Hick-Hop Hooray? “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,” Musical Genre, and the Misrecognitions of Hybridity
2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/15295036.2010.517778
ISSN1529-5036
Autores Tópico(s)Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
ResumoAbstract This paper takes the country music song and video "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" as a case study of the deeply ambivalent potentials of hybridity in contemporary culture. "Badonkadonk" was celebrated by some as joining hip hop and country music to create a "hybrid," a type of cultural text valorized in various intellectual and popular discourses as both embodying and advancing progressive social values such as antiracism and antiemperialism. This essay, however, uses close reading and an account of "Badonkadonk's" context within country music's generic selfconstruction to expose the conflicted nature of the text's hybridity, which includes substantial reactionary and essentialist elements. "Badonkadonk" caters to American culture's growing embrace of hybridity while continuing twentieth century efforts to downplay country music's racially hybrid roots. This instance highlights problems in concepts such as hybridity and cosmopolitanism. This includes the crucial distinction between consciously hybrid works of art or culture, and the less consciously hybrid objects that emerge "naturally" from the mixing of cultures. The rise of selfconsciously hybrid culture and the celebration of hybridity have been partially enabled by contemporary academic theories of hybridity's progressivism. The essay concludes by highlighting some of the strategic and philosophical shortcomings of such selfconscious hybridism. Keywords: HybridityWhitenessHip-HopCountry musicParodyCosmopolitanismGenre Acknowledgement This essay was originally conceived under the supervision of Timothy Havens, and received substantial guidance from Eric King Watts. Thanks also go out to the large number of reviewers who have provided invaluable comments. Updates about Dr. Morris' work can be found on Twitter at davidzmorris. Notes 1. Although a version of "Badonkadonk" actually appeared on Adkins' previous album, Songs About Me, the remixed version that became a smash hit was released on Dangerous Man. 2. Gilroy is particularly troubled by black nationalisms, but I here treat his stance as more generally applicable. 3. Because of the remarkable effectiveness of this video in expanding upon the themes inherent in the song, and because so much of the song's success seems to have been fueled by the video, I will treat the combination as a single text [e.g. "the video"]. 4. "Dance" versions of the song were widely distributed to cheerleading teams and nightclubs by Adkins' label. (Burch, 2006) 5. A few recent hip hop hits and their BPMs: Nelly, "Air Force One," 83 BPM; Nas, "Made you look'," 96 BPM; Jay-Z, 99 Problems," 95 BPM; T.I., "Why You Wanna," 97 BPM. 6. I stop short of saying "exclusively white" for two reasons. First, a black man in a cowboy hat appears once, for a scant few frames, about halfway through the video. It is necessary to proceed through the video one frame at a time to see this clearly—he is the ghost of a dead child, erupting into the vacation video of a family working to forget him. Second, some of the women in the video seem to occupy the phenotypic realm between whiteness and something more ambiguous, reinforcing the video's overall feminization of difference. 7. For some idea of just how deeply rooted this conception of whiteness is, see Samuel Richardson's 1740 novel Pamela, whose hero is a reformed rake whose moral superiority is based not on his lack of sexual desire, but on his mastery of it. 8. Although for just one glimpse at the complexity suppressed even by this duality, see Lewis. 9. Green's article nonetheless "remains a touchstone of country music scholarship," and as recently as 2003 was the inspiration for a conference and online archive that shared its title (Breaden 2004 Breaden , C. 2004 . Hillbilly music, source and symbol . Retrieved June 11, 2009, from http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/sfc1/hillbilly/HTML/Exhibit/exhibit01_Home.htm [Google Scholar]). 10. Appiah's account of cosmopolitanism primarily posits it as an ethical stance—a belief that "we have obligations to others ... that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind [or] citizenship" (2006, p. xv). Appiah directly equates this to Christian universalism, approvingly citing Paul's declaration that "Ye are all one in Christ Jesus." (See also Boyarin, 1997 Boyarin, D. 1997. A radical Jew: Paul and the politics of identity, Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]; Badiou, 2003 Badiou, A. 2003. Saint Paul: The foundation of universalism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [Google Scholar].) But, beneath this ethical stance, the adoption of which requires a choice, is something natural and 'real'—Appiah frequently but subtly claims that the world simply "is" a hybrid place, a status that precedes cosmopolitan ethics. For instance, the common ground that makes mutual understanding possible "is one result of the constant contact across societies produced by our travelling habits and trade in goods, both physical and symbolic, that now connects us all" (2006, p. 97). Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid MorrisDavid Morris is a researcher at Tokyo University of Fine Arts
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