Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

From Dirty South to potty mouth: Cee Lo Green's black camp freedom project, or, the profaning of an utterly profane form

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0740770x.2014.907643

1748-5819

Danielle C. Heard,

American Political and Social Dynamics

AbstractThis essay interprets the impact of Cee Lo Green's viral promo video for his hit song "Fuck You" in light of his camp-inspired politics of hypervisibility and his reaction to the censoring and branding mechanisms of conventional media. Cee Lo's evolving, career-long project – from his involvement in the original "Dirty South" rap scene, to his eclectic collaborations, soulful solo ventures outside of rap, and, most recently, to an explicit embrace of queer camp – specifically targets the patriarchal, heterosexist, and ableist scripts of black video music by bringing viewers' rapt attention to the way in which his aberrant body does not fit the "brand." Yet Cee Lo engages in the bodily pleasures of sensuality, expressive movement, and the art of adornment typically reserved in the music industry's post-MTV soul genre for the mesomorphic. Without ever publicly abandoning his kinship ties to hip hop, Cee Lo's freedom project is marked by outrageous disidentifications with hip hop's thuggish masculinity and soul's heterosexualized mesomorphy. By disallowing ready identification with exemplary black bodies and rendering normative displays of hypervisible blackness absurd, Cee Lo interrupts the silencing function of visual dominance to make room to revive the sound of soul and its ethical imperatives for contemporary challenges of unfreedom. Moreover, by forcing a skepticism upon the reliability of televisual media, particularly with his unmistakable bodily absence from the viral promotional video, Cee Lo finds a way to bring our attention back to the way that music sounds, and with irrepressible references to soul and funk reminds us of what the music said about freedom: a crucial lesson for twenty-first century hip hop.Keywords: Cee Lo Greenblack campmusic videoqueerfatnesship hop AcknowledgementsI am grateful to a number of people who read and responded to this essay or who otherwise provided me with valuable perspectives on this topic. Not least among these is my brother, music producer Andreao "Fanatic" Heard whose insider presence in the hip-hop industry since the beginning granted me indispensable insight into the forms of body politics that go on behind the scenes and into the history of the shift in emphasis from sonic to visual music production. I am also grateful to the participants of the Center for American Literary Studies inaugural First Book Institute at Penn State University, especially directors Priscilla Wald and Sean Goudie, as well as Tina Chen, Sonya Posmentier, Christen Mucher, and Ted Martin who commented on the longer version of this essay which appears in my forthcoming book manuscript. David L. Leonard and Natalie Léger provided essential feedback on early drafts of this piece.Notes on contributorDanielle Heard is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at University of California, Davis. Her research and teaching interests include African American literature and culture with a focus on black cultural theory and studies of political and cultural identity, as well as American, U.S. ethnic, and postcolonial literatures and cultures, feminism, cultural studies, humor studies, disability studies, and sonic and visual culture. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Mavericks of Masquerade: Comic Strategies of Post-Blackness. She can be reached at dheard@ucdavis.edu.Notes1. All of the section headings of this essay are comprised of lyrics from Cee Lo's songs in the following order: (1) "Big Ole Words"; (2) "I'm Selling Soul"; (3) "Big Ole Words"; (4) "Closet Freak"; (5) "Eldorado Sunrise"; (6) "Bodies"; (7) "I'm Selling Soul"; (8) "Big Ole Words."2. Working with this distinction made by Gilroy, I will use "Freedom" (capitalized) to refer to the concept and project of freedom associated with the soul era and "freedom" (lowercase) to refer more broadly to the generic term.3. Here I riff on Baker's enduring description of the strategies in Afromodernist culture which he calls "mastery of form" and "deformation of mastery."4. I am indebted to Nicole Fleetwood's theoretical attention to black "hypervisibility" and strategies of presenting "excess" black (female) flesh.5. Holland says that Gilroy "moved against a faction of queer theorizing that holds no brief for the 'future' – embodied by the figure of the (racial) child and therefore heteronormative."6. By "flesh" here I invoke Baby Suggs' spiritual command to love the abused black "flesh that needs to be loved" in Toni Morrison's Beloved as well as Hortense Spillers' theorization of the "body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside." I am also thinking of the way in which the term "flesh" is a favorite term in critical fat studies and fat-positive discourses. For an exuberant demonstration of the latter, see for example Koppelman's collection of fat women's accounts of loving their flesh. In all of these, "flesh" and the project of loving it is encircled by feminist imperatives, and as I explore below, so it is with Cee Lo.7. For the most part, I will refer to the artist by the version of his stage name which is most commonly used in the media as of this date: Cee Lo (Green).8. Keith Harris (Citation2008) explains the pressure put upon D'Angelo to maintain his physique in chapter five, " 'Untitled': D'Angelo and the Visualization of the Black Male Body." Conversations with Andreao "Fanatic" Heard also helped me to learn about this narrative well known in the contemporary black music industry.9. An extended discussion of recent work by social scientists looking at the intersection of masculinity and fat studies can be found in longer version of this essay in my forthcoming book.10. See for example Meyer (Citation1994) wherein the author begins by reminding us that "Camp, or queer parody, has become an activist strategy for organizations such as ACT UP and Queer Nation, as well as a focus in utopian movements like the Radical Faeries. As practiced by contemporary groups, Camp is both political and critical" (1).11. Reflecting on the Altman quote, Dyer uncritically describes soul in relation to blackness and camp.