by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
In a celebrated and much remarked upon three-minute spot that aired during Game 5 of the NBA finals, artist and entrepreneur Jay Z remarked “we don’t have any rules, everybody’s trying to figure it out. That’s why the internet is like the Wild West…the Wild, Wild West.” It was an admission from one of the most visible tastemakers of urban culture that the old models of the culture business have long given way to a great unknown. Of course Mr. Carter can make such pronouncements with the backing of Samsung and Live Nation—the only risks he’s really taking are purely aesthetic.
For an artist like Jasiri X, and many others, the Wild, Wild West is more than a metaphor. Jasiri X has staked his career on producing urgent spreadable media that undermines the very structures erected to keep a broader public from accessing thoughtful media, not sanctioned by the major media outlets and corporations. With very little, if any, radio airplay and lacking “major label” backing, Jasiri X has managed to become part of the cultural landscape with videos like “What if the Tea Party was Black?,” “I am Troy Davis (T.R.O.Y.),” which sampled the Pete Rock & CL Smooth classic “They Reminisce Over You,” and “Trayvon.” YouTube was still a new phenomenon for many folk when Jasiri X released his breakthrough track “Free the Jena 6.” Indeed these single videos—posted with full lyrics—recall the late poet Dudley Randall selling single page poems—broadsides—for a distinctly analog generation nearly fifty years ago.
Jasiri X’s latest track and music video “We Are the New Nat Turners” is evidence of what has really shifted in a world of sharable and spreadable culture. As Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green note in their recent book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in Networked World (NYU Press), “this shift from distribution to circulation signals a movement toward a more participatory model of culture, one which see the public not as simply consumers of preconstructed messages but as people who are shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media content in ways which might not have been previously imagined.” This particular cultural logic seems uniquely suited for the aesthetic impulses of Hip-Hop culture, which has long been committed to refashioning culture for its primary constituents.
Jasiri X’s “We Are the New Nat Turners” was made available for viewing on YouTubeand for download Band Camp on the eve of major releases from Kanye West (Yeezus), J Cole (Born Sinner) and underground hero Mac Miller (Watching Movies with the Sound Off). For Jasiri X, any fissure in the official cultural narratives that both applaud or denounce Yeezus, for example, is a victory.
As such, “We Are the New Nat Turners”—like Black Twitter and the “Rachet”—serves as a B(l)ackchannel, a counter-resistance, that is increasingly more critical to Black political discourse than those “Black” media outlets that claim access to the Obama White House. Literally a space to talk-back, the B(l)ackchannel functions much the same as the not-so-“hidden transcripts” that anthropologist James C. Scott describes in his classic Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990)—hidden in plain-sight, as it is, amongst a barrage of “big data.”
An important aspect of this sharable media moment is that it provides new dictates for the Black critical intelligentsia. While certain cultural products—no matter what their aesthetic value—will prove alluring because of the access they provide to the broader media landspace – this being written from someone with a new book with a large chapter on Jay Z—we also have a responsibility to support those artists whose work will be ignored, and worse still, dismissed. In our critical responses to Black cultural productions and other cultural products, we need to understand the reality of spreadable culture and be willing to “talk back” accordingly.
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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including the recently released Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (NYU Press). He is the host of the weekly webcast Left of Black, which is produced in conjunction with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, where Neal is also a Professor of African & African American Studies. You can follow him on Twitter at @NewBlackMan.
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