Last week the Nicki Minaj set the world on fire with pictures of herself in her natural state. Natural for her, anyway. The hair? It was straightened, and maybe augmented by bionic weave hair, but at least it wasn’t the color of a Highlighter. And she had makeup on… And black electrical tape on her nipples, because that’s how she wakes up, right? But some folks were mighty impressed.
Those pictures were behind the scenes photos of her new video, Lookin Ass Niggas.
The album cover featured this iconic picture of Malcolm X. I’m not going to put it here. Just look at it and imagine the words Lookin Ass Nigggas… Or, better yet, look at it and let the power of it sink in to your bones, and forget about plastic Nicki Minaj all together. Let’s all breath a collective Woosah… and remember that our music is so much deeper than that mainstream train wreck that is contemporary hip hop.
If you don’t like what she’s saying, or how she’s saying it, find something else to listen to. There’s actually a whole lot out there. Like this.
[bandcamp width=350 height=470 album=2082809144 size=large bgcol=333333 linkcol=0f91ff tracklist=false]
This is BLXPLTN, a Black punk band from Austin Texas. The second song is a middle finger to stop and frisk. All I know about them is what I learned on the Afropunk site. Not much. But the song is the perfect antidote to Nicki Minaj’s ode’ to nigga, niggas, niggerism, and vacuous, plastic buffoonery.
Nina Simone does not approve.
I like the Nicki song, I’ll say one thing…think is the first time I’ve heard Malcolm mentioned in the mainstream. I thought the meme was funny myself, N*ggas were looking a Malcolm too, by n*ggas I mean the feds so I don’t see the big deal.
That is the third interpretation of the song I’ve heard. Someone else felt as if it was an indictment of the male gaze… which would be ironic coming from a woman wearing a fishnet bodysuit and taped nipples. The other was that she was trying to avoid broke dudes.
I think some things should remain sacred, that image being one of them. I think of Lil Wayne, with his beat the pussy like Emmett Till line. Clever. Tone deaf and disrespectful but clever. That skit which protrayed Harriet Tubman fucking a slave master in order to blackmail him and fund the underground railroad… The King siblings fighting for the right to sell his bible and Nobel Prize.
I mean, I get it. Free speech. She can do what she wants to, but I don’t think we should try to be too clever with the images of our forefathers. If we don’t honor them, they will not be honored. Period.
But, I don’t like the N word. I wrote about it. So, even if she was spittin absolute science, it would have still made my skin crawl.
By the way, I love your illustrations.
Thanks. I agree on that Harriet Tubman, that was some Bullsh** man, Russell Simmons really did some minstrel sh** with that one. As far as the king kids, I live in Atlanta and I never really cared for any of them. The fact that year after year they only focus on the I have a Dream and the image of King the media wants…that let’s me know they aren’t about anything. With Lil Wanye and the Emitt Till line it’s almost like a slave dropping knowledge in the plantation without the master knowing it….I mean he did the track and video “God Bless Amerika” very revolutionary and it got little to no airplay…but the Emitt Till line caught attention, now think of this how many kids/people that never knew/never would’ve known who Emitt Till was until Weezy dropped that line…..with Nicki, my thing is Malcolm X gets little to no attention during the year/black history month included….that picture is so powerful a meme can’t destroy it, in fact n*ggas were watching Malcolm, by n*ggas I mean the feds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Nb4EHY_2bI&list=PLfsyZuB0i4kcz2vY-SSB3RnCPMZzMR8Gq
I’m not gonna lie and say that Lil Wayne isn’t talented. I don’t like to call people genius, but damn, sometimes he gets pretty close. He has his moments of awareness, but the Emmitt Till line wasn’t one of them. Yeah, you had a few people who stumbled upon some knowledge during that little dust up, but I wonder how many. Far fewer than if he had just done a song called, “Emmitt Till”, on the B side of one of his albums. If he wanted to drop knowledge, he could tweet it. He doesn’t have to be cryptic.
Nicki Minaj… I don’t like her. I’m not even going to pretend to come from a place of objectivity. For that reason, I’m not going to criticize her.
I do have a problem with how n*gga has been pushed into the mainstream. That single cover was a perfect example. When Gwenyth Paltrow sings it, and Madonna refers to her son as one, and we can’t even come to a consensus on what it means, we have pushed it too far.
I grew up in a place where, if a white dude said nigger in any context at all, you knew exactly what time it was. You didn’t have to ask yourself what song he was quoting, and you didn’t have to try to figure out the context. They knew better. It was a clear boundary.
I think things were better that way. I mean, folks are every bit as racist now as they were then, but at least we could call them out on it without them saying, “How come you guys say it all the time…” or, “I was just singing that song…”
That’s how I see it. We didn’t reclaim anything. If we had, we wouldn’t be getting shot in the street by cops and every white dude with a concealed carry permit. If we had, Kanye wouldn’t have beat the hell out of that kid for calling his wife a nigger lover. He wouldn’t have had to. He would have smiled and told dude, “Damned right!” If we reclaimed it, how come we are all so uncomfortable with it? (Let some dude call Nicki Minaj a nigger. See what happens to him.)
We didn’t reclaim it. We just saw a handful of people cash in by dangling it in the face of middle America. They shocked the world more than Elvis’s shaking pelvis. They packaged and sold an almost homogenous image of Black America, and they reaped all of the rewards while the rest of us slid deeper into poverty. They didn’t reclaim nigger. They pimped it out.