Hype Williams as Cultural Animator: The 90s Hip-Hop Music Video as Eye-Witness to Conspicuous Consumption and New Modalities of Globalized Tastemaking
Written by Aimée Tian
Edited by Sam Perelmuter & Sophia Kamps
Introduction
The emergence of the hip-hop music genre from the underground and into the mainstream did not occur until the late 1980s, when its focus shifted greatly from one of production to one of consumption [1]. What emerged as a mode of political resistance out of the Bronx in the 1970s has now become a largely commercialized enterprise in late capitalism. This shift in attitude stemmed from—in large part—the neoliberalist desires to reconstruct and repackage hip-hop culture into a more tolerable field of consumption, and thus marketable to a wider range of audiences: namely, the young and white buying audience [2].
Within the constructs of this current millennial age, mainstream hip-hop sensibilities have since become almost entirely emancipated from the struggles of disenfranchised inner-city black and Latinx youth who pioneered the movement by rapping about their lived experiences and the socio-economic divide in the South Bronx. Today, hip-hop culture is increasingly defined by the successful marketing of a certain ‘lifestyle,’ an accentuation of elitist ideologies, with a market emphasis placed on the purchase and acquisition of luxury products and commodities to connote self-worth and elevated subjectivity. Building off of the previous scholarship of hip-hop theorists Krista Thompson, Murray Forman, and Jeff Chang, my paper will explore the ways in which African-American director and producer Hype Williams’ mobilization of the 90s music video sought to elevate both hip-hop sensibilities and the status of the black body as a whole.
The 90s music video emerged at a rather critical juncture; as a suitable medium for the widespread dissemination of the hip-hop genre into the mainstream. Acting as a vehicle largely responsible for the integration of ‘bling culture’ into hip-hop sensibilities, it also connoted a turn toward the procurement of luxury objects as an extension of the self. In performing a comparative analysis of Afrofuturism to Retrofuturism, I will examine five media products realized by Hype Williams as a conduit for communicating these cultural exchanges. It is my assertion that through establishing a signature directorial style rooted in subversive tastemaking, Williams sought to challenge and destabilize the Western hegemony of power-as-taste through his creative output.
The Birth of Hip-Hop Studies
Figure 1: MTV’s Yo! MTV Raps, (1988-95)
The field of Hip-Hop Studies as an academic discipline is still relatively new. In the second edition of That’s the Joint!, editors Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (2012, 2) reflect on their introduction of the term in the first iteration of the book, noting that they brought in this new terminology “with full awareness that no such designation or discipline actually existed within the academy,” [3]. Today, although it continues to present a pointed challenge to higher academia, Hip-Hop Studies has emerged as a helpful new modality for examining contemporary cultural production. It is important that we recognize the cultural impact of hip-hop as a key influence in contemporary North American technocultures, for “when we consider hip hop’s origins and purpose, we understand it is a revolutionary cultural force that was intended to challenge the status quo and the greater American culture,” [4].
At its core, the field of Hip-Hop Studies draws from a rhetoric in scholarship (and criticism) that is incredibly interdisciplinary and intersectional. Here, I approach the term ‘intersectionality’ following Patricia Hill Collins, who defines it as an analytical framework for thinking through the multiple axes of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity and age, and how they might equally contribute to a person’s experience [5]. In this regard, Hip-Hop Studies provides an interesting segue in thinking about the praxis of intersecting identities and bodies that are often umbrellaed under the unifying scope of hip-hop cultural production.
A Restructuring of Western Cultural Hegemonies of Taste/Tastemaking?
Figure 2: BET’s Rap City, (1989-08)
As Pierre Bourdieu posits in his 1979 study Distinction, “aesthetic disposition and consumer preference are means of expressing, impressing, and maintaining cultural dominance,”[6]. Rooted in access, exposure, and education, this framework works to function under classist systems of social hierarchy and cultural dominance. Such hegemonic structures of elitism often “depend on sustaining the notion of taste as self-evident,” [7] marking anyone who does not fit into this framework as ‘uneducated,’ and consequently—‘distasteful.’ To further unpack this theory, what Bourdieu is saying is that notions of ‘taste’ are constructed through the possession of power and capital. The ruling class become ‘tastemakers’ by establishing a set of value-judgements that are then accepted and absorbed by mass society. The imposition of taste, while promoting the cultural values of some, inevitably silences the practices of others—a staging of class warfare through ‘symbolic violence,’ [8]. In America, class hierarchies are inextricably tied up with racial hierarchies, and thus, hip-hop culture has frequently been disregarded or diminished in the past because of its close alignment with African-American and Latinx communities.
In the context of the twenty-first century, however, Bourdieu’s observations are not so clear-cut. Insofar that hip-hop music was inaugurated by ‘the streets’ and the ‘urban underclass,’ “some of the most popular rappers are now part of the ‘leisure class’ and serve as tastemakers for the entire globe,” [9]. The ability to influence, to lead, and to eventually shape the public opinion becomes conflated with the ability to purchase, to acquire, and to consume. This observation functions as a testament to the economic restructuring that has since occurred in the post-industrial economy, whereby the black working class has been left with little-to-no options for social mobility, yet the Western cultural imperative for shopping has continued to escalate [10]. In this vein, “the ideology of black capitalism as a solution to black poverty has resurged,” writes sociologist Margaret Hunter. What has since emerged as a politics of representation is one that is completely stipulated through market exchange. North American popular culture routinely focuses on the definition and/or construction of identity through consumption and the harvesting of luxury lifestyle products and brands. As Krista Thompson observes:
In the 1980s, as hip-hop gained visibility and commercial success nationally and globally, rappers increasingly turned their attention from politics to pleasure and focused on earthly and bodily gratification, hedonism, and even nihilism […] [H]ip-hop artists in the postsoul period unabashedly celebrated materialism or a ‘radical consumerism,’ draping themselves in symbols of wealth from gold chains and medallions to all manner of brand-name goods [11].
More than ever, hip-hop music videos began to zero in on its focus of pushing “mass consumerism on people as a form of escapism from socioeconomic reality,”[12]. In the context of the twenty-first century, mainstream rap has become more or less a “performance of worthiness that can be read through hip-hop artists’ alignment with luxury,” [13].
In another lens, however, hip-hop music can also be regarded as a site for ‘mass distraction,’[14] harnessed and exploited by “larger external corporate entities operating outside of hip-hop’s proximate spheres,” and also “deliberately merged with the larger industrial operations of the media and fashion institutions by hip-hop-savvy entrepreneurs, many of whom were themselves participants and fans,”[15]. The appropriation of hip-hop from a mode of resistance to a product of commercialized mass media is indicative of a greater social problem: the global ‘white-washing’ of hip-hop, so to speak. This troubling practice predicates the question of whether racialized peoples’ continued efforts to self-fashion and self-determine can really make a lasting impact on the greater hegemonic structures of society, especially when those efforts are constantly being rewritten and appropriated by outside communities. The performance of worthiness, in itself, conflicts with establishing a degree of separation between the self and the overarching hegemony-of-taste.
The Commodity Status of Blackness in Late Capitalism: ‘Bling’ as Subversive Taste in the Global Contemporary Marketplace
Figure 3: Belly (1998) Dir. Hype Williams.
The more recent trend of hyper-commodification within the visual culture of hip-hop signifies a turn towards conspicuous consumption, whereby both bodies of producer and consumer are bound up with the acquisition and display of material objects to signify wealth and success. In observing this now-prolific habit of expenditure, hip-hop culture becomes closely associated to bling culture in accentuating the commodity status of blackness and black bodies [16]. ‘Bling’ is used here to signify the flashy, ostentatious, and often elaborate physical accoutrement and accessories that are used, worn, or carried by performers in hip-hop culture. Such examples might include the use of bejeweled tooth caps or ‘grills,’ diamond earrings, chain necklaces, or other forms of ‘rap jewelry.’ The American rapper B.G. is credited as one of the first to coin the ideophone, defining it as “the imaginary sound produced when light reflects off a diamond,”[17]. Bling cultures also connote a state “between hypervisibility and blinding invisibility, between visual surplus and disappearance. Bling signifies the physiological—even painful—limits of vision. Bling also illuminates an approach to visibility, in which optical and blinding effect has its own representational value,”[18]. The use of ‘bling’ within mainstream contemporary hip-hop culture can be observed under two functionalities: both as subversive representation, and as a mediation of object-relations in lieu of subject-relations, realized through consumption and power.
Figure 4: Missy Elliott, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” (1997)
Author Greg Tate writes in Flyboy in the Buttermilk that “perhaps the supreme irony of black American existence is how broadly black people debate the question of cultural identity among themselves while getting branded as a cultural monolith by those who would deny [them] the complexity and complexion of a community, let alone a nation,”[19]. Desires to adorn the self with bling and ‘heavy metal jewelry’ arguably come from underlying motivations of African-Americans to assert the self, to self-aggrandize, and self-fashion within a system that constantly disavowals their very existence [20]. Hip-hop jewelry, then, came to be indicative of a (re-)picturing of power under representational attempts of remixing, or ‘racing’ art history [21]. I argue that the incorporation of bling into hip-hop visuality envisions a form of ‘seeing unto the self’ as ‘being/becoming a new self.’
Afrofuturist Aesthetic as a New Apparatus for Representation
The ontological relationship between ‘seeing’ and ‘being’ necessitates a deeper understanding of alternative or non-normative modes of representation, rooted in practices that oppose the dominant regime. One way of subverting the harmful and pervasive cultural apparatuses of colonial America is to re-imagine a future (or past) that allows for marginalized voices to reverberate and make an impact—in this case, through a mode of self-representation grounded in the 90s music video production. Here, my argument turns toward a study of Afrofuturist aesthetics, engaging with Kodwo Eshun’s idea of producing counter-histories to normative history [22]. Thereorist Mark Dery defines the term ‘Afrofuturism’ as a practice of “African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future,” [23]. The cultural aesthetic of Afrofuturism serves as a productive methodology for rewriting and disrupting the systems of cultural dominance and symbolic violences enacted onto the bodies of African-American and Latinx individuals.
While Erik Steinskog’s introduction to his book Afrofuturisms and Black Sound Studies serves as a rather apt tool in developing a deeper understanding of this cultural phenomena, my own use of this literature will extend beyond just a sonic lens, to encompass the techno-visual. I am cognizant that while I will be in large part drawing from literature on sound studies, I do not wish to conflate or reduce African-American identity to merely genealogies of sound. As the cultural critic Michele Wallace has warned, “drawing parallels or alignments between Afro-American music and everything else cultural among Afro-Americans, stifles and represses most of the potential for understanding the visual in Afro-American culture,” [24]. Thus, my successive analysis on the work of American director Hype Williams will be, in large part, grounded in the visual—in particular, his use of light and cinematography to play off of the ‘bling’ and ornamentation worn by his subjects.
The Rise of New Black Technocultures? Hype Williams and the 90s Music Video
Figure 5: Opening sequence. Kanye West feat. Rihanna and Kid Cudi, “All of the Lights” (2011)
As Krista Scott has observed, “hip-hop came of age as music television reached [maturation],” [25]. Through the ubiquity of globalized digital consumption (moderated by channels such as MTV and BET) (fig. 1 and fig. 2), the hip-hop music video rose to prominence in the 1990s. This medium of representation allowed for the formation of new black professions and spaces, where personal and social narratives could be recrafted and retold outside of the narrow lenses of neocolonialist ideology [26]. One outstanding name within this field is the American music video director Hype Williams, whose cinematic style is emblematic of the 90s saturation of R&B and hip-hop into the mainstream, defining an entire era of popular culture during the turn of the new millennium.
Born Harold Williams in the Hollis, Queens neighbourhood of New York City to working-class parents, Hype Williams grew up aspiring to follow after fellow New York legacies Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring [27]. During his youth, he frequented as a graffiti artist, adopting the name ‘Hype’ as his chosen moniker. In the late 80s, he attended Adelphi University to study film, and thus marked his turn to videography as his medium of choice [28]. His production company, Big Dog Films, was born in 1993, and in 1994, he made his first big directorial debut with the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Can It All Be So Simple,” [29] Williams quickly rose to fame and garnered widespread media acclaim, taking home the 1996 Billboard Music Video Award for Best Director of the Year, the 1997 NAACP Image Award, and the 1998 MTV Video Music Award for Best Rap Video, among many others.
His prolific curriculum vitae is composed of collaborations with some of hip-hop’s most notable names, including (but certainly not limited to) Missy Elliott, Tupac Shakur, The Notorious B.I.G., Aaliyah, and Kanye West. Williams’ work has frequently been characterized as visionary and avant-garde; commended for his cinematic acumen and use of “fish-eye lenses, wide ratio shots, tracking shots, and starkly contrasting colour palettes,” [30]. His music videos provide sleek, cinematic and stylized visuals, often engaging with the cultural aesthetics of Afrofuturism [31]. There is a distinct presence of robotics and non-human entities in his short fantasias, and his prismatic choice of neon colour palettes and manipulation of light help produce a ‘dazzling shine’ that further frames the black bodies of his subjects with new ontologies of representation. In Williams’ music videos, light-play is frequently juxtaposed against bling, pointing to “how light and its visual effect have informed notions of value, of social worth, and of power and prestige,” [32]. Through his directorial work and beyond, Williams takes on the identity of the new global tastemaker, by surfacing desires to deconstruct the lineation between high and low, bridging the perceived gap between the streets and the art space. The dexterity of his storytelling lies in his chosen techniques of cinematography, grounded in aesthetic choice. Williams’ artistic production helps encourage the new hip-hop generation to develop a non-conforming sense of self-hood that is continuously remixed, and always expanding.
Figure 6: Opening sequence. Enter the Void (2009) Dir. Gaspar Noé.
The ‘Auteurship’ of Hype Williams: Bling and Spectacularity
Bling, unlike normalized disembodied and monocular modes of specularity, highlights other bodily forms of perception and the blinding limits of visibility [33].
—Krista Thompson, “The Sound of Light”
Belly (1998)
Figure 7: Kanye. Kanye West feat. Rihanna and Kid Cudi, “All of the Lights” (2011)
In 1998, Williams released his first feature-length film, a dark Scorsese-esque crime drama entitled Belly. Starring rappers DMX and Nas, alongside Method Man, Taral Hicks and R&B singer T-Boz, the film was said to be “visually compelling, but did not make a lot of logical sense,” [34]. It was panned by critics and cast off as a “by-the-numbers story about the fall and possible redemption of two longtime friends and drug dealers,” [35] while Williams himself was knocked for his incapability of “barely [staging] a coherent scene,” [36]. Despite its negative criticisms, however, Belly has amassed a noteworthy cult following, spurring a multitude of discussions online on the considerable cultural contributions it left behind.
For the supervision of Belly’s costume design, Williams commissioned long-time friend and collaborator, stylist June Ambrose, who has been commended for her visionary contributions to the world of fashion. For many, Belly’s cultural capital was imminent. As one blogger explains: “[the film] is valuable because it captured so much of the ethos of the time [...It is] a product of the environment and time and culture,” [37]. Digital fashion platforms Grailed, SSENSE and Complex have all since produced retrospective feature editorials on the costuming and cinematography of Belly, applauding the film for being “precisely of its time and ahead of it all at once,” [38].
The opening sequence to the film reads like that of a 90s music video, and is soundtracked to Soul II Soul’s classic anthem “Back To Life.” In this scene, Williams conceives a slow-motion armed robbery and shooting under ultraviolet lights. DMX and Nas are shown arriving at a strip club, their coloured contacts reflecting like cat eyes under the glare of the blacklight (fig. 3). The film’s visual design is also somewhat reminiscent of neo-noir art cinematography: its dazzling optics are paramount to the actual storyline itself. This pairing—of luxury merchandise against prominent figures of the hip-hop scene—is captured by the gaze of Williams’ camera and metamorphoses into a stunningly cohesive visual language. Here, bling and celebrity are wielded as powerful tools in connoting the virtuous status of the black body.
In the title sequence, Williams uses a series of juxtaposing overhead shots, low-angle shots, pan-up shots and wide-angle lenses to make the figures on the screen appear bigger-than-life. Williams specifically zooms in to the dancing strippers, who fill the screen with their bodies and command the gaze of the viewer. Filmed at the legendary New York City nightclub Tunnel, [39] the flashing strobe lights act as a suitable companion to the dangerous and exciting lifestyles of drug dealers and trappers who frequented the location. Here, the role of the strip club is key in shaping the audience’s viewing pleasure, derived from the experience of visually consuming the glamour and excitement of the scene. The locality of Tunnel is portrayed as a muse, chosen with intentions that are two-fold: for its close affiliations with luxury and fame, and as a site of consumption and sexual exchange.
Figure 8: Rihanna. Kanye West feat. Rihanna and Kid Cudi, “All of the Lights” (2011)
Missy Elliott, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” (1997)
Williams’ use of wide-angle and fish-eye lens is most notably evidenced in the 1997 music video for “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).” In this work, Missy ‘Misdemeanor' Elliott appears to be attacking the camera due to filming techniques that evoke optical illusion. This video has also been held in high regard for its innovative fashions: Elliott wears black lipstick paired with what appears to be an inflatable black trash bag, which functions to both magnify her size and defy the standards of Western beauty ideals for women (fig. 4). The voluptuous garment is accentuated by the large gold hoops worn by Elliott, along with an elaborate headpiece that is embellished with gold detailing. The video is also presented against various conceptual and futuristic stage sets, including a hemispherical silver vortex, a black canvas eclipsed by a dark circular form, and an anamorphic warehouse-esque space decked out with heavy, swinging mechanical pendulums, all while brightly saturated lights play off of the different monochromatic shapes. None of the settings are geographically identifiable, and thus, Supa Dupa Fly is catapulted out of the rational, linear world of reality and into the semi-ambiguous, cognitively estranged world of science-fiction.
Here, I argue that Williams’ arrangement of the female rapper in a post-industrial, post-conceptual setting not only borrows from Afrofuturist aesthetics but can be interpreted in line with the doctrine of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. The reframing of Elliott’s body as ‘cyborg’ allows for it to become a creature in a technological, post-gender world free of traditional western stereotypes towards race and gender [40]. Attention then shifts away from the consumption of her body as a sexual entity and to the stakes of her performative talent. In this video, Williams also employs water/rain to make the black skin of Elliott and her backup dancers appear luminous, while further highlighting the gleam of her various bodily adornments.
Kanye West feat. Rihanna and Kid Cudi, “All of the Lights” (2011)
Figure 9: Street. Blackstreet featuring Dr. Dre & Queen Pen, "No Diggity” (1996)
In 2011, Williams directed “All Of The Lights,” a collaborative track off of Kanye West’s fifth studio album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, featuring the acclaimed Bajan songstress Rihanna and rapper Kid Cudi. Much like the elements from Missy Elliott’s video for “The Rain,” the song’s lyrics point directly to the visibility or (invisibility) of the black subject’s body, communicated through the visual language of light:
Turn up the lights in here baby
Extra bright, I want y’all to see this
Turn up the lights in here, baby
You know what I need
Want you to see everything
Want you to see all of the lights
The accompanying music video to this song makes use of extremely animated flashing lights and is premised with a discretionary warning, stating that it has the potential to “trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy,” [41]. The first minute of the video is shot in black-and-white and features a young girl walking around New York City, set to Kanye’s “All Of The Lights (Interlude)”. Piano and violin accompaniment underscore the video with a nostalgic and sentimental tonality. At 1:05, Williams floods the screen with monochromatic filters of various colours, and the music video quickly shifts to flashing lyric titles (fig. 5). This procession has been thereafter critiqued for being extremely similar to the title sequence of French director Gaspar Noé’s 2009 film Enter the Void, in which names of the production staff flashed rapidly in many different graphical styles (fig. 6), [42]. On the matter of Williams’ supposed plagiarism, Noé had the following to say: “if you put the idea out there that’s kind of flashy, you’ll have many, many people that are going to be copying it. This happens if you do movies, paintings, or music,” [43]. The cross-cultural exchange of styles over various media products/platforms appears to be somewhat imminent in the age of ubiquitous media production. One approach in resolving the case of Noé v. Williams is to regard the latter’s interpretation as a (re-)appropriation of past visual aesthetics: as in, an envisioning of a new Black visual aesthetic rooted in hip-hop sensibilities.
In “All of the Lights,” Kanye himself does not appear in the video until the 2:04 mark, when Williams reintroduces the procession of monochromatic narrative shots, interchangeably juxtaposed against an intensely illuminated footage of West rapping against a black backdrop (fig. 7). This simulation mimics the effects of flash photography and recalls the moment of being seen: caught by “the blinding flashes of visibility, the sound of being bathed in light,”[44]. Here, Williams returns to his fascination with slick cityscapes, whilst depicting the hyper-illuminated figures of West, Rihanna and Kid Cudi silhouetted against monotonal backdrops (fig. 8). The performers are all adorned with gold chains and various bling-y accessories: in particular, West’s gold grills are reflected against a sequence of colours resembling the palette of pixelated blocks that appear when a television faces connectivity issues. Arguably, “All Of The Lights” is set in the shared techno-cultural, cosmopolitan imaginary of Hype Williams and Kanye West, delineated from the ordinance of the real world.
Decades of Difference? From Afrofuturism to Retrofuturism: A Comparison of Blackstreet feat. Dr. Dre & Queen Pen, “No Diggity” (1996) to Travis Scott feat. Kacy Hill, “90210” (2016)
Although Hype Williams has significantly slowed down the volume of his video production in the last decade, his film techniques and visual aesthetics have continued to influence videographers and directors to present day. In some of Williams’ more recent work, it is evident that the director has taken a heightened interest in revisiting his use of Afrofuturist cinematography. His film style often harnesses the power of coloured filters to produce an atmospheric quality evocative of the 1990s, and today, Williams reflects back on past cultural production in an effort to revive this nostalgia. I argue that Williams’ twenty-first century revisitation of the Afrofuturist aesthetics found in his earlier works can also be read as a form of ‘Retrofuturism,’ or, “a distanced interest in past versions of the future,”[45]. Williams’ penchant for 90s nostalgia is manifested through the continuation of past themes and motifs. For instance, his use of puppetry in the 1996 music video for Blackstreet’s standout track “No Diggity” would reappear twenty years later, when he envisioned the music video for Travis Scott’s “90210.”
In comparing the two music videos, it is perhaps useful to first identify the fact that the production of “No Diggity” in 1996 signified a milestone moment for Hype Williams—this video really concretized the development of his signature visual style. The use of low, wide-angle shots distorted the figures of Blackstreet, while brightly saturated neon lights were reflected off of slick city streets (fig. 9). Additionally, the song features lyrics call upon the new consumerist mentality of the black capitalist class, revealing the implications of conspicuous consumption. Once again, light becomes conflated with structures of wealth and power. The name-dropping of brands like Cartier, along with the group’s access and ability to board first-class airplanes are understood to be indicative of their rising social capital:
'Cause that's my peeps and we rolls deep
Flyin' first class from New York City to Blackstreet
What you know about me? Not a motherfuckin' thing
Cartier wooden frames sported by my shorty
As for me, icy gleaming pinkie diamond ring
We be's the baddest clique up on the scene
Ain't you getting bored with these fake ass broads?
I shows and proves, no doubt, how predictably so
Please excuse, if I come across rude, that’s just me
“No Diggity” contains no shortage of luxury cars, beautiful women, and flashy jewelry. This flaunting of wealth serves as a way to “outwardly explore and express one’s capital and mobility economically, socially, and culturally,”[46].
Figure 10: Puppet. Blackstreet featuring Dr. Dre & Queen Pen, "No Diggity” (1996)
This video was also one of the first in which Williams worked with overtly non-human entities. Here, the director installed a piano-playing marionette (fig. 10) and an older, guitar-strumming counterpart to accompany the rap group, again motioning to the staging of the fantastic—a narrative that is rooted in a world distanced from reality (re: Afrofuturism). These puppets act both as an adjunct to the members of Blackstreet, and work to dissociate the scene from reality—and in turn—the hegemonic structures imposed by the dominant regime.
Twenty years later, Williams would revisit his doll and puppet fascination in Travis Scott’s “90210,” one of the leading tracks on the artist’s debut studio album Rodeo. In the “90210” visual, Scott is depicted as an action figure in a stop-motion world. The rapper is transformed into the same doll-like figurine from his album cover, and the video traces his nighttime adventures with an anonymous lover, whom he courts in a rather blasé manner. In an opposing storyline, Scott is rendered as a giant robot, storming the city and angrily kicking over buildings. The same neo-noir aesthetics present in Belly are reinvented in “90210” as tech-noir, along with Williams’ classic use of flared lenses and slick cityscapes (fig. 11). In this song, Scott struggles to cope with his two identities, as Jacques Webster (his name by birth) and Travis Scott (his stage name).
The song’s melancholic timbre, coupled with its self-referential title, [47] reads like a nocturnal ode to Scott’s ascension to fame. It is sentimental, introspective, and pictures the coming together of the rapper’s two conflicting (yet at-times complementary) identities. The fragmented quality of Scott’s body, along with his two duelling identities, could function as a visual metaphor alluding to the mechanical and isolating life he faces as a consequence to his newfound fame. The artificiality of the video can therefore be read as a stand-in for the superficiality of relationships built on the values of late capitalism. In “90210,” Scott reminisces on lost friends and fraudulent exchanges constructed on the basis of money and economic worth:
What happened? Now my daddy happy, mama called me up
That money coming and she love me, I done made it now
I done found life's meaning now, all them days of heartbreak
Her heart out of pieces now, friends turning into fraud ni**as
* * *
Whole crew, I swear they counting on me
Gold chains, gold rings, I got an island on me
Houses on me, he got them ounces on him
Holy father, come save these ni**as, I'm styling on 'em
Good lord, I see my good fortune in all these horses
I'm driving too fast to stop, so all these signs, I ignore them
The video is also replete with evidence of bling/ice: found in the reflection of lights in the city’s buildings, the heavy gold chains worn by the action figures, and in the glossy luxury vehicles that line the streets.
Figure 11: City. Travis Scott feat. Kacy Hill, “90210” (2016)
When the two figures (Webster/Scott) finally meet, they do so in a flowering garden (fig. 12). The abundant growth of the plants are reflective of Travis’ own internal growth as a person. Ultimately, however, the video concludes with a lone Scott walking into the night by himself. I argue that this vague ending might speak to the contemporary consumer’s inability to find true fulfillment from the hyper-commercialized nature of mainstream hip-hop. Whereas Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” was an optimistic reflection on the ‘high life’ enjoyed by rappers in the 1990s, “90210” is the twenty-first century’s response: revealing the sometimes painful act of self-fashioning as ‘worthy enough,’ or ‘tasteful enough.’ This discrepancy lies in black body’s continued struggle with transgressing into the dominant class of ‘high-culture.’ Williams, then, uses the aesthetic of Retrofuturism (in reflecting on his past works) to iterate a continuous storyline that haunts the contemporary consumer, who will endlessly seek out material objects to fill the void left by conspicuous consumption.
Conclusion
When the hip-hop music video first rose to the forefront in the 1990s, it served as a critical channel of communication in advertising the new corporatized identity of hip-hop culture. As one of the leading figures of this movement, the American director Hype Williams mobilized the power of this mass mediatization, presenting a counterculture to the world “while simultaneously shaping that culture’s way of life.”48 Accredited as a ‘gatekeeper’ of the new hip-hop, Williams can be considered a cultural animator of the times on two accounts. First, through his videography, Williams wielded the juxtaposition of bright lights against luxury commodities, emphasizing the sheer size and extravagance of these heavy metals. Framed against the bodies of his black subjects, these objects were instrumentalized to aggressively take up space, demanding to be noticed and recognized. If we consider ‘bling culture’ as taking on a ‘valence of agency and expression,’ [49]. then the site of the black body constructed under mainstream hip-hop sensibilities effectively demonstrates its anti-imperialist goals. In doing so, ‘bling’ helps assert the physical presence of its bearer, defying the traditional modes of representation that have spurred out of neocolonialist ideologies.
Figure 12: Garden. Travis Scott feat. Kacy Hill, “90210” (2016)
Williams, however, was also critical of the new turn towards hyper-consumption. In employing the visual effects of Afrofuturism (and later, Retrofuturism), the director moved the geopolitical setting of his productions out of the linear rationality of the physical world (the real world), and constructed an alternate realm for marginalized bodies to exist, devoid of past stereotypes and denigrated identities. As Eshun writes, “the field of Afrofuturism does not seek to deny the tradition of countermemory. Rather, it aims to extend that tradition by reorienting the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective,” [50]. Retrofuturism, in turn, functions as a revisiting of the past; as an undoing or redoing of the present narrative.
Since the onset of the twenty-first century, the cultural realm of mainstream hip-hop music has significantly detoured both sonically and visually from its foundational roots in the ’hood of the South Bronx. The evolution of its growth has come to encompass a wider breadth of socio-cultural impact, emergent as a considerable contender in the dominant cultural regime. Through the aid of technological innovation, as well as worldwide media distribution systems, “hip-hop is more than ever situated within the global-local nexus and what might be defined as the contemporary hip-hop industrial complex,” [51]. Williams has exemplified, through his prolific portfolio of music video production, that hip-hop music (and its incumbent cultural figures), have undeniably emerged as a useful apparatus for challenging ideas about taste/tastemaking in the cultural terrain of global hierarchy.
Endnotes
1. Margaret Hunter, "Shake It, Baby, Shake It: Consumption and the New Gender Relation in Hip-Hop," Sociological Perspectives 54, no. 1 (2011): 15-16.
2. Hunter, "Shake It, Baby, Shake It: Consumption and the New Gender Relation in Hip-Hop," 16.
3. Murray Forman, “General Introduction,” in That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, eds. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2012), 2.
4. M.K. Asante Jr., It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 8. Quoted in Murray Forman, “General Introduction,” 2.
5. Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1998), 108.
6. Isabel Flower and Marcel Rosa-Solas, “Say My Name: Nameplate Jewelry and the Politics of Taste,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 4, no. 3 (2017): 121.
7. Ibid.
8. Flower and Rosa-Solas, “Say My Name: Nameplate Jewelry and the Politics of Taste,” 121.
9. Hunter, 18.
10. Ibid.
11. Krista Thompson, “The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop,” in Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press, 2015), 221.
12. Emphasis mine. A roundtable curated by Erik K. Arnold, with Rachel Raimist, Kevin Epps, and Michael Wanguhu, “Put Your Camera Where My Eyes Can See: Hip-Hop Video, Film, and Documentary” in Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, ed. Jeff Chang (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 310.
13. Rikki Byrd, “In Search of the Good Life: Toward a Discourse on Reading the Black Body in Hip-Hop and Luxury Fashion,” in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 4, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 183.
14. Jeff Chang, “Introduction, Hip-Hop Arts: Our Expanding Universe,” in Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, ed. Jeff Chang (New York: Basic Books, 2008), xi.
15. Murray Forman, “Growing an Industry: The Corporate Expansion of Hip Hop,” in The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop, (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 107.
16. Thompson, “The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop,” 269.
17. Quoted in Thompson, 222.
18. Ibid, 223.
19. Quoted in Robin D.G. Kelley, “Lookin’ for the ‘Real’ Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the Ghetto,” in That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, eds. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2012), 135.
20. Flower and Rosa-Solas, “Say My Name: Nameplate Jewelry and the Politics of Taste,” 117.
21. To be all-encompassing: this term could be modified to the ‘racing [of] visual culture,’ in general.
22. Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 287-302.
23. Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse on Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 180.
24. Quoted in Thompson, 217.
25. Thompson, 221.
26. Davarian L. Baldwin, “Black Empires, White Desires,” in That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, eds. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2012).
27. Melvin Donalson, “Keeping it Real (Reel): Black Dramatic Visions,” in Black Directors in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 172.
28. Vyce Victus, “In Defense of ‘Belly’,” Birth.Movies.Death, August 22, 2014.
29. Donalson, “Keeping it Real (Reel): Black Dramatic Visions,” 172.
30. Victus, “In Defense of ‘Belly’.”
31. Desiree, “Hype Williams: Defining a Genre,” Medium, October 26, 2016.
32. Thompson, 255.
33. Thompson, 269.
34. VFiles, “90s Music Videos Wouldn’t Exist Without Hype Williams,” YouTube video, August 15, 2016.
35. Michael Dequina, “Belly,” The Movie Report Archive 41, no. 165, November 5, 1998.
36. Owen Gleiberman, “Belly (Movie - 1998),” Entertainment Weekly, November 20, 1998.
37. “Belly: You Don’t Realize How Good This Movie Actually Is,” Words About Sounds (blog), January 27, 2013.
38. Adam Wray, “Belly: Hype Williams’ Advanced Time Capsule,” SSENSE, January 9, 2017.
39. Tunnel was located at 220 Twelfth Avenue, in the Chelsea neighbourhood of Manhattan, New York City. The space has since been shut down, but the nightclub operated from 1986 until 2001.
40. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
41. Kanye West, “All Of The Lights,” YouTube video, February 18, 2011.
42. VFiles. “90s Music Videos Wouldn’t Exist Without Hype Williams.”
43. Quoted in VFiles.
44. Thompson, 215.
45. Susan Sharp, “Nostalgia for the Future: Retrofuturism in Enterprise,” Science Fiction Film and Television 4, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 25.
46. Byrd, “In Search of the Good Life: Toward a Discourse on Reading the Black Body in Hip-Hop and Luxury Fashion,” 183.
47. ‘90210’ is the primary ZIP code of the affluent city of Beverly Hills, California.
48. Bonsu Thompson, “All Hail Hype Williams, The Director Whose ‘Videos Just Looked Like Money’,” Mass Appeal, September 18, 2017.
49. Flower and Rosa-Solas, 118.
50. Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” 289.
51. Murray Forman, “Epilogue,” in The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 342