JollyRoger 80´s

JollyRoger 80´s

terça-feira, 29 de setembro de 2020

Beyoncé and Jay Z. "APESHIT". Ostentation and personal worship disguised as social criticism

 Artistically overrated Beyoncé and her husband rapper millionaire music producer Jay-Z recorded yet another song together. The video clip of "Apeshit" drew attention because it was recorded at the Louvre Museum in 2018. I think that if it were today the video would be different, because instead of having the dancers performing in the museum, we might have scenes of people destroying the statues and works of art. art. But, let's analyze the audiovisual piece.



In the video we see the couple of black artists, perhaps the richest and most famous today, recording a video at the Louvre, with their backs to all the works and declaiming a "letter" about their social and monetary power. The letter does NOT address a broad issue, but is configured in an outburst / provocation and personal exaltation of both. The video is intended to provoke a provocation

I see many youtubers analyzing and praising the "sealing", the supposedly revolutionary content of the video, the denunciation of a supposed invisibility of the black in the arts (What I think is an exaggerated criticism, if we think about the present), about the theft of art by other peoples perpetrated by evil European whites and on the predominance of European white representation in European arts.

The reason is kind of obvious, isn't it? The works of art, the artists, their styles and intentions represent their historical times. Pretentious BBC reports with a false "denunciation" tone have spoken about the few representations of black people and the whitening of black mythological figures in European paintings. This is like charging white figures in Eastern and African art.


I find it very funny that the couple that always appears on the lists of the richest in show business and that only release songs and videos spewing ostentation and monetary success, highlighting the worst and most despicable side effects of capitalism, continue to insist on this speech of oppressed false and making millions with this opportunistic militancy. The cult of the personality of entertainment professionals has reached alarming levels.

People in general "analyze" the history of mankind in a simplistic, reductionist, Manichean way. We are never totally impartial, but allied to this, the new digital "philosophers" fill their banal opinions and conclusions with resentments, anachronisms and the old Marxist worldview that simplifies all the complex and exciting directions of men in the "absolute truth": oppressors versus oppressed.

It is obvious that any type of art well done should be valued and that the European and American cultural mainstream was / is an organized territory and occupied by "whites". (Which also depends, because if we think about the Hollywood film industry, know that it is an area organized by Jews). But it is also an exaggeration to say that black artists did not have their space, either in the United States or in Brazil, for example.



Hip Hop hits the mainstream

If we can use the concept "black culture" it seems to me that it is more fashionable than ever, despite the black artists of the past, in my opinion, being much better and more relevant than these rappers and pop singers today. For a number of factors, including technological, contemporary artists and entertainment professionals are widely disseminated, widespread. Especially those from the United States.

Today's artists and the permanence of Hip Hop as the most lucrative and influential music genre today are not necessarily about quality. But first with a marketing choice, which already suffered from the loss of popularity of rock and pop music in the late 1990s (represented with boy bands).

Producers feeling the growth of Hip Hop began to gradually bring it into the mainstream, putting rapper stakes in songs by singers like Mariah Carey. Bands like REM had already flirted with rap on "Radio Song" and Michael Jackson partnered with rappers on some songs from the albums Dangerous (1991), History (1995) and Invincible (2001).

From the 2000s onwards, MTV, the TV channel that guided the youth's behavior, began to dedicate a large part of its programming to Hip Hop. Naturally, the style underwent changes compared to the type of sound that was made in the 1980s.


Intentions of the Video Clip

The video clip was intended to provoke a provocation, of course. But was it the best path taken? In my opinion, it would be more valid to record it in a museum full of arts made by blacks from different parts of the world. That is, if the intention was really to divulge the art made by black people and to praise other non-Eurocentric worldviews.

But that was not it. For the intention of this was only personal exaltation of the "artist" couple, financial ostentation, ode to the tacky, to bad taste, to the bad sound and the propagation of this terrible current aesthetic of the phonographic industrial market. And even with a message here and there, a re-reading of a painting by a black artist over there, the images and strong messages are the couple's declaration of power, with the excuse that they can inspire others to achieve the same.

Well, I'm sorry to say, before these two, an extensive list of black artists had already achieved fame, stardom, respect for criticism and, above all, cultural relevance and the immortality of their songs. Something that maybe Beyoncé and especially Jay-Z will never achieve.

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