"The Protestor" Is No "Basic Bitch": The Politics and Aesthetics of Stereotypical Blackness in 2011

“The Protestor” Is No “Basic Bitch”: The Politics and Aesthetics of Stereotypical Blackness in 2011

I want to take a minute to reflect on the representations of race, specifically, the representations of African-American blackness, in US pop culture in 2011. In several blog posts, and a few of my published works, I’ve argued that stereotypical…

White d00ds Posing as Queer WOC—or, postmillennial hipness strikes again

In this post, I want to talk about several recent phenomena that I think are, if not best, at least usefully interpreted through the lens of my concept “postmillennial (black) hipness”. These phenomena include the “Gay Girl in Damascus” fiasco,…

Janel Monae vs. Shephard Fairey

Janel Monae vs. Shephard Fairey

As promised, here is an excerpt from a work in progress where I read Monae as critiquing Shephard Fairey’s appropriation/use of images of radicalized non-Western women of color. First, let’s put some images in play. They are, in this order:…

“Neckties” vs. “Warlords”: Yeezy and HOVA’s contesting masculinities

So, in my earlier post about Jay-Z’s DOA, I argued that he was defending a more traditional ghetto-hetero-black masculinity against Kanye’s Autotuned insurgency into hip-hop and its canon of “proper” masculinities. Kanye’s LMFAO “Paranoid” remix (Youtube below) makes it clear…

Flo-Riding the New Wave? or, Postmillennial Black Hipness

So, Kanye West is pretty commonly recognized as mainstream hip hop’s acolyte of the New Wave (Gary Numan references, what?), but Flo-Rida’s last two singles are totally obvious remixes/reworkings of iconic New Wave tracks. First, there’s “Right Round,” the somewhat…