Watching their Souls Speak: Childish Gambino, Kendrick Lamar, Beyonc - - PDF document

Watching their Souls Speak: Childish Gambino, Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé Knowles- Carter, and the New Aesthetics of the Hip Hop Music Video Whereas music video scholarship up to this point has reflected larger aesthetic trends, it has neglected to appreciate the rich diversity of hip hop music videos. For example, the essay collection Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media, is comprised of works that either analyze single music videos or seek to establish methods of analysis that could be used across the board. Carol Vernallis’s book Experiencing Music Video also works towards the latter, once again leaving out the possibility of aesthetic differences between musical genres. While this is clearly not an exhaustive list of all music video scholarship, I have found that it is nonetheless representative of a larger problem. In this presentation, I will argue for the need to discuss music videos in tandem with their associated musical genres left by presenting analyses of three hip hop music videos that highlight aesthetic trends I have observed within works by exclusively hip hop artists. In working towards this goal, I draw from and build upon the work of scholars of black art and hip hop such as Tricia Rose, Cheryl Keyes, Henry Louis Gates, and Angela Davis. Music videos are typically thought of as subordinate to the song they accompany; however, this is a pervasive gross generalization which likely stems from their origin as promotional tools to bolster record sales. Hip hop artists took hold of the

music video early on and, over time, have transformed it into their primary mode of artistic expression. The three works I will analyze here, being Beyoncé’s audiovisual album Lemonade, Childish Gambino’s track “This is America,” and Kendrick Lamar’s track “HUMBLE.” exemplify this transformation to an extreme. I have identified three specific aesthetic criteria that these new music videos employ, thereby asserting the artistic importance of the music video as both a historicist and socially relevant art form. (It is also not surprising that since the start of this project last fall, hip hop music videos that conform to these criteria have rapidly grown in number, for example, Janelle Monae’s Emotion Picture Dirty Computer, Tierra Whack’s track “Mumbo Jumbo,” Beyonce and Jay-Z’s track “APESHIT,” Gambino’s track “Feels Like Summer,” etc.) These new aesthetic criteria are as follows:

• 1. Each work has a distinct civil-rights-minded message.
• 2. Each work plays with the anchoring of sound within the world it presents,

and this has a profound impact on the video’s possible messages.

• 3. Each work is markedly historicist through constant visual and audible

signification (as discussed in the Gates) and iconic memory (as discussed in the Keyes). When taken separately, these criteria are present throughout the history of the hip hop music video. However, by way of combining these three, these videos “are wholesale pieces of art in which the visuals and music are fundamentally inseparable; sometimes the importance of the video itself trumps that of the song,” as Jon Caramanica

insightfully wrote in a New York Times article published on January 30th. These videos may include complicated webs of signification, but the artist’s larger message is abundantly clear. For instance, Gambino’s “This is America” exemplifies this idea in its title alone, stating bluntly that what the viewer is about to witness is America. Reviewers from the Guardian, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone have continued to focus their reviews primarily on references to pop culture and events from the artists’ personal lives. The three hip hop music videos I analyze here include visuals that drastically change the narrative presented by the song alone. In Kendrick Lamar’s track HUMBLE, from his Pulitzer Prize-winning album DAMN., the lyrics of the hook are a striking command, I quote, “Bitch sit down, be humble.” And, from the very start, the music video positions Kendrick as a religious figure, wearing a robe reminiscent of that of the

• Pope. In another scene shown here, Kendrick and his friends are positioned in a mock

image of the last supper, with Kendrick in the middle of the table as Jesus. These images coupled with the hook of “HUMBLE.” emphasize the commanding nature of the track, both persuading his audience to listen and ironically framing Kendrick within his massive ego. However, there are key characters present in the music video for “HUMBLE.” that are lost without Lamar’s visuals – his friends (or in the case of that last image, his disciples), and his audience within the video’s world. Kendrick lip-syncs to his verses and hooks throughout the entirety of the video, however, only some of other men shown nod along with him. It would seem that only a select few are able to hear

the music. For example, a few of these bizarre moments feature Kendrick, wearing all white, surrounded by men wearing all black. The men that surround him clearly either can’t hear the music or aren’t really bothering to listen. Notice that these images are simultaneously referring back to the previously shown religious imagery in their black- versus-white color scheme without the directness of Kendrick’s pope-like outfit and the reference to Da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” One of the more striking moments of this video shows Kendrick once again wearing all white, but now with the red laser sights of police snipers aiming at him from the audience’s angle. He is behind a glass window, moving and rapping along as if he’s yelling the words to a world that can’t possibly hear him. [Play clip] I would like to pause here in order to point out the deplorably familiar muting of black women in this video. While one of its most famous moments is a refreshing indictment of the impossible feminine and femme standard of beauty, Lamar’s clever illustration of the line, “I’m so fuckin’ sick and tired of the photoshop, show me something natural like afro on Richard Pryor, show me something natural like ass with some stretch marks,” nonetheless forces black women into silently posing for the male gaze. By the end of the video, all of the men in black leave the frame, with Kendrick standing alone to stare out at the audience as if to ask the implied question, “were you listening?” [Play clip] The lyrics of the audio track alone depict Kendrick’s experience as a black man living in the United States, and only those seemingly close to Kendrick in the video can hear them. Therefore, the song operates at two levels of reception.

When paired with these visuals, the work as a whole takes on a deeper, more relevant

• meaning. …..

Unlike Lamar’s “HUMBLE.,” Childish Gambino’s most recent release, titled “This Is America,” forces the black experience into the face of the viewer. The world of the video, set in a warehouse that some critics have loosely related to the set of Michael Jackson’s short film for the track “Bad,” becomes increasingly chaotic as panicked strangers flood the frame. This mess continues to build up until, close to the end of the video, there is a small moment of complete silence and peace. Gambino lights a joint, the music starts again, and the scene slowly fades out while he runs for his life from an angry mob. This video exists to expose some of the harsh realities of the African American experience to the world. Notice that the video open with a shocking, senseless act of

• violence. [play clip] As the video progresses, the audience suffers through the whiplash
• f a mass shooting over the course of a few seconds, with our attention commanded the

next second by a viral dance. Two versions of “This Is America” are available for public

• consumption. The audio-only version doesn’t include the gunshots in the video – a

crucial part of the video’s violent narrative. [play audio bit] The jarring shift in musical genre is clear, but the shock factor of sudden gun violence is lost. If Gambino’s representation of the state of the union, then, is couched in these jarring shifts between candy coated mass media and horrific acts of violence, it could be said that the lyrics of the track have little to do with the video’s meaning. However, closer inspection reveals that the lyrics demonstrate these sharp juxtapositions as well,

in a fashion similar to that of Lamar’s “HUMBLE.” As Frank Guan writes in his review

• f the video for Vulture, “This Is America’ draws life from the unsolvable tension

within a society whose bloody business is transmuted into cultural potency at relentless speed… The incongruousness of Glover, raised middle-class and a NYU graduate, bragging about his Mexican drug supplier and threatening to have you gunned down, is intentional.”1 The lyrics of the track may have less to do with the video’s narrative than Kendrick’s “HUMBLE.,” but they are not without relevance. If the chaos and juxtaposition of the video is central to its definition of America; without the video, this aspect of the track’s message is lost. Once again, I briefly pause here to discuss Gambino’s portrayal of black women. While his back-up dancers are comprised of a roughly equal number of boys and girls, the only other significant female characters in the work are either part of the gunned- down gospel choir with one single exception. After the moment of silence towards the end of “This Is America,” the music re-enters while Gambino dances atop a parked car, with R & B singer-songwriter SZA sitting nearby, staring silently at the camera at first, but as it slowly moves away, she only watches him. [play clip] Beyoncé’s track “Formation” caused social uproar when it was released and performed for the first time at Super Bowl 50 in 2016. Many football fans protested because of her references to the Black Panther Party and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 70s. [change slide] At the top left of this slide is Beyoncé and her back-up

1 Cite guan

dancers, the top right is an image of Michael Jackson at his 1993 Super Bowl performance, and the bottom right is an image of Black Panther Party members. The track is featured at the very end of her hour-long audiovisual album entitled Lemonade, released after the initial release and performance of “Formation.” The intertwining of the personal and political seems obvious in Lemonade, a superficial reading of which sees Beyoncé publicly uncovering issues with an adulterous lover. Critics have claimed that the album is focused primarily – in some cases even solely – on marital strife.2 They support this claim by asserting that “Formation” is a postscript to the work and, in some cases, not involved with the rest of the album.3 I make the case, however, that a closer look at “Formation’s” relationship to the rest of the album reveals that there is far more to Lemonade than meets the eye. In fact, “Formation” includes visual references to almost every other track on Lemonade. [Scroll through formation slides here] These visual signifiers to the album’s previous tracks reveal the crucial role “Formation” plays within Lemonade’s discourse, showing it to be no less integral to the album than any

• ther track. They suggest at the very least that “Formation’s” relationship to Lemonade is

far more convoluted than meets the eye. Even without Lemonade’s role in “Formation,” the album still contributes much to the socio-political discourse surrounding modern civil rights. The twelve stages of the album, as shown in your Lemonade structure table, frame the tracks and the spoken word poetry within them in a larger arc of trauma, grief, and recovery, ultimately

2 See Petridis, Empire, Mapes, and Sheffield. 3 See Pareles.

culminating in “Formation.” This saga of grief is constantly churning behind the surface-level biographical narrative of the album, revealing itself in moments of sharp political commentary. These two coexisting narratives form a dichotomy within Lemonade, and lie at the heart of my analysis. If the larger thematic arc before “Formation” is that of internal struggle, external strife, hope for a better future, and the ability to recover and create that better future, then the message of Lemonade as a whole, including the track that forms its expressive culmination, is precisely that saga outlined within the context of “Formation’s” subject matter. Lemonade is an outcry against the perpetual silencing of black women’s voices, the commodification of black women’s anger, police brutality, and the ongoing racism in the United States. …… There are three different versions of the track available for public consumption: The stand-alone music video, made available to the public before any of the other singles from Lemonade, the audio-only track released with the audio-only version of the album Lemonade, and the version within the audiovisual album. The two video versions have five different, short break-out moments in which we hear someone speaking from a source offscreen. In the example I’m about to play for you, the visuals could be understood as an illustration of the individual’s words, or you could interpret the words and visuals as completely unrelated. [play clip] The second speaker, prominent New Orleans Bounce artist Big Freedia, suddenly becomes a kind of narrator in “Formation”; when the music stops and Big Freedia’s previously unheard voice enters, the audience is forced to mentally process what’s going on. This subtle moment further

highlights the importance of the two video versions to both “Formation” and Lemonade as a whole. One of the many complicating factors of analyzing these three works is the tension between the scholarly and audience-based discourses they create. As manufactured products designed in part to assist the artist and associated record labels in making a profit, I feel that it is an ethical imperative to mention that they are all part

• f this larger, highly corporatized culture machine. However, I endeavor to argue that,

despite this, there exists an artistic social awakening within these long-form videos that is the reason for their demand of our attention as music scholars.