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THE GHETTO FABULOUS AESTHETIC IN CONTEMPORARY BLACK CULTURE

2006; Routledge; Volume: 20; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502380600973978

1466-4348

Roopali Mukherjee,

Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

Abstract With diamonds, mink, and champagne, black popular culture has, in recent years, made an audacious spectacle of conspicuous commodity consumption. Commonly termed ‘bling’, the ‘ghetto fabulous’ aesthetic of these flashy displays has prompted vociferous debate about the cultural meanings of contemporary black consumerism. Is it pathological? Subversive? Deviant? Since the nineties when it first appeared, the ghetto fabulous aesthetic has left its mark on a range of cultural productions from music videos to ghetto lit, fashion to film, walking a familiar line from defiance to bowdlerization, from raucous wild child of the streets to co-opted product tagline. This essay explores a new cinematic genre within this repertoire, the ghetto fabulous genre of black film that has emerged to variously castigate and congratulate black investments in ghetto fabulous bling. Appearing at the close of the twentieth century, the genre reflects key shifts in the political imaginary and economic transformations of the ‘post-soul’ era. Drawing on two such texts, Barbershop (Tim Story 2002) and Barbershop 2: Back In Business (Kevin Rodney Sullivan 2004), studio films with all-black casts and directed by young African-American filmmakers, this analysis focuses on their engagement with contemporary cultural tensions over class and consumerism, their narrative containment of a transformative black politics, and their reconciliation of post-soul priorities with hegemonic discourses of the market. I argue that ghetto fabulous films are quintessential products of the post-soul era, their allegorical priorities in pointed accord with neo-liberal individualism and the promise of class transcendence. Performing crucial work of hegemonic cooptation, these texts offer archetypes of the ghetto entrepreneur and black enterprise itself as a salvational sphere for the urban poor. Reining in unruly desires, these texts draw working-class African Americans into the capitalist fold, articulating a post-soul politics that preaches black acquiescence with hegemonic discourses of advanced capitalism. Keywords: black popular culturefilm analysispost-soul politicscommodity consumptionblack consumerismadvanced capitalismrace and class Notes 1. There is some disagreement over where and with whom the term ‘bling bling’ originated. Danielle Weekes, writer for The Voice (London) credits New Orleans rapper BG (Baby Gangsta) with coining the term in 1999 (3–9 November Citation2003, p. 3). MTV reporter, Minya Oh agrees, explaining that the term originated with the New Orleans rap family, Cash Money Millionaires between 1997 and 1998, and came into national awareness as the title of a song by Cash Money artist BG (http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1471629/2003043/bg.jhtm?headlines=true). Others suggest it was Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs, formerly Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs, who first used the term to describe his personal style, a combination of ‘white Rolls-Royce, pink champagne, cream Versace suit, gold and more gold, dark shades, minders, and a pimp's swagger’ (Shepard Citation2000). 2. In recent years, scholars in American, cultural, and ethnic studies have gathered in consensus that the post-soul moment marks an important break from the civil rights era that preceded it. For detail on these shifts see, Bonilla-Silva Citation2001, Boyd Citation2003, Dillard Citation2001, George Citation1992, George Citation2004, Goldberg Citation1997, Mukherjee Citation2006, Neal, Citation2002. 3. The iconic ‘hip hop mogul’ of recent years includes black performers like Jay Z, Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs, Russell Simmons, Oprah Winfrey and most recently, Kanye West, whose ascension to corporate boardrooms has played notably on the covers of business magazines and the pages of major news dailies. For scholars like Christopher Holmes Smith, one of the keys to the popularity of the hip hop mogul is the way in which s/he appeals to the ‘power of socially competitive consumption as a viable mode of civic participation and personal fulfillment’ (2003, p. 71). Emblematic of the aspirations of a largely disenfranchised constituency, Holmes Smith suggests, the hip hop mogul serves as a visual signifier of the ‘good life’, normalizing black political discourse with ‘growth-mediated forms of social uplift’ instead of ‘support-led communal development blueprints from the civil rights era’ (2003, p. 71). Thus, the hip hop mogul, the rap star, the sports legend – and cinematic archetypes of the ghetto entrepreneur as this analysis proposes – are of a piece, each proffering a constellation of semiotic clues to how blackness works within capitalist projects, how African American cultural icons, even those that seem opposed to one another, become crucial to contemporary capitalist discipline. 4. A significant body of scholarly work has followed in recent years to explore the semiotic labors and ideological appeal of these texts. See, for instance, Basu Citation1998, Bynoe Citation2004, Donalson Citation2003, Christensen Citation1991, Davé et al. Citation2005, Forman & Neal Citation2004, Gabbard Citation2004, Grant Citation2004, Gubar Citation1997, Hunt Citation2005, Kelley Citation1994, Kelley Citation1997, Kitwana Citation2002, Maharaj Citation1997, Massood 2002, McBride Citation2005, Neal 2003, Pough Citation2004, Reed Citation1999, Smith-Shomade Citation2002, Watkins Citation1998, White Citation1995, White & White Citation1998, Zook Citation1999. 5. For example, Continental Airlines and the Hongkong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) have in recent years produced advertising campaigns that turn on tongue-in-cheek references to elements of the bling aesthetic. The HSBC ad, for instance, ran for several weeks in early 2005, and featured an image of a demure South Asian bride, bejeweled with traditional gold ornaments from head to waist. The caption read, ‘Bling Speaks In Many Languages’, suggesting, by analogy, that so do HSBC's global operations. It is significant that the ad was not targeted narrowly to an inner-city audience. To the contrary, it ran in a variety of markets, including on billboards in South Asian neighborhoods in Queens, New York. Thus, the bling aesthetic enjoys a wide voyeuristic appeal across class and ethnic categories. 6. It should be noted that my emphasis in this essay remains on analyzing these phenomena within the racial context of the contemporary United States. While scholars of global media have explored the currency of black popular culture across international media markets (Clarke & Thomas Citation2006, Havens Citation2006, Stovall Citation2005) and the work of blackness in smoothing US global expansion in the era of late capitalism (Lull Citation2000), the analysis I present here focuses on the specific cultural and historical contexts of the neo-liberal nineties in the United States. Given the worldwide reach of US media productions, this analysis opens up crucial questions about the global spectacle of black consumptive excess – how it plays in other corners of the world, what it signifies as well as what it glosses over – which, while I do address them in a longer, book-length manuscript currently in preparation on this topic, remain secondary to this particular essay. 7. For detail on the relationship between industry economics and black filmmaking over this period, see Jesse Algeron Rhines’ Black Film, White Money (Citation1996). Rhines explains that starting in the mid-seventies, a series of ‘structural crises’ affecting the major studios created the conditions necessary for a ‘renaissance in black filmmaking’ that enabled young black filmmakers to experience an unprecedented degree of autonomy in their craft including the kinds of films they could choose to make. By this account, the emergence of ‘blaxploitation’ films in the late seventies, like ‘ghetto-centric’ films in the nineties and the ‘soul drama’ and ‘ghetto fabulous’ genres that followed, each is explained by imbalances between product supply and product demand that created episodic gluts in black-oriented films in past decades. 8. These included F. Gary Gray's Friday (1995), Robert Townsend's B.A.P.S. (1997), Lionel C. Martin's How To Be a Player (1997), Jeff Pollack's Booty Call (1997), Michael Martin's I Got the Hook Up (1998), Les Mayfield's Blue Streak (1999), Raja Gosnell's Big Momma's House (2000), Steve Carr's Next Friday (2000), Tim Story's Barbershop (2000), Mark Raboy's Friday After Next (2002), Richard Benjamin's Marci X (2003), Adam Shankman's Bringing Down the House (2003), Kevin Rodney Sullivan's Barbershop 2: Back In Business (2004), Lance Rivera's The Cookout (2004), Keenan Ivory Wayans’ White Chicks (2004), Jessy Terrero's Soul Plane (2004), Tim Story's Taxi (2004), and Billy Woodruff's Beauty Shop (2005). 9. Oprah Winfrey sold this property in December 2004. She now lives on a 42-acre oceanfront estate in Montecito, California, south of Santa Barbara (Zwecker Citation2004). 10. This is ostensibly an important message for the Barbershop series for it repeats in the opening sequences of the sequel. Here, we find Calvin in the private storeroom in the back of the shop fussing over Coley, his two-year old son, as he dispenses pithy strains of street advice to the gurgling infant: One thing you're gonna constantly have to deal with in your life and that's broke-ass black folk. Now they gonna be hard to spot at first, ‘cuz they gonna be dressed real nice. But don't let that fool you, ‘cuz the nicer they dress, usually, the broker they are. 11. Simply put, anything that is produced by labor in capitalist societies is a commodity. The value-relation between things (physical goods) and commodities (the products of labor) is skewed in such societies so that commodities can have absolutely no connection to their physical properties. Thus, the market price of a commodity such as, pieces of the Berlin Wall that sold in auction, apartment buildings in Manhattan, salaries paid to professional athletes and film stars, designer clothes, shoes, accessories, works of art, and so on, need have no relation to the physical value of the product.Products are thus ‘fetishized’ when they become commodities, which means that they take on the characteristics of fetish objects – objects with magical powers, things we revere for their perceived symbolic, historical, mythical value. These are objects that enjoy a perceived aesthetic value, a ‘must-have’ quality that bears no relation to its material value; thus, the material and labor costs of constructing a Gucci handbag as opposed to the retail price of such a fashion accessory. Market forces of demand rely on the phenomena of commodity fetishism for once a commodity achieves fetishistic status, its demand soars and consequently, so does its market price (Berger Citation1995, pp. 41–70). 12. Calvin's transformation is complete by the opening sequences of the sequel where we find that the protagonist has turned the limping barbershop into a vibrant neighborhood business. Gone are his basement quick-rich schemes as well as his tax arrears and loan burdens. Instead, the newly painted façade announces that the shop is now ‘Calvin Jr’.s Barbershop’, and along with a new car or two, he has also managed to buy the neighboring storefront that he rents out as a beauty parlor for women. 13. These ideological labors of the ghetto fabulous genre paint a relatively bleak picture of the potential of black popular cultural expression for rupturing contemporary neo-liberal hegemonies of ‘individuation’ and ‘responsibilization’. While a broader view of black expressive culture that for example, pursues comparisons between mainstream and underground hip hop would reveal a vibrant arena of parody, camp, and radical critique geared to unseating the system of dominant values that black enterprise and responsible consumerism signify, the ghetto fabulous genre itself presents few opportunities for such counter-hegemonic readings. Rather, the racial critiques we find in these cinematic texts emerge as doggedly earnest and didactic, filmic echoes of the career trajectories of rap stars Ice Cube and Queen Latifah (star of the third film in the Barbershop series) that trace narratives of black embourgeoisement and political docility. 14. These include historic works such works as Charlie L. Russell's Five On the Black Hand Side (1967), adapted for the screen in 1974, Langston Hughes’ Little Ham in Five Plays (1968), Richard Wright's Lawd Today (1969), Lonne Elder's Ceremonies in Dark Old Men (1970), and the short-lived black sit-com, That's My Mama, which premiered on the ABC television network in September 1974. For detail on the historical significance of the barbershop in black literature, see Harris, T. (Autumn 1979) ‘The Barbershop in Black Literature’, Black American Literature Forum, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 112–118. Thornton, H. (October 1979) ‘The Barbershop and Beauty Parlor in Afro-American Literature’, Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 14, pp. 76–83. 15. As explored by Vorris Nunley (Citation2004, pp. 221–241), spaces like beauty shops, women's clubs, and barbershops function much like ‘hush harbors’ of black history, hidden and quasi-public spheres where vernacular knowledges, rhetorical forms, and subjectivities circulate and emerge. The concept has its origins in the antebellum South, places where enslaved African Americans gathered in secret to practice Christianity or communal forms of worship, and to sing religious spirituals undetected by nearby slave owners. 16. Calvin's transformation is also keenly nostalgic in the sense that it reconstructs the archetype of the ‘old head’ as Elijah Anderson has suggested (Citation1990). Comparable with its female counterpart, ‘the community mother’, the old head was ‘a man of stable means who believed in hard work, family life, and the church’, and ‘whose acknowledged role was to teach, support, encourage, and in effect, socialize young men to meet their responsibilities regarding work, family, the law, and common decency’ (1990, pp. 3–4). Where Eddie and Calvin Palmer Sr. are, from the start, nostalgic exemplars of such ‘old heads’, benevolent spirits who watch over the shop and guide the younger generation of workers, the Barbershop films focus on the young Calvin's metamorphosis into this ‘role of surrogate father to those who need attention, care and moral support’ (p. 3).As Jane Jacobs (Citation1993), Marshall Berman (Citation1982), and others have argued however, the idea of such a ‘public character’, an imagined figure of prestige and authority who holds the keys to moral and ethical discipline, relies on a romanticized vision of interpersonal trust and moral cohesion as having once prevailed in African American communities. The danger of such romanticism, as these scholars suggest, is that it imagines a return to ‘better times’ that may never have existed at all. Moreover, and as a consequence, it pushes for a specific set of reactionary choices, insisting upon hetero-normative family values, hierarchical gender roles, and entrenched generational and class stratifications. 17. These reinterpretations deploy elements of the ‘superfly’ persona of the blaxploitation genre of the seventies together with the enduring ‘pimp aesthetic’ that has returned in recent years in hip hop videos but with a crucial defanging of these archetypes so that the heroes of the ghetto fabulous genre, far from posing any ideological threat, instead serve to reinforce dominant hegemonies of neo-liberal responsibilization and capitulation to capitalist endeavor.