified, who's buying? In my generation, in my opinion, everyone's a broker, and African Americans resemble Ferengi. Case in point: Tony Rome and Maven Strategies. The Washington Post, recently breaking more news on the social and economic ramifications of hip hop than the entrie print runs of The Source and XXL Magazine, informed the public this past Monday of a little known marketing company that pairs materialistic, flossy, gaudy, shiny Jacob-the-Jeweler imprinted, platinum record selling hip hop artists with major corporations to promote corporate products' brand names through the omnipresent advertising Mecca that is hip hop. Think of all the Adidas and Air Force Ones and Hennessy and Courvoisier and Armadale Vodka and Vitamin Water and Phat Farm and DKNY and Sean John and Rocawear people buy thanks to some unwashed rapper's recommendation. The entire mid-Nineties explosion of New York City Big Willie rap, pioneered by the late Notorious B.I.G., morphed our syncopated streetwalker from nihilistic nefariousness to Fifth Avenue formality. One day "Life's a Bitch", the next we're "Poppin' Tags". "Natural Born Killers" now spend the majority of their time "In Da Club". If nothing else, the George W. Bush-style public transformation of Ice Cube from Amerikkka's Most Wanted weapon of mass destruction to family friendly Hollywood action star should legitimize for all critics hip hop's capitalist original sin. Double H 'paid the cost to be the boss', and we all sold our souls.
Today, we are the Devil of our own details. In methods too numerous to mention, hip hop allows the general public to purchase Blackness at their leisure. The problem begins when a fickle, demanding body politic realizes that keyboard-heavy Dr. Dre sonic production can not bestow melanin. The Marshall Mathers LP hammers this truth into all mainstream White Americans: no matter how poor you were growing up, how dysfunctional your parents, how painstakingly you study rap history and narrative flow, how many throwback jerseys and Akademic jeans and Timberland boots you wear, how many 2Pac verses you quote from memory, how often you renew your subscription to Rap Pages, how much street slang you spit, how polished your pimp cup, how crunk you get in the club, or how many Black friends you have, you will never be Black. Never ever. Never ever? Never ever. And, ironically, it's your fault.
Our Founding Fathers forged a social, economic and legal system upon their arrival in North America that depended on extreme racial stratification to preserve the unfree labor early American society required, from their perspective. Anti-miscegenation laws, prohibitions again slave education, the Three-Fifths Compromise - all these early American statutes forged the beginnings of American legal history. And just as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas sparked a social revolution that forever altered American mores on race separation and unequal treatment, early slave codes congealed prevailing ideologies about displaced Africans in America that exist today - including the myth of the randy, hypersexual, muscular, obnoxiously virile African American Supermasculine Menial. Remember this excerpt from last week's Washington Post?
People always need more. It's not enough to get one's freak on to old-school Miami bass, some people need an all-White environment in order to feel 'safe'. It's not enough that suburban Whites encompass the majority of domestic hip hop album sales(roughly seventy percent, by some estimates), Music Television and nationwide concert promoters didn't really feel comfortable with hip hop until the entire Black rapper community supported the great White hope, Eminem. It's not enough that a non-Black hip hop fan can enjoy and produce any element of hip hop he wishes without any Black influences whatsoever, some non-Blacks wish to assert original ownership over the spoken word and graffiti hip hop periphery. Blame the information age. In a world where most teenagers have no problems with government-sponsored propaganda masquerading as impartial, objective news coverage, and where young people have never heard the original songs Kanye West and Jessica Simpson sample and remake with impunity, American youth's pop culture short-term memory erases more than it retains. Who needs Africa Bambaataa or Public Enemy in present-day hip hop? Unless they've done a collaboration with 50 Cent, they're no longer relevant.
So where does that leave Double H? Her concrete jungle's shades of grey digitized into cacophonous white noise, but her pixelated pussy now accepts Visa donations via Pay-Pal. Hip hop is modern Blackness' ghost in the machine. Morally primitive yet infinitely adaptable, Double H is the indispensable American cultural economic force, and tenders neo-Blackness to any member of the global village without concern for physical, racial, or cultural location. Hip hop proves that the old notions of Blackness and Whiteness, once rigid and static, now acquiesce to electronic fluidity and wireless instantaneous communication. What is race against a broadband connection? Remember, today's technologically advanced age promises innovation in practically every facet of daily living, from communication to national defense, from medicine to personal entertainment. We sell blue diamond pills for erectile dysfunction, perform delicate heart surgery on newborn infants, repair high-powered telescopes in outer space and contact relatives separated by vast distances with push-button sequences. Live in a G-8 nation today, and chances are, your possibilities for personal advancement through mechanical ease are endless. Imagination, infinite human wonder, remains the only real obstacle to human creation, and imagination's intangible. Everyone's technoorganic.
Therefore, a reasonable, and profitable invention would be technology that could imbue an individual with all the cultural markers, personal savoir-faire, interpersonal empathy, and pop culture cool of the most trendy, strong, hypersexual Will Smith Black man, regardless of the biochemical shell he was both with. Think of a barcode Hitch ghetto pass that never changed physical outward appearance or epidermal eumelanin polymer concentration (to preserve original privilege), yet allowed total line-item freedom to appropriate any culture imaginable, including African American youth culture, without any interpersonal side-effects around any group of people. I'd call it the Melanin Machine. Sure, it seems like science fiction, but consider the possibilities, outside of international espionage. Impervious transracial camouflage not even Rev. Jesse Jackson could detect would be the Da Vinci Code of current mainstream transracial appropriation; every person who sees a little bit of themselves in know-nothing hip hop fans like Tha Pumpsta would pay everything they could to buy and maintain such technology. Think of it: the utter and complete devolution of race and sex and class to technological innovation, Double H orgasmic. Be forewarned: you've just glimpsed the future of hip hop.
Update: Dan Charnas, reporter, screenwriter, and record producer, penned a introspective post entitled The Unbearable Whiteness of Being, that offers a reasoned glimpse into the motivations of some White Americans who indulge the inexplicable urge to appropriate distinct minority cultural traits like hip hop. Mind you: I disagree wholeheartedly with the sentiments expressed here, but I respect not only Charnas' candor and eloquence, but more importantly his authentic handling of a touchy subject for many White people - the personal motivations of cultural appropriation. But we can expect no less - this is the man who executive produced the most lyrically complex rap album ever made, Chino XL's masterpiece Here to Save You All.
Sassy, sexy and confident, Heather Hunter, the mainstream face of African American pornography for over a decade, first appeared before my puberty-glazed brown eyes sometime in the mid-Nineties, during the affirmative action segment of an early episode of HBO's Real Sex. In bed with Akineyele to film a sex show, in a meeting to write an adults only comic book, and in a studio to promote a radio show, Heather Hunter emerged as a prostitute for all seasons, an idyllic muse for art if Norman Rockwell ever caught jungle fever. Her gaudy sexuality aside, Double H developed into the only African American female performer of recent memory to display the business savvy found in sex starlets such as Jenna Jameson and Danni Ashe. The first and only African American female inductee into the Adult Film Hall of Fame, Heather Hunter enjoyed constant referencing and name-dropping by hip-hop artists throughout her career, including Lil' Kim, LL Cool J, and Snoop Dogg. Given today's pop culture climate, one shouldn't be surprised that, eventually, Heather Hunter would record a hip hop album.
Heather Hunter personifies race and sex oppression's demise through individual agency; this B-list Bronx feminist does not possess Jennifer Lopez's fame or fortune, yet operates similarly on-screen to provide brazen, sleazy sexual arousal to male film viewers willing to pay-per-erection. The point? Whenever men watch Heather Hunter on film, she offers the fantasy of sexual possession; to view Double H ramrodded by Lexington Steele or Sean Michaels or Peter North is to indulge in a taboo phantasmagoria of Black female possession by virile, turgid, unstoppable masculine power, Sally Hemings cowed and timid and spread eagle for the man in her life.
Heather Hunter, a street-level capitalist in every respect, lies sore and sweaty and spent on plasma television screens the world over, drips lewdly from used, raw, reddened orifices slimy with the mother-of-pearl ejaculate her clients' concrete pillars spray without concern. Radio playable Jazze Pha Southern crunk stripper bass pounds incessantly in the background; pussy-popping, booty-shaking, low-budget audio lechery provides the appropriate soundtrack. Without a moment's respite, another arrogant anonymous member invades whatever remains of Heather Hunter's inner sanctum, her God-given temple of life's promise, without remorse or pity or sorrow for the unholy perversion her worn, loose, malleable genitals allow for profit. Meanwhile, many men's furious palms frenzy about tired, sweaty, barely lubricated phalluses, hoping in worried vain for momentary bliss; their warped minds absorb devalued femininity and wanton whorishness as the divine, natural state of all women. The numerous men's glossy fixed stares - green, hazel, blue, brown - drink Heather's defiant submission, relish Hunter's easy physicality. This isn't love, this is ownership. Not sex, control. Without warning, the pitiful anonymous watch Heather Hunter's chiseled brown back arch violently, her immaculate Revlon lashes squeeze with oncoming delight. A grimace. A gasp. A scream. Double H's mascara runs. Panasonics the world over require immediate Windex attention. Big Tigger, longtime host of Black Entertainment Television's Rap City, cuts to commercial.
Heather Hunter is hip hop. I used to lust H.E.R.
Lust, not love. Hip hop's syncopated streetwalker never presents wholesome Americana; Snoop Dogg, darling of Long Beach and Park Avenue, translated the apathetic delinquency of inner-city killers not yet old enough to shave to the mainstream Music Television audience, including one perennially uncool African American thirteen-year-old lover of astronomy, Jeopardy, and ancient Greece. "Gin & Juice" began my lifelong trysts with hip hop; she was already hollow and morose and licentious before she bothered to arouse my pubescent sensibilities. The archetypal video vixen, hip hop transformed a straight-laced, stalwart, Clark Kent squarejaw into a down brother in a reverse Pygmalion straight-to-video featuring Beyonce Knowles and scored by The RZA. Notice the economic genius of hip hop: with cable television, incessant Clear Channel radio airplay and foolishly expensive compact discs, international record conglomerates could produce scientifically quantified urban culture to middle-class and upper middle-class multicultural America for virtually nonexistent startup cost, through the promise of lavish rockstar hedonism to the few poor African American rap musicians who could stir today's colored proletariat masses with rhyming couplets in the revolutionary manner of last generation's Eldridge Cleaver and Fred Hampton and Huey Newton. Incidentally, that was the marketing blueprint for intellectual thug scion Tupac Shakur, and the reason he's still a platinum artist today, years after his death. In reality, hip hop quenches the unceasing demand by mainstream soccer mom, red state, fair and balanced Fox News Channel Americana for easily attainable, personal immersion in underclass chic, drenches the majority in the counterculture cool of the minority. Double H was always a whore, above empathy or affection, beyond good and evil. Absent any paltry moralistic concerns, hip hop fertilizes street creditability with corporate greed to birth global profit, unites the entire industrialized world population with the infectious self-interest of attainable Negro style. Hip hop is prepackaged, shipped, distributed. Hip hop, is Blackness commodified.
Blackness. Not just Black culture, or Black people, but the very indefinable essence of what it means to be Black, from the macro to the micro, for the many and the few, or the one. Hip hop unmasks to reveal commercialized melanin. This natural pigment prophecies danger, allure, exotica, erotic fear and uncivilized fury for all non-Blacks in the American sociopolitical sphere of influence. All humans possess some quantity of melanin, yet those members of the African Diaspora have melanin more abundantly. Americans craft long standing traditional and new age skin color prejudices around melanin content; we shape our conceptions of safety, beauty, intelligence, virility, and power around our proximity to and possession of melanin. The color controls our lives.
Color has certainly laid claim to my brief existence so far. Recent online discussions over the indefensible antics of Jeremy Parker, a.k.a. Tha Pumpsta, led me to a brief inventory of the voluminous attempts non-Blacks make publicly to don neo-blackface, to attempt transracial immersion into African American youth culture and history without absorbing racial stigmatization. It's a basic question: if Blackness can be commodified, who's buying? In my generation, in my opinion, everyone's a broker, and African Americans resemble Ferengi. Case in point: Tony Rome and Maven Strategies. The Washington Post, recently breaking more news on the social and economic ramifications of hip hop than the entrie print runs of The Source and XXL Magazine, informed the public this past Monday of a little known marketing company that pairs materialistic, flossy, gaudy, shiny Jacob-the-Jeweler imprinted, platinum record selling hip hop artists with major corporations to promote corporate products' brand names through the omnipresent advertising Mecca that is hip hop. Think of all the Adidas and Air Force Ones and Hennessy and Courvoisier and Armadale Vodka and Vitamin Water and Phat Farm and DKNY and Sean John and Rocawear people buy thanks to some unwashed rapper's recommendation. The entire mid-Nineties explosion of New York City Big Willie rap, pioneered by the late Notorious B.I.G., morphed our syncopated streetwalker from nihilistic nefariousness to Fifth Avenue formality. One day "Life's a Bitch", the next we're "Poppin' Tags". "Natural Born Killers" now spend the majority of their time "In Da Club". If nothing else, the George W. Bush-style public transformation of Ice Cube from Amerikkka's Most Wanted weapon of mass destruction to family friendly Hollywood action star should legitimize for all critics hip hop's capitalist original sin. Double H 'paid the cost to be the boss', and we all sold our souls.
Today, we are the Devil of our own details. In methods too numerous to mention, hip hop allows the general public to purchase Blackness at their leisure. The problem begins when a fickle, demanding body politic realizes that keyboard-heavy Dr. Dre sonic production can not bestow melanin. The Marshall Mathers LP hammers this truth into all mainstream White Americans: no matter how poor you were growing up, how dysfunctional your parents, how painstakingly you study rap history and narrative flow, how many throwback jerseys and Akademic jeans and Timberland boots you wear, how many 2Pac verses you quote from memory, how often you renew your subscription to Rap Pages, how much street slang you spit, how polished your pimp cup, how crunk you get in the club, or how many Black friends you have, you will never be Black. Never ever. Never ever? Never ever. And, ironically, it's your fault.
Our Founding Fathers forged a social, economic and legal system upon their arrival in North America that depended on extreme racial stratification to preserve the unfree labor early American society required, from their perspective. Anti-miscegenation laws, prohibitions again slave education, the Three-Fifths Compromise - all these early American statutes forged the beginnings of American legal history. And just as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas sparked a social revolution that forever altered American mores on race separation and unequal treatment, early slave codes congealed prevailing ideologies about displaced Africans in America that exist today - including the myth of the randy, hypersexual, muscular, obnoxiously virile African American Supermasculine Menial. Remember this excerpt from last week's Washington Post?
Safe environment? What, are the brothers at most NYC hip hop clubs so hard-up for shaven hipster White girl booty that they skee-skee-skeet on the girls as soon as "Get Low" comes on? No. White America creates and maintains racial stereotypes about African Americans, then blames Black people for their fears, and justifies the rape of Black creative expression with those same self-serving ideologies of hate. This is why hip hop, try as it might, can never be a perfect melanin conduit for wealthy non-Blacks: Whiteness gets in the way. Whiteness impedes transracialization, as it bestows upon the few and the proud and the mainstream anonymous apolitical success expectations, better known as white privilege. Mind you, that's not very much. White privilege does not provide happiness or wealth or safety; white privilege can not create strong bones or healthy teeth. White privilege won't stop dangers foreign or domestic, can't stop disasters natural or terrorist. However, whiteness bestows individuality, to a degree impossible for persons of color in identity politic America. Whiteness grants closer proximity to mainstream beauty than Halle Berry or Jennifer Lopez or Lucy Liu will ever know. Whiteness confers true innocence until proven guilty. Plus, Whiteness appropriates every non-White creative force or cultural innovation like cold, vampire Borg clamoring for new technology. Resistance is futile; any exultation by an American White people to 'kill the Whiteness inside" is not shouted in good faith."It's about being nasty, people come to grind on each other," said Bianca Casady, 23. "It's like friends being sexual with each other." Casady was raised in Santa Barbara, Calif., but quickly notes her worldliness by listing the cities where she has lived along the trail to Brooklyn. A regular Kill Whitie partygoer, she tried the conventional (that is, non-hipster) hip-hop clubs but found the men "really hardcore." In this vastly whiter scene, Casady said that "it's a safe environment to be freaky."
People always need more. It's not enough to get one's freak on to old-school Miami bass, some people need an all-White environment in order to feel 'safe'. It's not enough that suburban Whites encompass the majority of domestic hip hop album sales(roughly seventy percent, by some estimates), Music Television and nationwide concert promoters didn't really feel comfortable with hip hop until the entire Black rapper community supported the great White hope, Eminem. It's not enough that a non-Black hip hop fan can enjoy and produce any element of hip hop he wishes without any Black influences whatsoever, some non-Blacks wish to assert original ownership over the spoken word and graffiti hip hop periphery. Blame the information age. In a world where most teenagers have no problems with government-sponsored propaganda masquerading as impartial, objective news coverage, and where young people have never heard the original songs Kanye West and Jessica Simpson sample and remake with impunity, American youth's pop culture short-term memory erases more than it retains. Who needs Africa Bambaataa or Public Enemy in present-day hip hop? Unless they've done a collaboration with 50 Cent, they're no longer relevant.
So where does that leave Double H? Her concrete jungle's shades of grey digitized into cacophonous white noise, but her pixelated pussy now accepts Visa donations via Pay-Pal. Hip hop is modern Blackness' ghost in the machine. Morally primitive yet infinitely adaptable, Double H is the indispensable American cultural economic force, and tenders neo-Blackness to any member of the global village without concern for physical, racial, or cultural location. Hip hop proves that the old notions of Blackness and Whiteness, once rigid and static, now acquiesce to electronic fluidity and wireless instantaneous communication. What is race against a broadband connection? Remember, today's technologically advanced age promises innovation in practically every facet of daily living, from communication to national defense, from medicine to personal entertainment. We sell blue diamond pills for erectile dysfunction, perform delicate heart surgery on newborn infants, repair high-powered telescopes in outer space and contact relatives separated by vast distances with push-button sequences. Live in a G-8 nation today, and chances are, your possibilities for personal advancement through mechanical ease are endless. Imagination, infinite human wonder, remains the only real obstacle to human creation, and imagination's intangible. Everyone's technoorganic.
Therefore, a reasonable, and profitable invention would be technology that could imbue an individual with all the cultural markers, personal savoir-faire, interpersonal empathy, and pop culture cool of the most trendy, strong, hypersexual Will Smith Black man, regardless of the biochemical shell he was both with. Think of a barcode Hitch ghetto pass that never changed physical outward appearance or epidermal eumelanin polymer concentration (to preserve original privilege), yet allowed total line-item freedom to appropriate any culture imaginable, including African American youth culture, without any interpersonal side-effects around any group of people. I'd call it the Melanin Machine. Sure, it seems like science fiction, but consider the possibilities, outside of international espionage. Impervious transracial camouflage not even Rev. Jesse Jackson could detect would be the Da Vinci Code of current mainstream transracial appropriation; every person who sees a little bit of themselves in know-nothing hip hop fans like Tha Pumpsta would pay everything they could to buy and maintain such technology. Think of it: the utter and complete devolution of race and sex and class to technological innovation, Double H orgasmic. Be forewarned: you've just glimpsed the future of hip hop.
Update: Dan Charnas, reporter, screenwriter, and record producer, penned a introspective post entitled The Unbearable Whiteness of Being, that offers a reasoned glimpse into the motivations of some White Americans who indulge the inexplicable urge to appropriate distinct minority cultural traits like hip hop. Mind you: I disagree wholeheartedly with the sentiments expressed here, but I respect not only Charnas' candor and eloquence, but more importantly his authentic handling of a touchy subject for many White people - the personal motivations of cultural appropriation. But we can expect no less - this is the man who executive produced the most lyrically complex rap album ever made, Chino XL's masterpiece Here to Save You All.
Friday, August 26, 2005
The cacophony abounds; can you drown the sound?
The Iraqi quagmire terminates good-natured American volunteer soldiers before the unblinking hazel-green optics of twenty-four hour xenophobic voyeurs who couldn't spell 'Shiite' before September 11, 2001, and always mispronounce the proper noun. Lonely mothers, fatigued fathers, bawling brothers, stalwart sisters, screaming spouses, and furious friends mark the passing of their heroic loved ones in this misbegotten war with candlelight vigils, tearful prayer services, and improbable protests in the quintessential Southern machismo state, near the summer cottage of an aristocrat President so stubborn he visualizes a victory no one else can see. This naked Emperor cycles with Lance Armstrong, dodges rotting flag-draped corpses and whiny proletariat parents in his personal valley of the shadow of death, replete with Secret Service protection. He believes his actions are just. "These brave men and women gave their lives for a cause that is just and necessary for the safety of the country, and now we will honor their sacrifice by completing the mission," shouts President Bush. He convinces himself he does what he must to protect America. He fights the terrorists 'over there' to protect us over here. He knows we hate him for it.
The President is a victim.
A right-wing talk-radio pundit and hatespeech author who refers to Islam - the entire religion - as a "terrorist organization" waxes philosophical about political correctness and freedom of speech to convince you his recent firing by ABC Radio executives was unjust and unfair. Michael Graham, author of Redneck Nation: How the South Really Won the War, believes that his former employer acquiesced to a politicized minority group too sensitive or too backward to hear unpleasant truths about itself. In the hyperbolic, disaffected, infuriated, inflamed American sonic rash known as conservative talk radio, humanoid ideology irritations seep injurious innuendo and unchecked rumor about racial minorities, liberal politicos, immigrants, homosexuals, feminists, the secular, the educated, the poor, the weak, and the defenseless into curious listeners and die-hard reactionaries like so much acidic pus. Michael Graham, a minor, miniscule, unimportant conservative concept-assassin, G. Gordon Liddy's spineless alternative lifestyle, symbolizes both talk radio's shrill Howard Stern-Rush Limbaugh synthesis effect, where minor-league political pundits no one's ever heard of broadcast spiteful, sinister, dehumanizing commentary on expected minority groups into the nation's morning work commute to boost ratings, and the paradoxical coarsening of American political thought by the shock-jock streetwalkers bought and paid for by the party of traditional family values, one-man one-woman marriage, and compassionate conservativism, the Republicans. Ken Mehlman still has Michael Graham's receipt. Michael Graham realizes his firing was just, given advertiser anxiety and increasing public outcry; he just does not care.
Michael Graham is a victim.
Jeremy Parker, a.k.a. Tha Pumpsta, rocks nearly all-White New York City parties with his derived and passe blend of pornographic old-school Miami bass and exhorts his frenzied partygoers to "Kill Whitey!" in a conscious misappropriation of African American political culture. Drenched in cynical ignorance or cunning irony (depending on your tolerance for anti-Black behavior), Parker's monthly "Kill Whitie" parties in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for the hip, trendy, and Caucasoid, appeal to apathetic youngsters so pale and hollow and cruel they justify their stereotypical MTV generation neo-blackface with a paltry reference to mainstream American cultural emptiness. Here's Parker's own words, from today's Washington Post:
Inebriated walking trust funds bounce and shimmy and sway -- no, they stutter and slip and fall, oblivious to the booming Roland TR-808 drums and their revolting RZA-meets-RuPaul gangsta drag. Parker himself alludes callous awareness of this; the most insidious privilege is the ability to paint-by-numbers yourself into the walking, breathing Willie Horton of your private nightmares and public scorn, without remorse or pity or sorrow, utterly non-responsible for the prejudices and stereotypes you regurgitate and recycle about people you'll never want to know or need to respect because you can always regain your original ivory sheen with a quick shower and change of clothes. Call it transracial morphology. Jeremy Parker, Eminem's photo-negative, provides the sonic overlay for his Abercrombie & Fitch-sponsored Stepin' Fetchit block parties with forced humor, Al Jolson jacking off on the wheels of steel.
Jeremy Parker is a victim.
The antagonist is ego. President George W. Bush's ego will not allow the sensible retreat from the Iraqi butcher's bill the entire country desires. Michael Graham's ego forces him to weakly defend indefensible religious bigotry on mainstream media outlets like CNN's Newsnight with Aaron Brown in between second-round job interviews. Jeremy Parker's ego prevents him from begging the forgiveness of every Black person he meets for the remainder of his natural life. So these three upstanding American citizens embrace John McWhorter's Victimology to characterize their transgressions as steadfast leadership, counterculture insurgency, or good-natured fun. Notice the parallel to McWhorter's infamous attack upon the civil rights establishment: here, each individual Captain America redux expresses personal victimhood in public to exhort their constituencies - conservative Republicans, anti-Muslim neo-conservative reactionaries, and random White suburban college students - to embrace alienation from and resentment towards multicultural American liberalism, the cosmopolitan ideal of global peace through respectful international engagement (read: global trade) and domestic legal and social egalitarianism. The anti-war, Islam-tolerant, pro-Black Left requires of our nation a pluralistic inclusion these good 'ol boys despise, even when they realize their own cultural production atrophies as a result.
In truth, we're all left numb and unfeeling by current events. Anti-war protesters receive media coverage exponentially above and beyond their size and influence, but our soldiers still return home in flag-draped coffins its illegal to photo-document, or in IV-rigged hospital beds with major appendages conspicuously absent. Michael Graham's firing over his bigoted stance on Islam emerges as the best thing to happen to his career; the Right birthed a new media darling, Ann Coulter with lighter Revlon. And outside of a G-Unit beatdown replete with Young Buck's rusty shank, Jeremy Parker's "Kill Whitie" parties are too profitable to discontinue.
So we end where we begin. Powerless, de-democratized, barely conscious, eyes bloodshot, ears bleeding, awash in the disturbing decibels of white noise, we scratch and claw for the power to change our system, and go deaf in the process.
Who's the victim?
Update: The Pumpsta Speaks! Check the comments section for Mr. Parker's lame-ass excuse for his modern-day Jazz Singer parties. Also, if you haven't already, check out the esteemed HipHopMusic.com and Poplicks.com for more commentary on this foolish excuse for a hip hop fan.
For top-of-the-line deconstruction of The Pumpsta's idiocy, please check out Reappropriate.com. Angel knows what she's talking about.
The Iraqi quagmire terminates good-natured American volunteer soldiers before the unblinking hazel-green optics of twenty-four hour xenophobic voyeurs who couldn't spell 'Shiite' before September 11, 2001, and always mispronounce the proper noun. Lonely mothers, fatigued fathers, bawling brothers, stalwart sisters, screaming spouses, and furious friends mark the passing of their heroic loved ones in this misbegotten war with candlelight vigils, tearful prayer services, and improbable protests in the quintessential Southern machismo state, near the summer cottage of an aristocrat President so stubborn he visualizes a victory no one else can see. This naked Emperor cycles with Lance Armstrong, dodges rotting flag-draped corpses and whiny proletariat parents in his personal valley of the shadow of death, replete with Secret Service protection. He believes his actions are just. "These brave men and women gave their lives for a cause that is just and necessary for the safety of the country, and now we will honor their sacrifice by completing the mission," shouts President Bush. He convinces himself he does what he must to protect America. He fights the terrorists 'over there' to protect us over here. He knows we hate him for it.
The President is a victim.
A right-wing talk-radio pundit and hatespeech author who refers to Islam - the entire religion - as a "terrorist organization" waxes philosophical about political correctness and freedom of speech to convince you his recent firing by ABC Radio executives was unjust and unfair. Michael Graham, author of Redneck Nation: How the South Really Won the War, believes that his former employer acquiesced to a politicized minority group too sensitive or too backward to hear unpleasant truths about itself. In the hyperbolic, disaffected, infuriated, inflamed American sonic rash known as conservative talk radio, humanoid ideology irritations seep injurious innuendo and unchecked rumor about racial minorities, liberal politicos, immigrants, homosexuals, feminists, the secular, the educated, the poor, the weak, and the defenseless into curious listeners and die-hard reactionaries like so much acidic pus. Michael Graham, a minor, miniscule, unimportant conservative concept-assassin, G. Gordon Liddy's spineless alternative lifestyle, symbolizes both talk radio's shrill Howard Stern-Rush Limbaugh synthesis effect, where minor-league political pundits no one's ever heard of broadcast spiteful, sinister, dehumanizing commentary on expected minority groups into the nation's morning work commute to boost ratings, and the paradoxical coarsening of American political thought by the shock-jock streetwalkers bought and paid for by the party of traditional family values, one-man one-woman marriage, and compassionate conservativism, the Republicans. Ken Mehlman still has Michael Graham's receipt. Michael Graham realizes his firing was just, given advertiser anxiety and increasing public outcry; he just does not care.
Michael Graham is a victim.
Jeremy Parker, a.k.a. Tha Pumpsta, rocks nearly all-White New York City parties with his derived and passe blend of pornographic old-school Miami bass and exhorts his frenzied partygoers to "Kill Whitey!" in a conscious misappropriation of African American political culture. Drenched in cynical ignorance or cunning irony (depending on your tolerance for anti-Black behavior), Parker's monthly "Kill Whitie" parties in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for the hip, trendy, and Caucasoid, appeal to apathetic youngsters so pale and hollow and cruel they justify their stereotypical MTV generation neo-blackface with a paltry reference to mainstream American cultural emptiness. Here's Parker's own words, from today's Washington Post:
"I'm throwing this party, and it's obvious that I'm white and I'm kind of appropriating this culture but in an ironic way," said Tha Pumpsta, whose name is Jeremy Parker. The 25-year-old takes his Pumpsta moniker from his high-top sneakers. "Kinda poking fun at myself and my origins and white people in general," he said.Jeremy Parker, a.k.a. Tha Pumpsta, reminds me of the 'pimp & ho' parties young White collegians adored during my Cornell years. Privileged, wealthy WASP scions dressed down into loud, comical player hats, sleeveless t-shirts, wavecaps, and (if they wanted to be fancy) their grandfather's zoot suits to accompany scantily-clad sorority sisters to parties saturated with piss-poor alcohol, rhythmless dancing, and DMX dance tunes barely popular years ago. All of those parties were quests for pure truth; elbow yourself onto the slippery dance floor at any White fraternity house in the Ivy League during a weekend party and I guarantee you DMX will be played there during that night, followed by every 50 Cent single you never need to hear again in your lifetime. Those children will play "Party Up" and "In Da Club" so often you'll think the iTunes was skipping at Quddus' apartment.
"I'm trying to kill the whiteness inside," Parker added, although his blue eyes, milk-white skin and blond hair might suggest he has some work ahead of him.
Inebriated walking trust funds bounce and shimmy and sway -- no, they stutter and slip and fall, oblivious to the booming Roland TR-808 drums and their revolting RZA-meets-RuPaul gangsta drag. Parker himself alludes callous awareness of this; the most insidious privilege is the ability to paint-by-numbers yourself into the walking, breathing Willie Horton of your private nightmares and public scorn, without remorse or pity or sorrow, utterly non-responsible for the prejudices and stereotypes you regurgitate and recycle about people you'll never want to know or need to respect because you can always regain your original ivory sheen with a quick shower and change of clothes. Call it transracial morphology. Jeremy Parker, Eminem's photo-negative, provides the sonic overlay for his Abercrombie & Fitch-sponsored Stepin' Fetchit block parties with forced humor, Al Jolson jacking off on the wheels of steel.
Jeremy Parker is a victim.
The antagonist is ego. President George W. Bush's ego will not allow the sensible retreat from the Iraqi butcher's bill the entire country desires. Michael Graham's ego forces him to weakly defend indefensible religious bigotry on mainstream media outlets like CNN's Newsnight with Aaron Brown in between second-round job interviews. Jeremy Parker's ego prevents him from begging the forgiveness of every Black person he meets for the remainder of his natural life. So these three upstanding American citizens embrace John McWhorter's Victimology to characterize their transgressions as steadfast leadership, counterculture insurgency, or good-natured fun. Notice the parallel to McWhorter's infamous attack upon the civil rights establishment: here, each individual Captain America redux expresses personal victimhood in public to exhort their constituencies - conservative Republicans, anti-Muslim neo-conservative reactionaries, and random White suburban college students - to embrace alienation from and resentment towards multicultural American liberalism, the cosmopolitan ideal of global peace through respectful international engagement (read: global trade) and domestic legal and social egalitarianism. The anti-war, Islam-tolerant, pro-Black Left requires of our nation a pluralistic inclusion these good 'ol boys despise, even when they realize their own cultural production atrophies as a result.
In truth, we're all left numb and unfeeling by current events. Anti-war protesters receive media coverage exponentially above and beyond their size and influence, but our soldiers still return home in flag-draped coffins its illegal to photo-document, or in IV-rigged hospital beds with major appendages conspicuously absent. Michael Graham's firing over his bigoted stance on Islam emerges as the best thing to happen to his career; the Right birthed a new media darling, Ann Coulter with lighter Revlon. And outside of a G-Unit beatdown replete with Young Buck's rusty shank, Jeremy Parker's "Kill Whitie" parties are too profitable to discontinue.
So we end where we begin. Powerless, de-democratized, barely conscious, eyes bloodshot, ears bleeding, awash in the disturbing decibels of white noise, we scratch and claw for the power to change our system, and go deaf in the process.
Who's the victim?
Update: The Pumpsta Speaks! Check the comments section for Mr. Parker's lame-ass excuse for his modern-day Jazz Singer parties. Also, if you haven't already, check out the esteemed HipHopMusic.com and Poplicks.com for more commentary on this foolish excuse for a hip hop fan.
For top-of-the-line deconstruction of The Pumpsta's idiocy, please check out Reappropriate.com. Angel knows what she's talking about.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Have you ever shopped at Lane Bryant?
As a child, I waited around beside my mother as she shopped rather often; I busied myself with some random Star Trek: The Next Generation novel or whatever while my mother gazed intently at racks of clothing I never understood or cared about. Never fashion conscious, never clothes savvy, I remember Mom inspecting row upon row of flowing formal dresses and boxy 1980's super shoulder working wear, all to display the proper synergy of omniscience and benevolence to poor rural fifth graders in Isle of Wight County, VA who still remember her as the first person in their lives who made education important, who made learning matter. My mother, is a teacher. Looking back, I don't remember my mother shopping for herself very often; most of her elementary school teacher's paycheck evaporated in order to feed and clothe and care for me and my niece, and to pay bills with my father. I wish my mother would have treated herself more.
At any rate, when she looked for a new dress or blouse, among other places my mother shopped at Lane Bryant. So I remember walking around the nearby store in Greenbrier Mall, Chesapeake, Virginia, at ages five and eight and ten, after time spent in Sears or electronic boutique. In case you've never heard of it, Lane Bryant is a store for 'plus size' women. The franchise's website describes the company as "the fashion leader in women's plus-size clothing, sizes 14-28". As memory serves, my mother spent her hard-earned paycheck in Lane Bryant because she always felt that along with attractive fashion and decent prices, Lane Bryant exuded respect for larger women as the overall tone and philosophy of their stores. In recent years, celebrities like Queen Latifah and Camryn Manheim have appeared in Lane Bryant advertisements; they promote healthy, beautiful women with style and glamour in the public sphere who don't need to squeeze into size 2 denim to feel human. I've always found Lane Bryant to be a respectable company.
A few weeks back, Angel (happy birthday, sweetie!) and I walked through an unbelievably large mall in New Jersey that had a Lane Bryant store. I wouldn't have noticed the shop at all because of my childish rush to locate the LEGO store, but in the Lane Bryant window was this picture:
Her name is Kimberley Locke, and she is fine. Obviously. Just look: the picture screams confidence, style, and warmth, not to mention extreme beauty. An open, graceful smile, a generally cheery attitude, and an all-killer-no-filler body left me dumbstruck, craning my neck as we passed by the store. (Mind you - I was walking with Angel, arm-in-arm; and I never notice other women, on the street, in advertisements, anywhere. No one pays me enough to commit suicide. ) Ms. Locke, a longtime singer and former American Idol contestant, is the new national spokeswoman for Lane Bryant's Seven7 Jeans, and currently tours to promote the clothing line. What I admire most about the pictures I've seen from her tour is how respectable the clothing frames her shape. It's never sluttish, always classy. She looks good.
I've never found beauty in a 'plus size' woman odd. The Black suburban community where I was raised was saturated with big, beautiful, Black women, who synthesized style and grace and class with inhuman ease. Street level Black culture has always respected larger women, in my opinion, out of necessity, to a greater degree that mainstream America. Of course, everyone is exposed to the dismaying pages of Cosmopolitan and People magazines, and Black women do accrue layered and complex body image concerns because of mainstream media input and internal Black male misogyny. Black men's stereotypical preference for lighter, Whiter women congeals a color complex our greatest minds have never quite excised from the darker nation's Y chromosomes. Still, growing up, larger women were always presented as healthy - to reasonable degrees; anyone who eats healthy foods and exercises regularly is generally healthy there, whether weighing in at 110, 150, or 180 pounds or fitting size five, seven, nine, or fourteen clothing. Please note, when I speak of the 'larger' Black woman, I refer to women who are of more mass than the mainstream White female beauty ideal marketed by American fashion and movie and print and medical industry media, nothing more. Examples? Lisa Nicole Carson instead of Calista Flockhart. Serena Williams instead of Anna Kournikova. Raven-Symone instead of Hilary Duff. It's not hard to figure out.
Hell, even all of the patently anti-woman audiovisual dogma hip hop produces daily reflects in some respects these communal African American origins. Your average rap video on the disgrace-to-the-race Black Entertainment Television from Ludacris or Snoop Dogg or Lil' Jon features women too voluptuous to shop in Abercrombie & Fitch or The Gap or American Eagle. The trendy SoHo boutique I pass by every day to travel to work features clothing that would be lost on video vixens like Ki Toy Johnson or Buffie the Body. Sure, Kanye West and David Banner will feature shapely Black women bobbing and weaving and bouncing and shaking their softer parts on camera to please men, without concern for sexist implications of the softcore corporate pornography they produce to sell rap records; this is as undeniable as it is unhealthy. However, all the 'bitch and ho' rhetoric notwithstanding, hip hop as a musical culture patently rejects the hillbilly heroin chic the rest of America injects daily.
Conversely, you're much more likely to find the Ying Yang Twins or Ice Cube or Twista fantasizing in rhyming couplets on the divine nature of round, brown posteriors and thick, rich sepia thighs. BET's Uncut shows practically nothing but booty videos of all budgetary proportions where Black women shake, rattle, and roll their asses as if their lives and your libido depended on it. Your average Black male rap fan probably has a mental list of favorite hip hop ass videos he can recite at will. If you care, the top of my list was once a tossup between Tupac's "I Get Around" and Dr. Dre's "Nuthin' But a G Thing", but then I saw Nelly's "E.I. (Tip Drill Remix)", produced by David Banner. Ass and breasts and thongs, oh my! I was twelve again - hormonal and horny and home alone. Without warning, MTV's favorite St. Lunatic ran an African American Express through a Black woman's bootycheeks, which she shook with capitalistic glee before unblinking 3 AM voyeurs nationwide. Ghetto Approved!
I know its wrong to like that video; I know that six minute celluloid oppresses women with it's very existence. But damn! Did you see that ass? Hey, I'll go to hell long before I reach Spelman, so I can understand Spelman's female protests of his presence. Nelly's "E.I. (Tip Drill Remix)" is unclean Black hedonism, degrading our race's morality every time its played. The visceral pleasure one derives from such a display devolves the African American woman - regal, intellectual, invulnerable - to your local automatic teller machine. And I'm beyond caring. Think about it: on some level, hip hop realizes it oppresses and dehumanizes women for corporate music's profit, and has already moved beyond therapy for those continued transgressions. Hip hop is anti-woman, yet its most feminist contributions still include a healthy support of and love for female forms of multiple sizes. Remember, the one plus size actress mainstream America cares about today - Queen Latifah - is a hip hop original.
Therein lies the paradox of hip hop misogyny - more than any other form of popular modern music, hip hop earns derision and disrespect for its infantile Neanderthal behavior toward women. In word and deed and mind, from every casual 'bitch' epithet to every scantily-clad half-naked video vixen to Dr. Dre slapping Dee Barnes to Tupac's conviction for sexual battery to Eminem's audio Abu Gharib of every one of his important female family members older than age ten to Lil' Kim's hypersexual clitoris rap to Kimberly Jones' plastic surgery to XXL's requisite Eye Candy photo pages to King magazine's presence as a low-budget rip-off Black man's Maxim to all hip hop pimp/player/mack references to the absence of any lyrically respected and commercially successful Black female emcees to hip hop's unneeded machismo homophobia, declaring any woman unwilling to wear dental floss and translucent gauze from Baby Phat on 106 & Park to promote her new album a butch lesbian - hip hop hates women. Yet the healthiest body imagery pop culture displays in reference to female size and weight can be found in hip hop. Men are more likely to appreciate larger, more realistic female physical shapes if they are exposed to hip hop influences and celebrities. Hell, Jennifer Lopez taught all of White America in the late Nineties that having a plump posterior was sexy and desirable- an obvious fact hip hop helped her market. Props to Sir Mix a Lot as well; mainstream Ivy League fraternity brothers still base 1991's "Baby Got Back" at their parties. They dance, drunkenly and off beat, with the skinniest, palest, flattest bottle blonds you can imagine, but they're with the brothers in spirit.
Fashion runways from New York to Paris promote the underfed and Teutonic as Nature's highest specimens of beauty and culture while reality television and pop music style Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson into America's beloved idiot princesses, mindless prodigies in wealth and glamour who laugh and sing and prance and fuck for public enjoyment and private mirth, beloved and adored by all as perfectly manicured humanoid mannequins, lithe and lifelike, posable and disposable, present-day permutations of a Victorian ideal outdated and repressive in it's own era. Meanwhile, you need a hip hop video to find a woman over one hundred fifty pounds displayed as attractive or desirable or sexy -- and not 'fat person sexy', but just sexy. Jill Scott. Floetry. Deborah Cox. Faith Evans. Kelly Price. Missy Elliott. True, the last two did lose a lot of weight publicly, but I recall brothers from my hometown of Portsmouth, VA commenting on how good Missy's thighs looked in more recent videos. When's the last time a red-blooded American White boy wanted to fuck Renee Zellweger?
Maybe it's a Southern thang, a cultural holdover and modern phenomenon resultant from slavery's fatty impact on soul food, or the modern impact of ever-worsening New South obesity trends, that explains African America's easygoing support for and love of larger women. The bulk of Black America still lives in the Southern states and composes, in part, the poorest, fattest American populations; those more likely to eat fast food three or more times a week, shop at big-box stores like Wal-Mart or Sam's Club or Costco, consume large portions of fried, fatty, greasy food at buffet style restaurants like Golden Corral, and barbeque more red meat than a Colorado rancher's convention are Southern Blacks. A leading risk factor for hypertension, high blood pressure, and heart disease, obesity, in the Black community, is older than our Negro spirituals, but the often unsung corollary is that positive body image among us is just as ancient. Again, I believe this occurs from necessity - the matriarchal Black community possessed voluminous examples of assertive, aggressive, intelligent, efficient Black women, who get things done and don't take no stuff, just like their mothers and their mother's mothers. Being put down over size is not, on the macro level, an option for these women. They are too busy working.
Apple pie Americana could use a double helping of fried chicken feminism.
(Shout outs to Crunk & Disorderly and Solitare Redux for Lil' Kim and Raven-Symone links.)
As a child, I waited around beside my mother as she shopped rather often; I busied myself with some random Star Trek: The Next Generation novel or whatever while my mother gazed intently at racks of clothing I never understood or cared about. Never fashion conscious, never clothes savvy, I remember Mom inspecting row upon row of flowing formal dresses and boxy 1980's super shoulder working wear, all to display the proper synergy of omniscience and benevolence to poor rural fifth graders in Isle of Wight County, VA who still remember her as the first person in their lives who made education important, who made learning matter. My mother, is a teacher. Looking back, I don't remember my mother shopping for herself very often; most of her elementary school teacher's paycheck evaporated in order to feed and clothe and care for me and my niece, and to pay bills with my father. I wish my mother would have treated herself more.
At any rate, when she looked for a new dress or blouse, among other places my mother shopped at Lane Bryant. So I remember walking around the nearby store in Greenbrier Mall, Chesapeake, Virginia, at ages five and eight and ten, after time spent in Sears or electronic boutique. In case you've never heard of it, Lane Bryant is a store for 'plus size' women. The franchise's website describes the company as "the fashion leader in women's plus-size clothing, sizes 14-28". As memory serves, my mother spent her hard-earned paycheck in Lane Bryant because she always felt that along with attractive fashion and decent prices, Lane Bryant exuded respect for larger women as the overall tone and philosophy of their stores. In recent years, celebrities like Queen Latifah and Camryn Manheim have appeared in Lane Bryant advertisements; they promote healthy, beautiful women with style and glamour in the public sphere who don't need to squeeze into size 2 denim to feel human. I've always found Lane Bryant to be a respectable company.
A few weeks back, Angel (happy birthday, sweetie!) and I walked through an unbelievably large mall in New Jersey that had a Lane Bryant store. I wouldn't have noticed the shop at all because of my childish rush to locate the LEGO store, but in the Lane Bryant window was this picture:
Her name is Kimberley Locke, and she is fine. Obviously. Just look: the picture screams confidence, style, and warmth, not to mention extreme beauty. An open, graceful smile, a generally cheery attitude, and an all-killer-no-filler body left me dumbstruck, craning my neck as we passed by the store. (Mind you - I was walking with Angel, arm-in-arm; and I never notice other women, on the street, in advertisements, anywhere. No one pays me enough to commit suicide. ) Ms. Locke, a longtime singer and former American Idol contestant, is the new national spokeswoman for Lane Bryant's Seven7 Jeans, and currently tours to promote the clothing line. What I admire most about the pictures I've seen from her tour is how respectable the clothing frames her shape. It's never sluttish, always classy. She looks good.
I've never found beauty in a 'plus size' woman odd. The Black suburban community where I was raised was saturated with big, beautiful, Black women, who synthesized style and grace and class with inhuman ease. Street level Black culture has always respected larger women, in my opinion, out of necessity, to a greater degree that mainstream America. Of course, everyone is exposed to the dismaying pages of Cosmopolitan and People magazines, and Black women do accrue layered and complex body image concerns because of mainstream media input and internal Black male misogyny. Black men's stereotypical preference for lighter, Whiter women congeals a color complex our greatest minds have never quite excised from the darker nation's Y chromosomes. Still, growing up, larger women were always presented as healthy - to reasonable degrees; anyone who eats healthy foods and exercises regularly is generally healthy there, whether weighing in at 110, 150, or 180 pounds or fitting size five, seven, nine, or fourteen clothing. Please note, when I speak of the 'larger' Black woman, I refer to women who are of more mass than the mainstream White female beauty ideal marketed by American fashion and movie and print and medical industry media, nothing more. Examples? Lisa Nicole Carson instead of Calista Flockhart. Serena Williams instead of Anna Kournikova. Raven-Symone instead of Hilary Duff. It's not hard to figure out.
Hell, even all of the patently anti-woman audiovisual dogma hip hop produces daily reflects in some respects these communal African American origins. Your average rap video on the disgrace-to-the-race Black Entertainment Television from Ludacris or Snoop Dogg or Lil' Jon features women too voluptuous to shop in Abercrombie & Fitch or The Gap or American Eagle. The trendy SoHo boutique I pass by every day to travel to work features clothing that would be lost on video vixens like Ki Toy Johnson or Buffie the Body. Sure, Kanye West and David Banner will feature shapely Black women bobbing and weaving and bouncing and shaking their softer parts on camera to please men, without concern for sexist implications of the softcore corporate pornography they produce to sell rap records; this is as undeniable as it is unhealthy. However, all the 'bitch and ho' rhetoric notwithstanding, hip hop as a musical culture patently rejects the hillbilly heroin chic the rest of America injects daily.
Conversely, you're much more likely to find the Ying Yang Twins or Ice Cube or Twista fantasizing in rhyming couplets on the divine nature of round, brown posteriors and thick, rich sepia thighs. BET's Uncut shows practically nothing but booty videos of all budgetary proportions where Black women shake, rattle, and roll their asses as if their lives and your libido depended on it. Your average Black male rap fan probably has a mental list of favorite hip hop ass videos he can recite at will. If you care, the top of my list was once a tossup between Tupac's "I Get Around" and Dr. Dre's "Nuthin' But a G Thing", but then I saw Nelly's "E.I. (Tip Drill Remix)", produced by David Banner. Ass and breasts and thongs, oh my! I was twelve again - hormonal and horny and home alone. Without warning, MTV's favorite St. Lunatic ran an African American Express through a Black woman's bootycheeks, which she shook with capitalistic glee before unblinking 3 AM voyeurs nationwide. Ghetto Approved!
I know its wrong to like that video; I know that six minute celluloid oppresses women with it's very existence. But damn! Did you see that ass? Hey, I'll go to hell long before I reach Spelman, so I can understand Spelman's female protests of his presence. Nelly's "E.I. (Tip Drill Remix)" is unclean Black hedonism, degrading our race's morality every time its played. The visceral pleasure one derives from such a display devolves the African American woman - regal, intellectual, invulnerable - to your local automatic teller machine. And I'm beyond caring. Think about it: on some level, hip hop realizes it oppresses and dehumanizes women for corporate music's profit, and has already moved beyond therapy for those continued transgressions. Hip hop is anti-woman, yet its most feminist contributions still include a healthy support of and love for female forms of multiple sizes. Remember, the one plus size actress mainstream America cares about today - Queen Latifah - is a hip hop original.
Therein lies the paradox of hip hop misogyny - more than any other form of popular modern music, hip hop earns derision and disrespect for its infantile Neanderthal behavior toward women. In word and deed and mind, from every casual 'bitch' epithet to every scantily-clad half-naked video vixen to Dr. Dre slapping Dee Barnes to Tupac's conviction for sexual battery to Eminem's audio Abu Gharib of every one of his important female family members older than age ten to Lil' Kim's hypersexual clitoris rap to Kimberly Jones' plastic surgery to XXL's requisite Eye Candy photo pages to King magazine's presence as a low-budget rip-off Black man's Maxim to all hip hop pimp/player/mack references to the absence of any lyrically respected and commercially successful Black female emcees to hip hop's unneeded machismo homophobia, declaring any woman unwilling to wear dental floss and translucent gauze from Baby Phat on 106 & Park to promote her new album a butch lesbian - hip hop hates women. Yet the healthiest body imagery pop culture displays in reference to female size and weight can be found in hip hop. Men are more likely to appreciate larger, more realistic female physical shapes if they are exposed to hip hop influences and celebrities. Hell, Jennifer Lopez taught all of White America in the late Nineties that having a plump posterior was sexy and desirable- an obvious fact hip hop helped her market. Props to Sir Mix a Lot as well; mainstream Ivy League fraternity brothers still base 1991's "Baby Got Back" at their parties. They dance, drunkenly and off beat, with the skinniest, palest, flattest bottle blonds you can imagine, but they're with the brothers in spirit.
Fashion runways from New York to Paris promote the underfed and Teutonic as Nature's highest specimens of beauty and culture while reality television and pop music style Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson into America's beloved idiot princesses, mindless prodigies in wealth and glamour who laugh and sing and prance and fuck for public enjoyment and private mirth, beloved and adored by all as perfectly manicured humanoid mannequins, lithe and lifelike, posable and disposable, present-day permutations of a Victorian ideal outdated and repressive in it's own era. Meanwhile, you need a hip hop video to find a woman over one hundred fifty pounds displayed as attractive or desirable or sexy -- and not 'fat person sexy', but just sexy. Jill Scott. Floetry. Deborah Cox. Faith Evans. Kelly Price. Missy Elliott. True, the last two did lose a lot of weight publicly, but I recall brothers from my hometown of Portsmouth, VA commenting on how good Missy's thighs looked in more recent videos. When's the last time a red-blooded American White boy wanted to fuck Renee Zellweger?
Maybe it's a Southern thang, a cultural holdover and modern phenomenon resultant from slavery's fatty impact on soul food, or the modern impact of ever-worsening New South obesity trends, that explains African America's easygoing support for and love of larger women. The bulk of Black America still lives in the Southern states and composes, in part, the poorest, fattest American populations; those more likely to eat fast food three or more times a week, shop at big-box stores like Wal-Mart or Sam's Club or Costco, consume large portions of fried, fatty, greasy food at buffet style restaurants like Golden Corral, and barbeque more red meat than a Colorado rancher's convention are Southern Blacks. A leading risk factor for hypertension, high blood pressure, and heart disease, obesity, in the Black community, is older than our Negro spirituals, but the often unsung corollary is that positive body image among us is just as ancient. Again, I believe this occurs from necessity - the matriarchal Black community possessed voluminous examples of assertive, aggressive, intelligent, efficient Black women, who get things done and don't take no stuff, just like their mothers and their mother's mothers. Being put down over size is not, on the macro level, an option for these women. They are too busy working.
Apple pie Americana could use a double helping of fried chicken feminism.
(Shout outs to Crunk & Disorderly and Solitare Redux for Lil' Kim and Raven-Symone links.)
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Pamela Anderson spoke last night on Larry King. I didn't watch. America's latest Schwarzenegger immorality play explodes across our living room high definition televisions each evening, regurgitating familiar Iraqi sand and suffering. American meatloaf nights shudder sporadically with the sudden impacts of insurgent car bombs that maim and dismember and kill the brave and the bold and lonely maternal interrogatives that whine and cry and question the idle and the corporate. Sadly, one recalls the "Mission Accomplished!" photo-op phantasmagoria of May 1, 2003 with mute horror, as we watch The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer for John Madden-esque play-by-play of a Hollywood war movie sequel doubly sinister given the obvious, blatant lies we told ourselves to enter the theater and the horrible, malicious truth that won't let us leave during the previews.
No Iraqi Constitution can stop an insurgent's bullet, improvised explosive device, or dirty bomb. Our current international debate, argued in men and material, over whether to allow evil dictators to control their nations with iron impunity while isolating their realm's international impact, or to remove enemy combatant heads of state from power through costly martial means will ultimately have one ground zero result for the American people -- weak national security. The very concept of domestic safety within American borders is ludicrous: the country that produced Eric Rudolph and Eric Harris, the nation responsible for Dennis Rader and Timothy McVeigh, can never be safe.
We don't know what safe is.
Think about it: the geopolitical concerns of free trade and unfree labor, of open borders and international law, are not understood or even reflected on by the average American. To survive, we consume energy and produce waste; more than simple biology, our base needs dictate our national political psychology, which is why no one really cares about Cindy Sheehan. Without quoting Hobbes, I submit that the real reason America routinely involves itself in destructive, lethal, utterly wasteful wars without justice is that we tend to forget our own impotence.
The United States of America represents the pinnacle of human civilization on Planet Earth. We are the ideal. People the world over endure journeys of unbelievable sacrifice and hardship just for the chance to pick our oranges, wash our dishes, mow our lawns, drive our cabs, and study our sciences. Everyone wants to come here, even in our worst moments -- the enduring American freedom is the belief that here, more than anywhere else, the individual is truly master of his or her own fate. Not class, nor race, nor religion or gender, not station of birth, or family ties, or anything you can think of can hold you back, so the myth goes. Recently, I've desired nothing more than to see this nation through the warm, worn, determined brown eyes of an immigrant, a person whose stake in American success emerges as a voluntary choice rather than a lifelong fact. For the American native, born into privileged citizenship, America is very much a self-defined propaganda, always lacking the substance of voluntary commitment unless one makes the extra effort to discern what America really means to them. Nothing is more annoying in the modern American political commentary than the right-wing character assassins who decry illegal immigration as if it presents the single greatest clear and present danger to American welfare and security since Russia got the bomb. In Tucson, Arizona where I left Angel, hatred of Mexican immigrants was more common than hundred degree afternoons, drunken co-eds, and low-cut tank-tops on middle-aged bottle-blond mothers. For the Michelle Malkin's and Lou Dobbs' among us, illegal immigration allows lawlessness and aids terrorism, while castrating the law-abiding American middle class who wish nothing more than to work hard at jobs that pay wages decent enough to support Christian families and send good-natured, God-fearing children to college.
But that's not really possible in George W. Bush's America. The middle class is being squeezed, Twenty-First Century terrorism contributes to investor anxiety, gas prices are higher than Bill Maher snorting coke off Ann Coulter's shaven pubic mound at midnight on Libe Slope at our alma mater, Cornell University, metropolitan police departments routinely violate personal civil liberties at subway stations, and poverty still cripples millions of American children -- way more than Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas ever will. The point? The alpha nation in human history has yet to feed all its hungry, protect all its citizens from sudden, unprovoked attack, secure energy sources that don't annihilate the natural environment, ensure all its workers a living wage, or refrain from attacking individual rights to manipulate public fear. We are not only the best, we are the best that ever was. And we are failing.
America is impotent.
Yet, like all suffers of erectile dysfunction, or ED (thanks Sen. Dole!), America doesn't like to remember its condition. Sure, the temporary Cialis of tax cuts and reality television allows the American body politic quiet orgasms, fleeting moments of Jessica Simpson mind-numbing stupidity, but our blissful ignorance never persists as long as we'd like. We may be the ideal, but we are far from enlightened, and our false Nirvana shatters with every breaking news casualty report and front line tragedy. What is the war in Iraq but an arctic reality shower? Fox News can massage and manipulate and propagandize news from the front until Donald Rumsfeld resembles Angelina Jolie and Operation Iraqi Freedom will still be what it always has been -- the kind of mistake that gets men killed.
We are the brightest, and we have yet to learn to live without war. We are the greatest, and we spend more time, energy, and money on ending life than preserving life. We are the Omega -- and we still make mistakes we cannot fix where people die. When our CEO President reminds us reminds us how much we enjoy vile, depraved human conflict by scaring us all into frothy rabid fervor our myopic national lenses focus on the supposed good we can perform abroad, and no one seriously considers poverty, education, health care, and the economy. We convince ourselves to believe the Mattel President's prepared speech about mushroom clouds on American soil because of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and send our young people to die by fire under a Fallujan sun. We call this patriotic, but this quest for pure lies and soiled truths sacrifices more than our sons and daughters in Iraq.
We are losing the American soul.
The founding myth of individual virtue atrophies under an Administration more concerned with bike riding with Lance Armstrong than adequate protective gear for American troops. Our leader forsakes the crippling economic concerns of millions of Americans who depend on the internal combustion engine to support themselves and their families, yet finds the time to question evolution's validity and oppose both embryonic stem-cell research and homosexual marriage while American students lab behind much of the civilized world in science and math. In the meantime, rising scientific and industrial powerhouses like China and India threaten to surpass American superpower hegemony before Paris Hilton's dermatologist finds her first wrinkle. President George W. Bush annihilates American self-determination fanaticism in favor of totalitarian control from an anti-intellectual, quasi-corporate, reactionary Christian theocracy formerly known as the Grand Old Party.
Individuality can not exist in a world where everyone either thinks alike, or is too afraid of man and God to speak difference. All we teach the young in today's America are binary numerals. "You're either with us, or with the terrorists." "We fight the terrorists abroad, so we don't have to fight them at home." "Marriage is a union between a man and a woman." "Dead or alive." 011100110001. The price of nonconformity with the New Republican Order is social ostracism and political irrelevance. No Democrat on the national stage of any stature opposes the fundamental Bush doctrine of military intervention on a President's gut instinct alone, regardless of oppositional intelligence, absent post-war planning, unabashed war profiteering and graft, and the unfinished war or terror. The Bush Administration dismembers the reputations of all those who stand against the President, even former counterterrorism operatives, career diplomatic and civil service personnel, and grieving mothers of war dead; the result is a public that rejects difference and reason and embraces authority and control. Mind you, we are not yet Borg, but resistance should not become futile on our watch. It's not as if passive silence keeps America safe anyway.
No Iraqi Constitution can stop an insurgent's bullet, improvised explosive device, or dirty bomb. Our current international debate, argued in men and material, over whether to allow evil dictators to control their nations with iron impunity while isolating their realm's international impact, or to remove enemy combatant heads of state from power through costly martial means will ultimately have one ground zero result for the American people -- weak national security. The very concept of domestic safety within American borders is ludicrous: the country that produced Eric Rudolph and Eric Harris, the nation responsible for Dennis Rader and Timothy McVeigh, can never be safe.
We don't know what safe is.
Think about it: the geopolitical concerns of free trade and unfree labor, of open borders and international law, are not understood or even reflected on by the average American. To survive, we consume energy and produce waste; more than simple biology, our base needs dictate our national political psychology, which is why no one really cares about Cindy Sheehan. Without quoting Hobbes, I submit that the real reason America routinely involves itself in destructive, lethal, utterly wasteful wars without justice is that we tend to forget our own impotence.
The United States of America represents the pinnacle of human civilization on Planet Earth. We are the ideal. People the world over endure journeys of unbelievable sacrifice and hardship just for the chance to pick our oranges, wash our dishes, mow our lawns, drive our cabs, and study our sciences. Everyone wants to come here, even in our worst moments -- the enduring American freedom is the belief that here, more than anywhere else, the individual is truly master of his or her own fate. Not class, nor race, nor religion or gender, not station of birth, or family ties, or anything you can think of can hold you back, so the myth goes. Recently, I've desired nothing more than to see this nation through the warm, worn, determined brown eyes of an immigrant, a person whose stake in American success emerges as a voluntary choice rather than a lifelong fact. For the American native, born into privileged citizenship, America is very much a self-defined propaganda, always lacking the substance of voluntary commitment unless one makes the extra effort to discern what America really means to them. Nothing is more annoying in the modern American political commentary than the right-wing character assassins who decry illegal immigration as if it presents the single greatest clear and present danger to American welfare and security since Russia got the bomb. In Tucson, Arizona where I left Angel, hatred of Mexican immigrants was more common than hundred degree afternoons, drunken co-eds, and low-cut tank-tops on middle-aged bottle-blond mothers. For the Michelle Malkin's and Lou Dobbs' among us, illegal immigration allows lawlessness and aids terrorism, while castrating the law-abiding American middle class who wish nothing more than to work hard at jobs that pay wages decent enough to support Christian families and send good-natured, God-fearing children to college.
But that's not really possible in George W. Bush's America. The middle class is being squeezed, Twenty-First Century terrorism contributes to investor anxiety, gas prices are higher than Bill Maher snorting coke off Ann Coulter's shaven pubic mound at midnight on Libe Slope at our alma mater, Cornell University, metropolitan police departments routinely violate personal civil liberties at subway stations, and poverty still cripples millions of American children -- way more than Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas ever will. The point? The alpha nation in human history has yet to feed all its hungry, protect all its citizens from sudden, unprovoked attack, secure energy sources that don't annihilate the natural environment, ensure all its workers a living wage, or refrain from attacking individual rights to manipulate public fear. We are not only the best, we are the best that ever was. And we are failing.
America is impotent.
Yet, like all suffers of erectile dysfunction, or ED (thanks Sen. Dole!), America doesn't like to remember its condition. Sure, the temporary Cialis of tax cuts and reality television allows the American body politic quiet orgasms, fleeting moments of Jessica Simpson mind-numbing stupidity, but our blissful ignorance never persists as long as we'd like. We may be the ideal, but we are far from enlightened, and our false Nirvana shatters with every breaking news casualty report and front line tragedy. What is the war in Iraq but an arctic reality shower? Fox News can massage and manipulate and propagandize news from the front until Donald Rumsfeld resembles Angelina Jolie and Operation Iraqi Freedom will still be what it always has been -- the kind of mistake that gets men killed.
We are the brightest, and we have yet to learn to live without war. We are the greatest, and we spend more time, energy, and money on ending life than preserving life. We are the Omega -- and we still make mistakes we cannot fix where people die. When our CEO President reminds us reminds us how much we enjoy vile, depraved human conflict by scaring us all into frothy rabid fervor our myopic national lenses focus on the supposed good we can perform abroad, and no one seriously considers poverty, education, health care, and the economy. We convince ourselves to believe the Mattel President's prepared speech about mushroom clouds on American soil because of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and send our young people to die by fire under a Fallujan sun. We call this patriotic, but this quest for pure lies and soiled truths sacrifices more than our sons and daughters in Iraq.
We are losing the American soul.
The founding myth of individual virtue atrophies under an Administration more concerned with bike riding with Lance Armstrong than adequate protective gear for American troops. Our leader forsakes the crippling economic concerns of millions of Americans who depend on the internal combustion engine to support themselves and their families, yet finds the time to question evolution's validity and oppose both embryonic stem-cell research and homosexual marriage while American students lab behind much of the civilized world in science and math. In the meantime, rising scientific and industrial powerhouses like China and India threaten to surpass American superpower hegemony before Paris Hilton's dermatologist finds her first wrinkle. President George W. Bush annihilates American self-determination fanaticism in favor of totalitarian control from an anti-intellectual, quasi-corporate, reactionary Christian theocracy formerly known as the Grand Old Party.
Individuality can not exist in a world where everyone either thinks alike, or is too afraid of man and God to speak difference. All we teach the young in today's America are binary numerals. "You're either with us, or with the terrorists." "We fight the terrorists abroad, so we don't have to fight them at home." "Marriage is a union between a man and a woman." "Dead or alive." 011100110001. The price of nonconformity with the New Republican Order is social ostracism and political irrelevance. No Democrat on the national stage of any stature opposes the fundamental Bush doctrine of military intervention on a President's gut instinct alone, regardless of oppositional intelligence, absent post-war planning, unabashed war profiteering and graft, and the unfinished war or terror. The Bush Administration dismembers the reputations of all those who stand against the President, even former counterterrorism operatives, career diplomatic and civil service personnel, and grieving mothers of war dead; the result is a public that rejects difference and reason and embraces authority and control. Mind you, we are not yet Borg, but resistance should not become futile on our watch. It's not as if passive silence keeps America safe anyway.
