Friday, May 11, 2007
yeeeeaayyuuuhhh
Here's a blog I promised to deliver.
Have you ever seen Lil Jon without his sunglasses on? Would we even know what he would look like if he didn't have some sunglasses and dreads or head covering on? I don't know bout other folks, but it's been bothering me.
This is not a post to hate on mainstream hip hop, crunk music or Lil Jon himself. I'm attempting to explore the importance/significance of attaching a material item to one's identity as a social marker. I'm just gunna type this through...
Lil Jon's sunglasses. An attempt at setting himself apart from all of the other rapper/producers that feature themselves on others' one-word titled tracks? Maybe they're prescripted? Perhaps he feels the need to always keep his eyes out of the sun and out of the flashy-flashy lights brought on by the paparazzi? Who knows? (If you do, let me know.)
My point is, a lot of the emphasis on his image, and other celebs' images, seems to be based on his sunglasses that have become one of his most salient facial features. Strip away the dreads, the grill, the head coverings and the sunglasses and we will have a regular Black man whose image will no longer be recalled into memory. Not because his race automatically makes him insignificant or that he falls into the background of our society's political agenda, but because our language has slipped into succumbing to oversimplification. Because the traces of his image in your memory will be erased and the casual conversation, these days, doesn't consist of vivid imagery or exact mathematics measuring the darkness of skin, the roundness of face, the outlines and angles of one's bone structure or any complex phenotype. Our words and syntax unfortunately don't account for what does count or what should count. Not to harp on language as an insufficient form of vernacular, but if we are made to use words as a primary source of communication, then why aren't they enough? It seems as if we almost have to lend ourselves to material items to differentiate ourselves from each other. As if we are forced to extend our personalities in order to stake our claims, faces and spaces so that others can try to figure out how to reach, describe and vibe with us. Yet, we give ourselves to mass produced objects making ourselves mass produced objects.
I'm not imploring Lil Jon to take his sunglasses off. Maybe I'm even requesting that he sleep with them and permanently keep them on at all hours or staple them to the sides of his head. But then cultures like Hip Hop become mass produced, ephemeral or even devalued. While sunglasses attain and permit a status of more meaning and become sad symbols and representations as something superficial.
You SEE what I'm SAYIN?
x_magsalita.
Labels: hip hop, Lil Jon, materialism
// posted by Janice @ 11:18 PM 
Comments:
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yoooo...
?uestion... that link you left on your comment, were you moving your blog to wordpress, or was it just a coincidence that the site actually existed.
and... good critical points on juano pequeno... but if you've ever seen the guy without shades and seen his socket poppin eyes, it might make a little sense:
http://img42.photobucket.com/albums/v128/kw1973/boardimages/liljon.jpg
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?uestion... that link you left on your comment, were you moving your blog to wordpress, or was it just a coincidence that the site actually existed.
and... good critical points on juano pequeno... but if you've ever seen the guy without shades and seen his socket poppin eyes, it might make a little sense:
http://img42.photobucket.com/albums/v128/kw1973/boardimages/liljon.jpg
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