On the Question of “Who's Out in Hip Hop”

Abstract

As a symptom, the question “who's out in hip hop” evidences a set of logics about race, sexuality, and visibility, which this article examines in relation to a series of news reports about the “first (mainstream) gay rapper” in 2012. Elaborating on Richard Iton's concern over the violently public ways black life is experienced, this article attends to how certain hip hop artists—hailed as the “first gay rapper”—navigate sexual publicity for techniques that may be instructive for temporarily remediating the endemic problem of blackness, as an always publicly experienced phenomenon.

Keywords:

• glass closet
• hip hop
• mask and masking
• plasticity
• sexuality

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the SPAN project at Northwestern, S.P.A.C.E., IRWAG at Columbia University, and IRW at Rutgers University for opportunities to present this work and for the generative feedback received in each setting. My deepest gratitude to the special issue editors and editors at Souls for including this article in a special issue to commemorate my dear former colleague, Richard Iton.

Notes

Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Majors and Minors (Toledo, OH: Hadly & Hadley, 1895).

Fugees, “The Mask,” Wyclef Jean, Lauren Hill, Pras Michel, The Score © 1996 by Ruffhouse/Columbia Records, LP.

Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 211.

Ibid., 27.

Ibid., 27, 104.

Ibid.

Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Verso, 1970/ 2009), 35.

C. Riley Snorton, Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

Sedgwick takes up the notion of the glass closet as a site that licenses both insult and the “far warmer relations … whose potential for exploitiveness is built into the optics of the asymmetrical, the specularized, and the inexplicit.” Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 80.

Slavoj Zizek offers that for both Marx and Freud, “the point is to avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of the ‘content’ supposedly hidden behind the form … but, on the contrary, the ‘secret’ of this form itself.” Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989/2008), 3.

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 102.

Rob Markman, “Lil B Says I'm Gay LP Title Provoking Death Threats,” MTV.com. http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1662490/lil-b-im-gay.jhtml (accessed December 24, 2012).

Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 19.

Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation),” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm (accessed June 24, 2013).

The characterization of Odd Future as acutely homophobic is primarily due to the visibility of its noted member Tyler Okonma, known by his stage name Tyler the Creator, who garnered a great deal of public scrutiny for the use of the f-word on his breakout album, Goblin. According to the music weekly, NME, Okonma used the word and “variants of anti-gay lyrics” over two hundred times across the album. Andrea Domanick, “Odd Future's Syd the Kyd Joins the Internet,” LA Weekly, January 12, 2012, http://www.laweekly.com/2012-01-12/music/syd-the-kyd-odd-future-the-internet/ (accessed December 24, 2012).

Ibid.

Antonio Gramsci describes “common sense” as embedded, incoherent, and spontaneous beliefs and assumption, which confirm the “status quo” of a given social order. See, for example, “Language, Languages, Common Sense,” in The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935, ed. David Forgacs (New York: New York University Press, 2000). See also Wahneema Lubiano's essay “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense: Policing Ourselves and Others,” in The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today, ed. W. Lubiano (New York: Random House, 1998) and Kara Keeling's The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) for black feminist and queer elaborations on Gramsci's concept.

Ibid.

Paul Ohan, “Gay Hip Hop is Here to Stay: Syd the Kid Digs In” [sic], Sundance Channel, January 18, 2012, http://www.sundancechannel.com/sunfiltered/2012/01/gay-hip-hop-is-here-to-stay-syd-tha-kid-digs-in/

Andrea Domanick, “Syd the Kyd on Odd Future, Her Sexuality and Why She Hates the Word ‘Lesbian,' ” LA Weekly, January 12, 2012, http://blogs.laweekly.com/westcoastsound/2012/01/syd_odd_future_the_internet_matt_martians.php (accessed December 24, 2012).

Adam Rathe, “Syd the Kyd Could Be Hip-Hop's Next Lesbian Icon,” Out, February 13, 2012, http://www.out.com/entertainment/music/2012/02/13/syd-kyd-could-be-hip-hops-next-lesbian-icon (accessed December 24, 2012).

Ibid.

John Ortved, “Azealia Banks, Taking Her Cues and Lyrics from the Street,” New York Times, February 1, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/fashion/azealia-banks-a-young-rapper-taking-cues-from-the-street.html?_r=3&ref=fashion& (accessed December 24, 2012).

In subsequent articles, however, Banks identifies herself as bisexual. Colleen Nika, “Q&A: Azaelia Banks on Why the C-Word Is ‘Feminine,' ” Rolling Stone, September 10, 2012, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/blogs/thread-count/azealia-banks-on-why-the-c-word-is-feminine-20120910 (accessed December 24, 2012). In response to the question, “so do you feel a special affection for your gay fans?” Banks states: Definitely. I mean, I'm bisexual, so it makes sense. But I don't want to be that girl who says all gays necessarily hang out together, of course! I have people say to me, “Oh wow, my friend is gay, too,” and I'm like, “Yeah, so?”.

“Azaelia Banks, Rapper, Comes Out as Bisexual in ‘New York Times.' ” HuffingtonPost.com, February 2, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/02/azealia-banks-rapper-comes-out-bisexual_n_1249996.html#s411864&title=Cynthia_Nixon_2004 (accessed December 24, 2012).

Mike Larkin, “‘I'm Bisexual': Hotshot Rapper Azealia Banks Fights Hip-Hop Prejudice by Coming Out of the Closet,” Daily Mail, February 2, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2095755/Azealia-Banks-fights-hip-hop-prejudice-coming-closet-bisexual.html (accessed December 24, 2012).

Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality and the US State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 185.

“Azaelia Banks, Rapper, Comes Out as Bisexual in ‘New York Times.' ”.

“Azealia Banks & Perez Hilton: Twitter Feud with Angel Haze Goes Too Far,” January 5, 2013, huffingtonpost.com, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/05/azealia-banks-perez-hilton-twitter-angel-haze_n_2415591.html (accessed April 8, 2013).

Matt Kane, “Rapper Azealia Banks Defends Use of “Fa**ot” on Twitter,” January 5, 2013, www.glaad.org, http://www.glaad.org/blog/rapper-azealia-banks-defends-use-faot-twitter (accessed April 8, 2013).

Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011).

Ann Powers, “A Close Look At Frank Ocean's Coming Out Letter,” the record: Music News from NPR, http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/07/04/156261612/a-close-look-at-frank-oceans-coming-out-letter (accessed December 24, 2012).

Ibid.

Jamilah Lemieux, “Independence Day: Frank Ocean Gets Real,” July 4, 2012. Ebony.com, http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/independence-day-frank-ocean-gets-real#axzz2JpyjuNRB (accessed December 24, 2012).

Ibid.

Ann Powers, “A Close Look At Frank Ocean's Coming Out Letter.”

Louis Althusser and Éttiene Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Verso, 1970/2009), 27–28.

DJ Louie XIV, “Trapped Outside the Closet: Some Second Thoughts on Coming Out,” The Blog, October 19, 2012, huffingtonpost.com, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dj-louie-xiv/being-gay-is-awesome-but-by-coming-out-of-the-closet-are-we-putting-ourselves-in-boxes_b_1974959.html (accessed December 24, 2012).

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967).

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 11.

Relatedly, Tavia Nyong'o explains in his critical review of the Channel Orange LP: “When Ocean, on his Tumblr, greeted us as ‘human beings spinning on blackness,’ he invited us into that cab alongside him, but also onto the edge of that oceanic feeling of cosmic oneness that Freud could only associate with regression, so convinced was he that satisfaction was something all humans left in the womb.” “The Oceanic Feeling,” October 19, 2012, The New Inquiry, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-oceanic-feeling/ (accessed April 7, 2013).

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 15.

Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1 − 22.

Lupe Fiasco, “Why I like Lil B: A Review,” June 30, 2011. lupefiasco.com, http://www.lupefiasco.com/news/why-i-lil-b-review (accessed January 4, 2012).

Markman, “Lil B Says I'm Gay LP Title Provoking Death Threats, Slurs.”

“Lil B Album & Song Chart History,” Billboard. http://www.billboard.com/artist/307217/lil-b (accessed January 24, 2012).

Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2000), 67–68.

Ibid.

Lil B, “Unchain Me,” I'm Gay (I'm Happy), June 29, 2011.

Scott offers a way to think through the bottom as a site for blackness's counterintuitive powers in Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

Lil B, “Unchain Me.”

Ibid.

“'LOLZ Nicki Minaj says ‘I am a Gay Rapper’ in Candid Video,” June 22, 2011. NickiMinajBarbies.com http://nickiminajbarbies.com/lolz-nicki-minaj-says-%E2%80%98i-am-a-gay-rapper%E2%80%99-in-candid-video/ (accessed December 24, 2012).

Ibid.

Brian Hiatt, “The NEW QUEEN of HIP-HOP,” Rolling Stone (December 9, 2010): 77–79 (Lexis Nexus).

Dave Itzkoff, “No, Nicki Minaj Did Not Endorse Mitt Romney,” September 10, 2012. The Caucus: The Politics and Government Blog of the Times, http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/no-nicki-minaj-did-not-endorse-mitt-romney/ (accessed December 24, 2012).

Ibid.

Mark Anthony Neal, Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 65.

J. Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2012), xii–xiii.

Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 111–112.

Ibid.

For additional takes on Minaj's embodied performance, see Uri McMillan, “Nicki-aesthetics: The Camp Performance of Nicki Minaj,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 24, no. 1 (2014): 79–87 and Savannah Shange, “A King Named Nicki: Strategic Queerness and the Black Femmecee,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 24, no. 1 (2014): 29–45.

J. A. Byrdson, Plastic Materials, 7th edition (Amsterdam: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999), xix.

Achille Mbembe has described this process as “animism” in “Notes on Fetishism and Animism,” a lecture presented at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, October 18, 2012.

Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afrom-Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 89.

Ibid., emphasis added.

Catherine Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, trans. Carolyn Shread (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 1.

Ibid., 2.

Ibid.