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The Pluralist, Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2014, pp. 18-37 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/plu.2014.0026

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/plu/summary/v009/9.3.curry.html

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Pessimistic Themes in Kanye Wests

Necrophobic Aesthetic: Moving beyond
Subjects of Perfection to Understand the
New Slave as a Paradigm of Anti-Black Violence
tommy j. curry
Texas A&M University

Introduction
The release of Kanye Wests Yeezus was indelibly marked by the provocation of his hit song entitled New Slaves, which introduced a pessimistic
terminology to capture the paradoxical condition whereby Black freedom
from enslavement only resulted in the capturing of Black people psychically
in the neo-liberal entanglements of poverty, servitude, and corporatism. His
analysis, not unlike currently en vogue theories of Afro-pessimism or Critical Race Theorys (racial) realist lens, maintains that despite all the rhetoric
and symbols of progress to the contrary, Black people are simply not free in
America. Wests performance of New Slaves on Saturday Night Live was
only amplified by the Not For Sale insignia projected behind him.1 Wests
Not For Sale insignia was a symbol of independence, as well as a public
declaration of his anti-corporatism. It signaled Wests resistance against commodification, and announced his confrontational posture toward the rap
industry; a posture that ignited the Hip-Hop community and academia alike
over this artistic radicalism. However, such a provocation, despite its rhetorical flare and allure, was immediately cast as disingenuous and inauthentic.
Kanye West is a Black man torn: at moments by his brilliance and at
times by his banality. The lack of attention to his discography in Hip-Hop
studies and his performances in philosophical aesthetics is not because his
work is not worthwhile; to the contrary, Wests analyses of anti-Black death,
corporatism, and neo-liberal aspiration are enough to warrant more than one
serious study of his art. The refusal to study West is not at all due to his lack
of correctness about the world around him. In reality, West is not studied
because his body, his Black male body, lacks the symbolic currency to motivate reverence for his thinking. Regardless of his popularity, Wests ideas,
the plur alist Volume 9, Number 3Fall 2014:pp. 1837

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2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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specifically his analysis of the New Slave, implicate all arenas of knowledge
and political production hailing from the academy, and while his life and
public proclamations are at tension with some of his work, it nonetheless
necessitates serious study, rather than sophistry and condemnation. This
article is an attempt to draw out some of the themes concerning anti-Black
racism in Wests New Slaves. Unlike many scholarly works on Hip-Hop,
this article does not attempt to center the artist, in this case Kanye West,
as the sole creator of the art, but rather evaluates his aesthetics as a starting
point of dialogue between Black men about death. This article explores the
articulations, the signification(s), and the unexplored meanings of his work
given that it was co-authored with Che Rhymefest Smith, and remixed by
Jasiri X. It is my view that Wests work is an attempt to articulate the continuation of Black enslavement despite the artificial political and social changes
that are attributed to racial progress and social equality through the lens of
(the anxiety and fears endemic to) Black manhood. Wests aesthetics communicate the ever-looming threat of death, violence, and erasure seemingly
married to the Black male body.

On Subjects Par Excellence: Dismissing West

for His Corporate Dreams While Embracing
Beyonc as the Deserving Capitalist
Less than a month after Wests Saturday Night Live performance, Vladimir
Lyubovny (DJ Vlad) conducted an interview with Charlamagne Tha God,
who criticized Wests newfound radicalism as little more than a publicity
stunt, saying: [Kanyes] a Gemini, so hes two sided; so I guess its like two
different personalities ... but you cant denounce corporations when you are
in business with corporations. ... [D]ont be a fake revolutionary for profit.
Kanye is being a walking contradiction. We are all walking contradictions
but damn dont be so blatant with it (Charlamagne Tha God).2 Similarly,
Jessica Ann Mitchells piece entitled Kanyes Frantz Fanon Complex argued
that Kanyes commentary has shifted from calling out racism because its
wrong, to calling out racism because he didnt get a seat at the table. This is
the bigger issue. Mitchell even suggests that West suffers from a racial psychosis that is envious of the oppressor class, rather than enraged by it. For
Mitchell, [w]ith every new Kanye rant we are witnessing a public display
of internal conflict consisting of Fanons dreams of possession and Dubois
double consciousness. Ultimately, he cares more about having a seat at the
table with the same people he accuses of racism and classism, than bringing

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about change. Black popular culture scholars and progressives have inscribed
any number of psychoanalytic pathologies to West, his contradictions representing more than the complexities of an oppressed subject attempting to
navigate the anti-Black world before him, but rather the actual deficiencies
of mind and morals. West has become demonized, where his public rants
against corporatism, while true, have been dismissed as nonsense and irrelevant because he does not embody, perform, or internalize the perfect subject
living out his revolutionary proclamations.
Like John Kennedys opinion piece appearing on Vibe.com, many academics have simply decided that [c]orporations are profiting, while the
underclass and rich rappers who refuse to read paperwork are under the psychological spell of materialism. Or as Yeezy puts it, new slavery. ... Kanye
isnt just the victim; hes part of the problem (Kennedy). But this criticism
is not about the contradictions found in arguing against corporatism while
seeking to establish oneself as a corporate brand, any more than it is about
the contradiction between allegedly attacking the university while seeking
permanent membership within it; this criticism is about Kanye West being
the wrong subject, the Black male subject, who must concede moral ground
to the idealization of revolution without regard for his own materiality at
risk during the revolt. This is about condemnation, not the irreconcilable
conundrum of oppression that makes the victims of anti-Blackness mythical
individuals who are supposed to live our choices that have been empirically
proven to be ineffective against the structures, both material and ideological, that impede freedom. But this moral condemnation, which revels in the
character found wanting in West, is the stuff Hip-Hop scholarship is made
of; it is the material of bourgeois condemnation that maintains intellectual
and moral judgment of Hip-Hop artists as if they are characters/caricatures
of the academics own creation.
Rather than being a conceptual device of inquiry into the cultural, historical, and political catalysts behind Hip-Hop and the consequences of this
radical Black aesthetic on the horizons of disciplinary taxonomy, Hip-Hop
scholarship in the academy follows the disciplinary categories that continue
to confine Black cultural expression and constrain Black aesthetic voice. These
scholars choose apologetics over inquiry, picking and choosing subjects based
on their intersectional identities and political declarations rather than the
content of their arguments and substance of their stances on social problems
and political realities. When Beyonc independently released her self-titled
album on December 13, 2013, the blogosphere as well as the popular culture
scholars who deem social media their homes took to the airways to defend

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her first lyrical articulations of Black feminism. Ignited by her signature

track Flawless, which sampled Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies speech We
Should All Be Feminists, Beyonc quotes Adichie, saying: We teach girls
to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller / We say to girls: You can
have ambition, but not too much / You should aim to be successful, but not
too successful / Otherwise you will threaten the man. ... / We raise girls to
see each other as competitors / Not for jobs or for accomplishments, which
I think would be a good thing / But for the attention of men. Beyonc
concludes her sampling with a definition of a feminist, mistakenly attributed
to Adichie, as a person who believes in the social / Political, and economic
equality of the sexes (Flawless). Adichie is clear that the definition used by
Beyonc was the definition given in the dictionary, not the one that Adichie
sees herself operating under, or shown to her through the life of her grandmother. Adichie actually defines a feminist as a man or a woman who says,
Yes, theres a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must
do better. Ironically, the person who best embodies this ideal for Adichie is
her (masculine) brother, but this male embodiment of gendered resistance
has been ignored altogether. I want to be clear: I am arguing that the authors
of the litany of moralizations defending Beyonc as a Black feminist icon
based on her sampling of Adichie did not listen to or chose to ignore her
actual definition of a feminist to maintain their specific ideological program
of feminism being politically liberal and subjectively Black and female.
Contrary to Adichies actual feminist call urging people to see the problem of gender, Beyonc resists offering a feminist treatise that problematizes
gender, and instead offers her fans a neo-liberal track warning her competitors of her power, be it economic or otherwise. She replaces the eradication
of gender hierarchy with capitalist gain, and offers homo economicus to the
world as the capitalist Black woman protected by the language, the political
sentiments, and moralism of Black feminism. Her first verse in Flawless
says: I know when you were little girls / You dreamt of being in my world
/ Dont forget it, dont forget it / Respect that, bow down bitches (crown).
This line bow down bitches (crown) is much more than an ambiguous call
for reverence. In fact, the voice saying crown, is that of her husband Jay-Z,
whose album Magna Carta ... Holy Grail was released July of 2013. Jay-Zs
interlude on Crown is the call for market superiority against challengers:
If fear is your only God / Get yall to fear me is my only job / crown, crown
/ crown, crown. Crown is the reclamation of transfiguration narrative of
Jesus, the meeting of the corporeal with the eternal. There is no mistaking
Jay-Z on this; his testimony of this says: Bitch asked if I was God, fuck Im

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supposed to say no? / You already seen me turn a man to a G.O.A.T. Beyonc
takes up the repetition crown, crown in the style of Jay-Z; she says Im
so crown, crown, bow down bitches! Beyonc appropriates the dominative
style of ownership and property relations common to Americas imperial
economy, pitting herself against corporations, but establishing herself as her
own corporate brand.
She corporatizes her artistic productions to gain control over profit, not
to address the conditions that generate inequity. She makes no call for the
abolition of any systems, despite the work her feminist public urges readers
to accept as ever-present in and lurking behind her performative intentions.
Instead of singing, Beyonc spits (raps) the verses of Haunted Lyrics: Im
climbing up the walls cause all the shit I hear is boring / All the shit I do is
boring, all these record labels boring / I dont trust these record labels, Im
torn / All these people on the planet working 9 to 5 just to stay alive. Like
Kanye, she claims to stand against the profit-motivated production of music
under an allegedly faux radicality. She asserts that her Soul not for sale /
Probably wont make any money off this, while celebrating the highest sales
of any record this year (Caulfield). Drawing parallels between Kanye West and
Beyonc, Ben Beaumont-Thomas applauded the move of these Black artists
to establish themselves as brands beyond the reach of PR firms and labels,
yet with few exceptions, there has been little scholarship engaging Beyoncs
profit-driven mode as problematic.3 Similar to Kanye, Beyonc criticizes the
corporatism of Black music while benefiting from the position she has within
this economic system as the artist, yet there is an apologetic for her position;
there are moralizations to demonize overly critical assessments of her work,
and scholarship dedicated to humanizing her contradictions as nothing more
than the inconsequential complexities of being a Black woman.
West, however, is denied such complexity. His humanity, like his various
moments of profundity and ambiguity, are contested categorically as mere
pathologies of his Black masculinity.4 He is castigated as a profit-driven Black
man and, as such, condemned for any capitalist pursuits since his desire of
wealth is a moral errorthe unjustifiable growth of patriarchy. His corporate
dreams become demonized as part of the problem: the white supremacist,
capitalist structure that continues to exploit and alienate the poor Black
worker. He has no symbolic worth in the eyes of the academy, not because
his actual existence is detrimental to the condition of Black people, but rather
because he is the wrong subjecta Black male subjectwho must be sanctioned for pursuing resistance outside of the idealizations of revolutiona
patriarch. His works, like his public testaments, exist to be problematized,

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critiqued, and displaced for more ideal subjects and solutions. Hip-Hop
scholarship demands nothing less than complete decolonization from him,
while celebrating Beyoncs capitalist leanings as well-deserved reparations
long overdue the intersectional subject par excellence: the Black woman.5
This selective deployment of intersectionality to protect ones preferred
subject is not new to the literature. Sirma Bliges Intersectionality Undone:
Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies, for instance,
argues that
intersectionality, originally focused on transformative and counterhegemonic knowledge production and radical politics of social justice,
has been commodified and colonized for neoliberal regimes. A depoliticized intersectionality is particularly useful to a neoliberalism that
reframes all values as market values: identity-based radical politics are
often turned into corporatized diversity tools leveraged by dominant
groups to attain various ideological and institutional goals. (40708)

Under the neo-liberal regime of disciplines, identity is not simply a marker

of historical exclusion, but also a commodity made marketable in the university. The identity of a group in these disciplinary systems is actually quite
distant from the actual social condition of people oppressed by racism, sexual
violence, or poverty because the identities in the academy are rooted in mythologized histories that justify mobility throughout the ranks of these particular academic institutions, rather than the understanding and redress of
the conditions that materially oppress racialized groups in society. As such,
the subject, or rather the perfect (intersectional) subjectfree of moral fault
and absolved of the consequences of their economic and political rise within
empire, the Black-woman-laborer rather than the consequences of oppression
articulated by the voices, bodies and deaths of the oppressedbecomes the
focus of race, class, and gendered inquiry.
Bliges work repeats the concerns post-intersectionality theorists raised
concerning Kimberl Crenshaws original formulation of the theory decades
ago. Nancy Ehrenreichs Subordination and Symbiosis: Mechanisms of Mutual Support between Subordinating Systems as well as Peter Kwans Jeffrey
Dahmer and the Cosynthesis of Categories both point to an essentialization
of the Black heterosexual female subject as the foundational representation of
intersectional analysis. In short, this intersectional allusion to the bourgeois
Black woman, her indemnification against all critique, has long been the
unquestionable norm operating within the political assertions of Black feminism and the conceptual pluralization supposedly gained through utilizing
intersectionality as a method. Carole Boyce Davies describes this tendency

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toward protecting the ascension of the Black feminist subject as condification;

a project perhaps, a behavioral process which marks the rise of a certain neocolonial elite in the U.S. imperial context, operating for the benefit of the
dominant state and its rulers (14). Davies argues that [c]ondification marks
the limit ... but can also be seen as the ultimate manifestation of a domestic
black and/or feminist bourgeois discourse (14), and presents a concrete crisis
for Black feminist calls for social, economic, and political equality. Since there
is no accountability to the buttressing up of empire and inequality in their
march toward capitalist freedom, Black feminist politics ultimately strive to
participate in structures that materially drive social ills (capitalism, patriarchy,
racism, etc.) to gain actual profit and power in universities, governments,
and corporations, as a way to remedy their marginalization, while suggesting
all other bodies that attempt the same march toward freedom are immoral,
decadent, and complacent in the capitalist-heteropatriarchial system that fails
to address their cause. Davies is not alone in this analysis of Black feminism;
Elaine Brown has gone as far as to say: [F]eminism, assuming this word,
which I dont assume (lets just call it that for now, womens liberation, the
liberation of all human beings), is part of my agenda. If you take their analysis,
as strict analysis, you can end up having a woman like Condoleezza Rice. So
they are incorrect in their ideological commitment. Condoleezza Rice would
be the ultimate Black feminist icon. So theyre wrong (3). The inability of
Black feminism to move beyond the defense of the Black female individual
through abstract accounts of subjectivity and agency, despite the concrete
economic and political inequities perpetuated by the Black female agent,
more accurately describes an apologia rather than a paradigm of analysis.
Simply put, Black feminism continues to assert that agency and subjectivity
regardless of their consequences are ultimately goods-in-themselves, and as
such cannot be judged or evaluated by any other means outside of the Black
feminist project.
These Black feminist apologetics are not revolutionary, but reformist.
Gaining power within the already established system, regardless of the means
or consequences, is justified as the moral call for gender progress, and rationalized as the necessary trajectory toward political freedom. However, these
authors offer no criteria for liberation, only axioms urging the accumulation
of representatives that are Black and female, who command the recognition
of systems previously blind to their existence. The now common practice of
lifting up the immaterial subject, the ideal abstraction of the (Black) feminist
self, represented by the mere utterance of race, class, and gender, destroys
our ability to truly understand the suffering of Black people. The Black man,

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the Black woman, and the Black child who survive in the bare conditions of
wretchedness nurtured by anti-Blacknessthe poverty, death, and violence
of racial oppressionare never seen. They are spoken about as secondary
factors worth mentioning, but never considered to be primary subjects worth
motivating independent study. Intersectionality, its synonymy with the ideal
bourgeois Black woman, is an errant axiom that denies Black study for the
elevation of one (powerful, Black, female) identity taken to be the finality of
all Black morality.6

Necrophobia: The Fear of Death

and Dying in Kanye Wests New Slaves
Kanye Wests New Slaves asks a question similar to that posed by Frank
Wilderson in Red, White & Black: [W]hy should we think of todays Blacks
in the United States as Slaves, and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? (10). What series of events have transpired, or what moment has failed to occur in both the mind and matter of the American state
that confines Black Americans to their previous state of being, literally the
non-(human) Being? How could we conceptualize this problem in such a
way that gives substance to the magnitude of the problem without exploding its scope beyond comprehension, or spurring quixotic appeals to our
traditional civil rights narratives, which demand one concede racial progress
has occurred despite the material oppression that remains. Wilderson poses
the problem in this way:
If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the
Slave is not a laborer, but an anti-Human, a position against which
Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is ... generally dishonored, that is, having
no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality,
then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or
reversals in struggles with the state and civil society. (11)

Because anti-Blackness is birthed into the world through violence, the death
of Black people naturally follows. This is an enduring condition that has persisted since enslavement to citizenship. It is not remedied by the class stratifications within the Black community, nor arrested by the alleged integration
of Black people into the already established white supremacist order that still
insists upon the underclass status of Black Americans. This is not simply a
theoretical mode of inquiry situated upon high theory. Over a decade ago,

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Derrick Bell made the same point we get from Wildersons critical inquiry
in straightforward historical terms, namely that we have never understood
that the essence of racism we contended against was not simply that we were
exploited in slavery, degraded by segregation, and frustrated by the unmet
promises of equal opportunity. The essence of racism in America was the
hope that we who were black would not exist (23).
By most popular accounts, Kanye Wests New Slaves revolves around
the idea that broke Nigga racism (segregation) where Blacks were denied the
ability to purchase goods, has been replaced with new Nigga racism (corporatism and economic exploitation), where Blacks are kept poor by spending
all their earnings on worthless materialism, keeping white corporations and
owners rich. This analysis is certainly present in New Slaves, but to suggest
this is the extent of the idea meant to be conveyed by the song confines the
meaning and over-determines the imagery of the lyrics to its first verse. A
closer examination of New Slaves reveals a different theme in the music.
West says: I know that we the new slaves / I see the blood on the leaves
(New Slaves). Here, West suggests that the blood on the leaves makes him
aware of his position as a slave. This is not the economic alienation of the
relatively deprived Black citizen who notices his inferior social position; rather,
West articulates the language and imagery of death, specifically lynching, as
the revelation of his enslaved, non-human, status. Death, not disadvantage,
is whats at stake in Wests analysis.
Besides being a historical reference to lynching, Blood on the Leaves
is also a track on Yeezus. West starts that song with a sample from Nina Simones Strange Fruit: Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees / Blood
on the leaves (Blood on the Leaves). Nina Simone describes lynching as
terrorisma recurring punishment for being Black in the South: Southern
trees / Bear strange fruit / Blood on the leaves / And blood at the roots / Black
bodies / Swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hangin / From the
poplar trees (Simone, Strange Fruit). The lyrics draw the listener into the
horror. Her words demand the attention of the listener to Black deathto
how the murder, the corpse of Blacks, changes the tree into a bloodstained
instrument of death. Simones version of Strange Fruit is a redo of Billie
Holidays original by the same name recorded in 1939. The reproduction, or
sampling of these songs present Black death and suffering as a burden with
continuity throughout the political eras of Black civil rights. Inspired by
Wests song Blood on the Leaves and his sampling of Strange Fruit, Jasiri
X created a remix dealing with the problem of anti-Black death and what the
contingency of Black life means for how we think about Black existence in

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America. In a comment explaining his Blood on the Leaves Remix, Jasiri

X argued:
I chose to remix Kanyes song Blood on the Leaves because I felt like
the sample he used from Billie Holidays Strange Fruit is even more
relevant today. Whether its the over 500 murders last year in Chicago
or the 313 Black people killed last year by the police, security guards,
and people like Zimmerman. Our blood is on the leaves, and it seems
like its in the best interest of America and these corporations. (Why
I Remixed Kanye Wests Blood on the Leaves)

What worth does a Black life have if it must retreat in fear from whiteness, if it lacks any resistance to challenges of its meaning? The problem of
racism is not a problem of misunderstanding; it is a problem of existence,
or rather who deserves to exist when challenged by the will of another. This
problem of being, where every white citizen is permitted by his or her alleged
racial superiority to murder the Black, impresses fear. This is a fear cultivated
in the minds of Blacks who live to see the terrorized corpses of the Blacks
who die. Racism socializes complacency in the minds of the oppressed. It
prevents them from rising up; it destroys their will for resistance. Only white
life is protected in America / Every Black life is rejected till they bury ya
(Jasiri X, Blood on the Leaves Remix). Jasiri X understands that Black life
is only corporealthe lifeless corpses, the chained prisoners, the wretched
bodies suffering in America. This configuration of society makes Blacks into
disposable things in the very same spaces where whites are made to be the
White/Human/Person. Blackness denies racialized people the ability to claim
a right to life. The stained melaninated bodies of Black folk are targets of
state brutality and white vigilantism alike. Similarly, Wilderson argues:
Whiteness and by extension civil societys junior partners cannot be
solely represented as some monumentalized coherence of phallic signifiers but must, in the first ontological instance, be understood as a
formation of contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets. This is
the essence of their construction through an asignifying absence; their
signifying presence is manifest in the fact that they are, if only by default
deputized against those who do magnetize bullets. (82)

Jasiri X would add sexual specificity to Wildersons claim. Jasiris work suggests
not only that death finds Blacks, but is engineered differently toward different
Black bodies. Bullets are not simply magnetized toward all Black bodies equally, because the white supremacist republic maintains itself through specificity.
Theres nothing more dangerous / Than the life of a young Black male the

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scales weighted our murders premeditated (Jasiri X, Blood on the Leaves

Remix). The death and incarceration of Black men and boys serve a different
end to that of the impoverished Black woman, who is demonized, sterilized,
and sanctioned for her ability to birth the Black male pathogen. The white
citizen is not murdered indiscriminately for the interests of Blacks. The white
citizen, while stratified along class, religion, and political ideology, is not divided from humanity itselfthe white citizen is not killed in service of some
racial goal, and their deaths do not go unrecognized for the sake of democratic order. The anti-Black manifestations of white supremacy are far from
uniform. Contrary to the liberal mythos, segregation is not the primary manifestation of racism, and its legal dissolution is not the ending or the emergent
possibility for the eradication of racism. The dynamism of white supremacism
reveals itself in the violence, the actual death, and the poverty that remains
constantsharing a symbiotic relationship to Blacknessdespite the political,
legal, and social decrees suggesting that the ameliorative symbols and discourse
of racial progress indicate a dawning equality.
The inevitability of death for Black people generally, but the Black male
specifically, nurtures an eschatological quality in Hip-Hop, and is heard
throughout Wests corpus. As Jasiri X says on his Blood on the Leaves remix,
Black life has no resistance against the white will to extinguish it: Blood on
the pavement / No saving no statements / No detainment no arraignment /
No ability to change it / In death we become famous (Blood on the Leaves
Remix). Jasiri X understands that the inevitability of death, the inability of
Black people to prevent themselves from becoming corpses, is the powerless
forced on the oppressed under racism. In an anti-Black society, there is no
accountability to the Black life lost, only those moments of remembrance
asked to recount joy of a life ultimately summarized in the physical death
of a Blackened thing. Jasiri Xs Blood on the Leaves Remix was inspired
by Kanye Wests reflection on anti-Black death. In both songs, we hear the
anger behind the beats, the frustration and anxiety expressed by the screams
borne out of these Black mens necrophobia; their visceral fear of deathof
being murdered. Necrophobia, far from being a debilitating nihilism for Black
men, is turned into a work of art standing against racism, which aims to call
out the white supremacism creating the agents and funding the institutions
perpetrating this violence against Black people. Black men, lyrically responding and artistically challenging their physical erasures through death, are attempting to expose the machinations of murder. These necrophobic aesthetics
are human trepidations ignited by the trauma of encountering ones finality.
Just as they may become mythical theodicies and braggadocio or attempts

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to escape the brutish reality of death rampant in Chiraq, these aesthetics,

their pessimistic tone, are resistancea concrete, actual, and audible rejection of the silence imposed by their murder by the state. Despite the formal
failings of such art (e.g., virtue, beauty, etc.), these songs exhibit the courage
of these Black men and their struggle against anti-Blackness. These aesthetic
performances and lyrics convey the refusal of Blacks to live as the corpse
craved by the white supremacist logics of America.
The Black man is not a normative subject; there is no query made to him
in this society where the action resulting from him answering the should
question (What should I/we do?) does not imply his death. Huey P. Newtons
Fear and Doubt, points out the ontological problem posed to the thinker
aiming to describe and animate the Black man as a political subject capable of
political life and social participation. Newton maintains that society responds
to [the lower socio-economic Black man] as a thing, a beast, a nonentity,
something to be ignored or stepped on. He is asked to respect laws that do
not respect him. He is asked to digest a code of ethics that acts upon him but
not for him (17). The consequence of this non-being is dire, as there are no
historical patterns of rationality or ethicality that project Black male existence
into the futuritythat normative plane of academic thought. West fights
for this existence and attempts to solidify his presence in a capitalist world
through being more than the Nigger he is confined to. His fear (of death,
of poverty, of Chiraq), his tragedy, is not based on delusion, but the illusion
of transcending the confines of anti-Blackness. The mirage of personhood
offered to him as a rich Black man cannot overcome the brutal force racism
has on his Black male body. He is still vulnerable to anti-Black violence, the
myth of the Black rapist, and death. His humanity is simply denied in reality. Despite his fame, there is no success, no triumph, and no amelioration
of the conditions of oppression that we find within the borders of empire.
Whereas the academic rationalizes this very same contradiction of claiming to be oppressed while belonging to an economic class quite distant from
the material oppression of the groups they adopt, housed within by the walls
of the universityhiding behind the various moralizations of their identity
politics, where their race, gender, or sexual orientation justifies their capitalist pursuitsWest has no such moralizations that are valued by institutions.
He is simply a product utilized, a commodity fetishized, and devalued by the
machinations of the industry. The Black academic (progressive/feminist) is
allowed the luxury of being represented as diversity, a currency traded and
possessed to aid in the legitimacy of the sociality of the university. Being of
society and worldly, West is debased precisely by his Nigger-ness, and only

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has capital, his own economic venture as retort. Despite his riches, West is
not gifted in the categorical dogmas of race, class, and gendera phrase
whose mere utterance is assumed to be synonymous with critical truth. West
is literally in the world, and unlike the academic, who is offered an ivory
tower far enough from the world so that he or she may freely observe it, the
consequences of his thoughts and speech are attributed solely to his melaninated male body. This is not to excuse his complicity, but an attempt to
demoralize the alleged sacredness of the (Black) academic who elevates his
or her positionality as observer to moral adjudicator.

Themes of Resistance: Rhymefest

on the Meaning of New Slaves
Like the ignored adolescent nerd with a cool popular friend, Hip-Hop studies
generally, and the genre of interpretation understood to be under the rubric of
Hip-Hop aesthetic theory specifically, craves the attention of producing works
acknowledged for their celebrity associations. Driven by the representation
and commercial prestige of the celebrity artist, this scholarship pays very little
attention to the lyrical text produced by the artist or the artists collaborators.
This is a methodological problem in these studies, whereby the meaning of
a song is largely hypothesized to be a reflection of the character, intention,
and temperament of the performer, rather than the accumulation of various
perspectives that then result in a lyrical testament of the artists perception
about the world before them that may or may not be accurately presented in
total by the performance of said piece. Because Hip-Hop scholarship is driven
largely by appearances, airs of significance determined by the popularity of the
subject rather than the analyses produced by the subject, much of the work
on Hip-Hop ignores the multiple perspectives and voices contained within
a song, mistakenly attributing the divergent perspectives of multiple writers to a singular voiceusually the voice of the celebrity personality rather
than other more creative contributors. This way of writing about popular
culture, especially Hip-Hop, lacks rigor and is indicative of a sophomoric
intellectual curiosityone preferring popularity to profundity. Distracted by
the stardom of the performer, philosophical/conceptual/theoretical inquiry
into Hip-Hop is degraded and the multi-vocality of the lyrics and various
other aesthetic qualities are collapsed into the commercial allure of the star,
ignoring the derivative consequences of the art: the remixes, samples, and
rhythms inspired by the original production, as well as the actual activism
of artists themselves.

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Wests New Slaves, which was co-written by Che Rhymefest Smith

is a typical case of this derelict regarding textual research into popular works.
Rhymefest has been a longtime co-writer of Wests discography. He won a
Grammy for his work with West on Jesus Walks in 2005, and has long been
considered the epitome of a raptivist, rap activist (Lindsey). He is co-founder
of Dondas House, a community organization providing arts instruction to
the young of Chicago, with Kanye West, and is a strong advocate of the idea
that [a]rts and music programs are routinely the first casualty in schools facing budget crises, specifically institutions in at-risk communities that directly
benefit from access to safe environments and developmental opportunities
(Dondas House). Rhymefest has made a brand of his race-conscious narratives of Black history and Black struggle throughout his music (AbduSalaam).
Like the sonic revolution of Jasiri Xs verses, Rhymefest focuses his lyrical attention to social justice, economic inequality, and racism (Rhymefest: Jasiri
X Is My Hero).
In a recent e-mail exchange, I asked Rhymefest what inspired his lyrics in
New Slaves, and how does it change the popular meaning attached largely to
Kanye Wests persona? Rhymefest said since the song New Slaves had more
than one writer, I would venture to say that it had more than one meaning,
and was one idea inspired by a collective of frustrations. Kanyes frustration,
seemed to have been the glass ceiling between venture capitalism and creative
(Smith, Answers). Instead of simply dismissing Wests concerns, Rhymefest
tries to contextualize the tensions, frustrations, and obstacles involved with
getting a message out. He says: People who are artists and creatives many
times are expected to splash the colors of music, film, and visual paintings
on the worlds wall, but many times are blocked by corporate interests from
controlling the business of its presentation. I believe Kanye wanted to control the business of his creativity and was striking out at what he perceived
was his obstruction to that goal (Smith, Answers). Rhymefests concerns,
however, revolved around inequity and injustice. Rhymefest maintains that
his lyrical contribution to New Slaves was from a social justice perspective, highlighting private prisons as well as the frustration of Americans that
cant seem to make ends meet while being bombarded with complicated
language and contracts from Plantation Style Capitalism in [his] return for
convenient products (Smith, Answer). The verse You throwing contracts
at me / you know that Niggaz cant read (West, New Slaves) takes on a
different weight if the listener is confronted with the depravation of Black
people suffering from the isolation of urban segregation and economic exploitation. The violence of the inner city leaving Black men either dead or

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in jail is not remedied by corporate sponsorship of Black art. Rather than

being a means to escape economic deprivation, it emerges as a different kind
of labor exploitationan exploitation that takes advantage of the education
and debasement of the racially oppressed.
When I suggested that many people have viewed New Slaves as just
rhetoric, Rhymefest replied that we only need a historical recollection and
sociological analysis of the problems confronting the Black community to
understand the failure of many in the academy as well as society to comprehend the gravity of new slavery. Rhymefest perceptively acknowledged
that [a]nyone who wants to oppress, deny and restrict the rights of others
will always dismiss their complaints as rhetoric, until the people rise up.
Paul Robeson said artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We have to decide
if the words in New Slaves are True or Not (Smith, Answers). Rhymefest
then asks: Do private prisons lock up a disproportionate number of black
men and women and profit from it? Are our communities suffering from
literacy & education issues, while were constantly being drowned with new
information, fees, fines and taxes from an increasing tyrannical big brother
government whove given corporations the same legal status as human beings? and Is individualism & materialism destroying our moral fiber and
communal spirit? (Smith, Answers). The New Slave is the product of an
emergent system of anti-Black oppression; it refers to a vicious organization
of social hierarchies that appears to be normal and democratic, but is in fact
racialized and repressive, where the future effect on the black community
as well as all Americans will be government and corporate captivity of its
customers which is the citizenry through our ignorance, prison labor and
economic debt (Smith, Answers).
Rhymefest aims to bring consciousness through an understanding of
the structural and economic forces that underlie the routine caricatures used
to explain Black failure. Instead of depending on instruments traditionally
worshiped as the solution to American racism and the continuing political,
economic, and social oppression of Black Americans, like the law or discourse,
Rhymefest emphasizes independence from the institutions that profit from
the Black communitys dependency. He is adamant that [p]eople of good
conscience have to create our own communities, share our talents, barter
our goods and have standards of living we can all agree on in a true village
based [in] democratic fashion. ... We have to stop desiring the trinkets this
media offers and falling for the tricks of our politicians and create our own
communities that we control (Smith, Answers). Rhymefests race-conscious
sentiment is not only seen in New Slaves, but throughout his discography.
For instance, in his new song Heroes, Rhymefest says: Fuck the system /

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Fuck imperialism / One mans terrorism is another mans heroism (Smith,

Heroes). He urges listeners to understand that the cyclical reproductions
of racial inequality under the guise of racial progress are not mistakes, but
sociological justifications used to further the profit interests of various corporate and governmental entities that benefit from and memorialize the use
of extra-legal violence resulting in Black peoples deaths and incarceration.
Black heroes die in anti-Black systems. Their corpses are deterrents to future
challenges against the system, not inspiration toward revolt. Rhymefest is
crystal clear: King could have lived but his ass wouldnt listen / talking about
Vietnam / Going international / Stick to civil rights / Keep the shit gradual
(Smith, Heroes). The lesson of history is that our heroes, our theorists
and thinkers who link the material oppression of Black Americans to the
expansion and maintenance of empire, turn up missing. The consequence
of oppression is not its inevitable demise, but the rise of various ideological
and systemic machinations to preserve the order of the already established
hierarchies. Given the seriousness of this cause, perhaps it is time the selfappointed oracle, the Black public intellectual so insistent upon his or her role
as critic and commentator, relinquish a stake in recognition and surrender
the attention of the masses to the creative genius of the artist.

Conclusion
Kanye West is judged by the extent to which he embodies and lives out
some unannounced, but already agreed-upon utopianismthose ideal solutions to (moralizations of ) the world and its problems he describesas if
the conditions for those solutions are ever present in this anti-Black chaos.
Rather than seeing his aesthetic reflections as a diagnosis establishing the
continuity of slavery through our supposedly sacred Obama era, his work
and rhetoric is simply announced by a seemingly endless series of cumulative
ad hominems. West offers a paradigmatic lens through which scholars and
thinkers can view the world, an aesthetic provocation against the accepted
narrative of racial progress that calls for the racially oppressed to consider the
possibility that slavery never ended. Is this a conceptual impossibility? What
is at stake for those who insist on denying West a position as a thinker, or
from consideration as a theorist? What is lost in valuing the signification of
the New Slave as indicative of not only these allegedly free Black Americans,
but descriptive of a neo-colonial oppressiona real slaveocracy functioning
within Americawhere corporations who have a stake in the death and dying of Black Americans and the imprisonment of Black men have tyrannical
degrees of power in government, policymaking, and economic institutions. Is

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this beyond possibility, or is it simply beyond our unwarranted beliefs in the

capacity of Kanye West? Stated differently, if his diagnosis of anti-Blackness
is true, then what possible expectations can we demand of his person that
we do not first demand of the world that enslaves him?

notes
1. See Kanye Wests Black Skinhead video on Saturday Night Live.
2. A similar conflict ensued when Charlemagne tha God confronted Kanye West on
the Breakfast Club; see BreakfastClub, 105.1, Kanye West Interview at Breakfast Club
Power 105.1.
3. The debate on Beyonc is pretty clear-cut for academic feminists. While there have
been works like Mia McKenzies On Defending Beyonc: Black Feminists, White Feminists, and the Line in the Sand, and Tamara Winfrey Harriss All Hail the Queen?,
many, if not most, of the public intellectual works praise Beyonc and these contradictions as part of the rich complexities of womanhood and femininity. Christina Colemans That Time Beyoncs Album Invalidated Every Criticism of Feminism Ever sees
no tension in the various capitalist and egoistic drives of Beyonc; similarly, Danielle
Moodie-Millss Can Beyoncs Celebrity Reshape Feminism? and Daniel DAddarios
Beyoncs Feminist Statement Shouldnt Come as a Surprise take pride that such a
famous and rich celebrity is spreading the ideology of feminism, despite the intellectual
and political praxis that accompanies it. Here again, the questions, concepts, and praxis
that would seriously challenge empire, imperial womanhoodincluding Black feminist
bourgeois ideologyis relinquished for growing the ideological base.
4. See Ronald B. Neals Kanye West Is Not a Feminist But . . .
5. The post-intersectionality literature has criticized the ideal subject of the Black
woman placed at the center of intersectionality. Kimberl Crenshaws believes:
Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white womens
experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men. Yet
often they experience double-discriminationthe combined effects of practices
which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes,
they experience discrimination as Black womennot the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as Black women. (149)
Crenshaws view has been challenged by Peter Kwan as a re-essentialization. Kwan argues:
[S]cholars who wrote about intersectionality responded to marginalization by creating new marginal categories that, by their very nature, themselves encourage the
idea of categorical hegemony. It is not just that intersectionality slighted issues of
sexual orientation, as Eskridge puts it, but that by focusing, for example, on the
particularities of black womens experience, intersectionality stands in danger of
pushing to its margins issues of class, religion, and able-bodiedness, as well as issues
of sexual orientation. Thus, without a more developed theory of how to factor in
these issues, as Crenshaw predicted, intersectionality stands in danger of perpetuating the very dangers to which it alerted with regard to male dominance in racial
discourses, and white supremacy in feminist discourses. (1276)
6. See Sylvia Wynter, Interview with Sylvia Wynter, where she argues:

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It is not that I am against feminism: Im appalled at what it became. Originally, there

was nothing wrong with my seeing myself as a feminist; I thought it was adding to
how we were going to understand this world. If you think about the origins of the
modern world, because gender was always there, how did we institute ourselves as
humans; why was gender a function of that? Id just like to make a point here that
is very important. Although I use the term race, and I have to use the term race,
race itself is a function of something else which is much closer to gender. Once
you say, besides ontogeny, theres sociogeny, then there cannot be only one mode
of sociogeny; there cannot be only one mode of being human; there are a multiplicity of modes. So I coined the word genre, or I adapted it, because genre
and gender come from the same root. They mean kind, one of the meanings is
kind. Now what I am suggesting is that gender has always been a function of the
instituting of kind. For example, in our order, which is a bourgeois order of kind,
a bourgeois order of the human, the woman was supposed to be the housewife and
the man was supposed to be the breadwinner. Each was as locked into their roles.
By making the feminist movement into a bourgeois movement, what theyve done
is to fight to be equal breadwinners. This means that the breadwinning man and
the breadwinning woman become a new class, so that the woman who remains in
her role becomes a part of a subordinated class. ... What we are witnessing is the
incorporation of the bourgeoisie.
. . . Now when I speak at a feminist gathering and I come up with genre and
say gender is a function of genre, they dont want to hear that. Look at the tremendous perks that feminism has given to some Black women, for example, and of
color women as they call themselves. Right? This is what I am trying to say about
the temptations, you see; and then you say youre a Black feminist, but what is
happening to Black women?
. . . Black womens struggle is quite other. Our struggle as Black women has to do
with the destruction of the genre; with the displacement of the genre of the human
of Man, of which the Black population groupmen, women and childrenmust
function as the negation. (2325)

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