Abstract
This paper investigates the visual aesthetics of French rap with regard to questions of race and subjectivity through an analysis of both the lyrics and music videos of the rapper Abd al Malik. Abd al Malik addresses the central question of corporeal visibility in a ‘colour-blind’ French society. His performance depicts the skin as a surface, rooting his corporeal subjectivity in a tactile experience. Through the use of light, oversaturated colour and constantly shifting forms, Abd al Malik’s videos test the limits of vision to create a sensorial experience that incorporates, yet transcends, the visibility of epidermalised blackness. The consciousness of self and others is therefore not achieved by an unmasking or a shedding of blackness, but through the recognition of skin as a material surface that both challenges the presumption that an individual’s interiority is legible on the body’s exterior and invites the more complex, sensorial contact of universal, human relationality.
A period of increased media coverage in the 1990s inextricably linked French rap with the figure of the jeune de banlieue and associated problems of public order, such as tagging (Hammou, 2012: 138). Critics look to French rappers to articulate a clear social message that highlights the fault lines of Republican values and protests their invisibility in the public sphere (Boucher, 1998: 183). Indeed, a major distinguishing factor between French and American rappers lies in the notions of citizenship and representation with which they are in dialogue. French rappers situate themselves in the political context of Republican universalism, which places an abstract citizenship above racial, ethnic or religious particularities. This context is further conditioned by the painful memory of racial categorisation under the Vichy regime, which renders race illegitimate as a category in French law and census collection. French rappers of African, Afro-Caribbean and North African origins thus interact with a paradox of visibility in French society in which the proclaimed colour-blindness of the French state occults bodies’ particularities to achieve the sameness required for equality, yet racism that ascribes meaning to perceptible physical difference still exists. In the context of France’s self-proclaimed colour-blindness, how do French rappers negotiate the visibility and invisibility of race and ethnicity?
Previous work (Boucher, 1998) portrayed French rap as a protest genre through which rappers push for their community’s recognition in the public sphere. These discussions frequently treat French rap from a sociological angle, deeming it an anti-establishment social message and exalting rappers as spokespeople for marginalised youth. Thus, textual analyses (Boucher, 1998; Vicherat, 2001) treat French rap as a socially engaged musical genre with a clear message, focusing on a set of fixed thematic categories, notably la banlieue, violence, women, money, religion and politics. However, I argue that these fixed categories restrict rap’s representational capacity to a predetermined image of the banlieue youth. Listening to rap music purely as an engaged message emanating from a previously silenced working-class, minority youth population plays into our expectations of banlieue culture that exist independently of the music’s aesthetic value. In light of this tendency to privilege the thematic or technical qualities of the genre over the poetic ambiguity of the music’s content, I seek to accentuate the inherent uncertainty and openness of rap as art. In so doing, my aim is to nuance the narrative of French rappers asserting their visibility in the public sphere, which risks oversimplifying the various means by which citizens come into visibility, and how this visibility is in turn recognised. I propose a deeper look into how rappers’ visibility is aestheticised, and how their performances interact with available modes of citizenship.
By ‘performances’ I intend to evoke both a musical form in which an artist performs for an audience as well as Judith Butler’s theory of performative acts that enable the subject. Linking the rapper to the discursive marker ‘jeune de banlieue,’ 1 dissimulates a series of historical and social conventions that not only sanction how these individuals act their bodies, but also conditions how their bodies are perceived (Butler, 2011: xxi). I look at how rappers use gestures, movements and visual technologies to stylise their bodies in ways that question available modes of visibility. Previous work (Pecqueux, 2007) on the performance of French rap focused solely on the function of the voice in establishing a communicative relationship between the rapper and the audience. While his analysis importantly underscores the production and reception of rap as a vocally interpreted art form, Pecqueux occludes the role of the rest of the body in rappers’ performances. I argue that the body also establishes a relationship between the rapper who stages his or her visibility and the audience that reads the rapper’s body for meaning. Felicia McCarren, meanwhile (2013: 45), investigates how French hip-hop dancers speak through choreography to articulate their bodily existence in innovative ways. McCarren’s focus on dance, however, inevitably leaves open the question of a relationship between vocal production and bodily gestures. How do rappers evoke their bodies through their lyrics, and how do they use their bodies in ways that go beyond a mere enactment of their rhymes?
I will specifically analyse both the lyrics and music videos of the Alsatian rapper of Congolese origins, Abd al Malik. In two highly conceptual music videos from his 2015 album Scarifications, Abd al Malik’s performance both visually and discursively depicts the skin as a surface that tests the limits of visibility, therefore rooting his corporeal subjectivity in a tactile, sensorial experience that incorporates, yet transcends, the visibility of epidermalised blackness. This destabilisation of vision provokes other ways of seeing skin that go beyond an essentialised bodily covering in which racialised difference is inscribed. By evoking the body as a material surface, Malik shatters the supposed equivalence of seeing and knowing between the exterior and interior.
As has been the case for many works of critical race theory, the Fanonian framework of epidermalisation will be my starting point for reflecting on Malik’s articulation of how he becomes visible as a black subject in the French public sphere. I situate my reading of Malik’s work within critical race theory’s recent focus on aesthetics and how visual technologies may be employed to envision new modes of self-representation. I enter into dialogue with Krista Thompson’s (2009) discussion of light and surfacism in the visual economy of American hip-hop, Michelle Ann Stephens’ (2014) focus on the materiality of skin, and Anne Anlin Cheng’s (2011) analysis of stylistic references to surface and texture. By incorporating critical race theory, I address a void in the discussion of French rap in thinking about how these artists aesthetically speak to the specifically French relationship to the visibility of race.
Between invisibility and hypervisibility: testing the limits of vision
I turn first to Fanon’s canonical text, Peau noire, masques blancs (1995 [1952]), in order to situate questions of race and subjectivity with regard to the body’s visibility. Interestingly, Fanon is not just a common reference for critical race theory, but for French rap as well. 2 Indeed, Fanon’s concept of epidermalisation is key to exploring Malik’s portrayal of skin. The body is crucial in Fanon’s portrayal of blackness as the site of the subject’s distinction as Other, as well as the vehicle through which the black subject interiorises the process of racialisation. In this regard, Nicole Fleetwood’s (2011: 27) reading of Fanon is useful, particularly in the emphasis she places on the act of interpellation as a moment that constructs both the audience and the performer of difference. This notion of deciphering difference as a performative act will be critical in thinking about how Malik engages with the beholder of his difference.
Perception of visible difference plays a prominent role in Malik’s lyrics, as it does in Fanon’s schematic development of the black lived experience. In the song, ‘Tout de noir vêtu’, Malik traces the lingering bodily effects created by the Other perceiving and naming his difference.
C’est comme si tu portais un vêtement que même si tu voulais tu ne pouvais enlever C’est comme si tu portais un vêtement que même si tu pouvais tu ne voudrais enlever C’est comme si tu portais un vêtement qui était censé dire aux autres qui tu es C’est comme si tu portais un vêtement qui te condamnait à vivre dans l’obscurité.
Malik repeatedly engages the comparison of his skin to clothing, a seemingly superfluous bodily covering. This image resonates strongly with Fanon’s (1995: 90) notion of a ‘supplement’, the historico-racial schema that sits on top of his corporeal schema. Crucially, Fanon suggests that, in this historico-racial schema, the white man ‘m’avait tissé de mille détails, anecdotes, récits’ (1995: 90, emphasis added). The notion of weaving powerfully evokes a material and tactile experience of racialisation, which Malik echoes with his comparison to black clothing. Malik raps ‘c’est comme si tu portais un vêtement qui était censé dire aux autres qui tu es’ to suggest that this imagined textile supplement is stitched with preconceptions, to the point where the mere sight of it is meant to project who Malik is. Yet Malik affirms that, it is as if you were wearing a piece of clothing, for unlike clothing, his blackness is an element of his subjectivity that he cannot, and indeed would not want to, remove. In addition to imposing meaning from the exterior, this article of clothing also serves to shroud Malik’s body, obscuring it to a status of non-recognition.
Malik’s music videos for ‘Allogène (j’suis un stremon)’ and ‘Daniel Darc’, both directed by Romain Cieutat, also recognise the objectifying power of the gaze and consequently seek to disturb the visual field, exposing the limits of visibility. On the one hand, the music video for ‘Allogène’ debuts with a protagonist covered from head to toe in black clothes. Throughout the video, the dancing figure removes articles of clothing to reveal a futuristic, opaque bodily surface comprised of constantly shifting patterns of neon-coloured lines. On the other hand, the video for ‘Daniel Darc’ evidently features the rapper himself. However, his body is obscured through various special effects that give contrasting impressions of a liquefied body and one that seemingly dissolves into the wind like white sand. The special effects on the rapper’s body shift constantly between black and white, alternating with a black or white backdrop. This serves to disorient the viewer through a continuously instable frame of reference. Both videos thus disrupt the visual field through constant motion, heightened contrast and an oversaturation of light and colour. These visual effects are important examples of how Malik employs technology to rethink modes of self-representation.
In her analysis of bling 3 in the visual economy of American hip-hop, Krista Thompson (2009) reflects on black subjectivity’s relationship to visibility. She notes how the shiny surface of bling and its capacity to refract light test the limits of vision.
Even as bling denotes an investment in the light of visibility, the concept may also be seen to pinpoint the limits of the visible world: the instant that reflected light bounces off a shiny object, it denies and obliterates vision. It saturates the visual plane, ultimately blinding the viewer … Bling, then, conveys a state between hypervisibility and blinding invisibility, between visual surplus and disappearance. (Thompson, 2009: 483)
The distortion of the visual field that the viewer experiences in Malik’s videos highlights this tension between hypervisibility and blinding invisibility. This tension reaches its zenith in ‘Allogène’ when the protagonist looks up to an overhead skylight with his arms raised, refracting the light and momentarily saturating the visual field with a blinding white light. The body thus momentarily dissipates in a surplus of light, disrupting the viewer’s reliance on vision to perceive and schematise the body.
Instead of playing off a bejewelled trinket, the light draws the viewer’s eye to the multi-coloured surface of the protagonist’s body. This mesmerising covering in ‘Allogène’ and the bodily special effects in ‘Daniel Darc’ employ surfacism much in the same way as bling, emphasising the material or visual texture of objects (Thompson, 2009: 485). The fact that the surface of the body monopolises the viewer’s gaze brings naturalised structures of vision to consciousness in order to question their limits. As Thompson (2009: 499) argues, the visual economy of hip-hop throws into relief the reliance on surface as the site where visually perceptible racialised difference is inscribed. By destabilising the surface of the body, both ‘Allogène’ and ‘Daniel Darc’ undermine the capacity of vision to fixate and incorporate the body into pre-existing schemas. The use of intensely saturated colour and motion both dramatically draw the eye to the body and cause it to vanish through their blinding excess, capturing a tension between hypervisibility and invisibility that resonates strongly in a French society where a self-proclaimed inability to see race coexists with processes of racialisation that are inherently dependent on the body’s visibility.
Lost in translation: disrupting skin’s communication between the interior and exterior
Disrupting the visual field through an incessantly transforming surface undermines visual reliance on the legibility of the body’s surface, its skin. This disruption subverts the power of vision as a means of knowledge. Indeed, as Thompson (2009: 498) notes, hip-hop’s focus on the black body’s surface and blinding visibility draws parallels with notions of the transparency of whiteness and the glare of blackness in late Renaissance, Dutch and Baroque painting styles. Malik evokes this racialised conception of whiteness as transparency and blackness as opacity in ‘Daniel Darc’ with the couplet, ‘Perfecto tout de noir vêtu / blanches sont mes vertus.’ The caesura evokes a mirror image that throws into relief the incommensurability between Malik’s perception of his moral character and of his exterior appearance. Reviving the image of black clothing from his song ‘Tout de noir vêtu’, he suggests an exterior that obscures and denies access to what lies beneath. The colouring of his virtues, however, implies a transparent look into interiority that only whiteness can provide. Ultimately, the stark, binary imagery of black and white suggest a breakdown of the ability of skin to render the interior legible on the body’s surface.
The opaque bodily surface of ‘Allogène’ further threatens the capacity of skin to communicate between the exterior and interior. If the bodily surface of ‘Allogène’ alludes to what it covers, the pulsating neon shapes suggest an entirely strange, inhuman interior, which reflects the song’s title: non-native. The song’s subtitle, ‘J’suis un stremon’, further evokes a grotesque Otherness. ‘Stremon’ signifies a monster in the inverted-syllable slang of verlan. The imagery conjured up by Malik’s lyrics therefore accentuates the video’s visual effects that create a body whose hardened, opaque exterior does not allow the gaze to access a knowable, familiar interior. This body in ‘Allogène’ is foreign and Other precisely because it refuses the legibility and transparency of skin associated with white humanity.
In denying translation of the interior self via the exterior, Malik challenges our reliance on visible, knowable difference in order to understand the world around us. ‘Allogène’ plays upon both our expectation to be able to see and schematise skin as well as our expectation of what non-native skin would resemble. In other words, the video references the collective nature of performative acts, in which cultural scripts condition the reception of an individual’s performance. The title’s signification of ‘non-native’ primes the viewer to read alterity in the protagonist’s bodily gestures. In the opening instances of the video, the protagonist struts through an urban setting, providing us only with a rear and profile view of a body draped in black clothing. As the verse begins, the figure raises his head as if to meet the viewer’s gaze, revealing the opaque surface that lies beneath the fabric. The glossy surface devoid of facial features renders a mutual gaze impossible, both depriving the viewer of the ability to fully objectify the protagonist and simultaneously preventing the protagonist from interiorising and constructing himself through our gaze. The disembodied voice of Malik echoes ‘J’suis un stremon’ and sutures itself to the only object available in the visual field, the body clothed all in black, enabling us to categorise this body as non-native, monster and Other. Through this wardrobe, Malik engages with the troubling presence of blackness in the visual field (Fleetwood, 2011: 3). Indeed, there is something quite disturbing about the listening subject being prompted to imagine a monstrous body, while the visual subject gazes at a body whose sartorial surface references blackness. However, as the video progresses, the troubling nature of the protagonist’s body proves to lie in its ability to subvert our processes of categorisation through its ever-shifting surface, suggesting that the monster is he who cannot be categorised. Ultimately, at the end of the song the lyrics fade out in a parallel echo, ‘Lyricalement, j’suis un stremon’ (Malik, 2015a). Engaging in rap’s fundamental stylistic of boasting, Malik both reaffirms his talents as a rapper and provokes a response, establishing a poetic battleground (Béthune, 2003: 73). Modifying the original repetition, ‘j’suis un stremon’ to refer to his lyrical and poetic abilities, Malik seemingly calls out the viewer as if to say, ‘What did you think I meant by “stremon?”’
Skin as material surface: engaging a sensorial experience beyond visuality
The focus on visually illegible bodies in ‘Allogène’ and ‘Daniel Darc’ emphasises the materiality of their surfaces. The notion of skin as a material covering for the body refers back to Malik’s depiction of blackness as being ‘tout de noir vêtu’. The image of black clothing presents racialised skin as a surface that can be added on or removed. Throughout the flux of captivating special effects in the video for ‘Daniel Darc’, Malik’s body continuously takes on various substances from a viscous black liquid to a delicate white powder. The skin is thus constantly in reference to other surfaces and textures, obscuring the subject underneath. Yet these shifting forms also serve to dissociate colour from the objects it attaches itself to, showing instead how colour circulates between objects of very different natures. In her analysis of Williams’ and Walker’s performance, Tina Post (2015) highlights this quality of blackface paint. ‘As an active (one might say animate) force, blacking can be seen to distance, deflect, or decoy – ultimately underscoring the inscrutability of the minstrel actor and offering itself: a surface of blackness and shine’ (Post, 2015: 94). Highlighting its own materiality as a superfluous, additive layer, burnt cork makes darkness visible precisely by not being skin. The special effects of ‘Daniel Darc’ vaguely guard the shape and definition of Malik’s features, maintaining his corporeal visibility through their very existence as something other than his skin. Obscuring the body layered underneath, these substances provoke the question: is blackness truly an essence, as the epidermal racial schema would suggest, or simply an ornamental supplement?
The materiality of the body’s surface in ‘Daniel Darc’ engages the viewer in a multi-sensorial experience. The video’s three-dimensional special effects texturise delicate white powder and cascading dark liquid, arousing the viewer’s sense of touch. It is this urge to touch that in turn heightens the viewer’s awareness of his or her own skin as material that can engage in a tactile relationship with other textures. Focusing on the texture and tactility of skin offers a relational body that interacts with the external world. This element of materiality in performances of blackness is central for Michelle Ann Stephens (2014), particularly in her analysis of Paul Robeson’s films. For Stephens, black masculine performances throw into relief the gaze’s desire to exemplify skin as the site where essentialised racial differences are inscribed, a container for the meaning of blackness in the Symbolic Order. Emphasising the body-with-skin is thus a means for the gaze to mask other corporeal, affective, kinaesthetic and sensorial aspects of an embodied subjectivity (Stephens, 2014: 193). Robeson’s physical action and expression of affect present his body as a tactile, interactive surface that prompts the viewer to reflect on their own corporeality as more than inanimate physique (2014: 80). This ability for movement and texture to inspire self-reflection and embody relationality is useful for analysing Abd al Malik’s music videos. In ‘Daniel Darc’ we witness a similarly mobile, shifting bodyline that highlights the haptic, sensorial and interactive qualities of the body’s surface. Malik’s body is constantly in motion. His arms wave with the music and his body propels itself forward as he mouths the lyrics. This kinaesthetic movement is accentuated by the constant shift of special effects that present a blurred, permeable and partial bodyline. Stephens (2014: 78) calls attention to the use of shadow and blurring to soften the distinction between Robeson’s body and the outside world. Like Robeson’s shadowy form, Malik’s body merges with its surroundings as he gestures. His waving arms appear to glitch, leaving a series of lines that radiate outwards, expanding the mark his body leaves on the space. The white powder representing his bodily form both flows towards him, constituting his outline, and dissipates into the space behind him with each movement. The distinction between body and surrounding space is thus completely obscured. Malik’s body engages in a mutually constitutive relationship with its backdrop. For Stephens (2014: 78), this smudged bodyline evokes a desire for ‘boundarylessness’ between bodies that promises a deeper relational consciousness. As a surface of interaction and motion, the skin subverts the gaze’s desire to fix it as a site of epidermalisation where racial difference is inscribed and essentialised. The fluid materiality of the surface invites contact and relationality, prompting a sensorial consciousness that goes deeper than pure visuality.
This emphasis on a supplementary, active surface is also central to Anne Anlin Cheng’s (2011) work on Josephine Baker and the Modernist dream of a ‘second skin’, that Baker embodies. According to Cheng (2011: 13), the preoccupation with surface represents a mutual fantasy of the Modernist seeking to be outside his own skin and racialised subjects looking to escape the burden of epidermalisation. In her analysis of portrayals of Josephine Baker’s corporeality, Cheng suggests that the conception of a second skin is indicative of an ‘inclination to subject the body to, and for that body to insist upon, its own abstraction’ (2011: 64). The insistence upon abstracting the body’s surface complicates the relationship between the skin and the flesh it covers. The very notion of black skin as an additional material surface flirts with the possibility of what occurs when it is removed. Cheng notes that Josephine Baker toys with shedding the second skin in Princesse Tam-Tam, when she removes her gold dress to reveal a black costume underneath. Baker’s striptease is left unaccomplished, frustrating the audience’s expectations of privileged visual access to her body. ‘The body offers itself not as depth or flesh, but as a mobile outline or, at the most, another costume’ (2011: 63). The obscenity of the scene arises from the lack of real skin, of the failure of blackness to provide distinction (2011: 64). While Baker’s retreat to surfaces is a performative strategy contemporary to Modernism, Malik’s emphasis on the surface represents a critical look back on the modes of representation made available to him through Modernism. Importantly, these music videos employ new visual technologies, including three-dimensional film in ‘Daniel Darc’ to express inventiveness in self-representation.
Baker’s obscene denial of access to her flesh resonates with the futuristic abstraction of the bodily surface in ‘Allogène’. In effect, the protagonist of ‘Allogène’ gradually sheds his black clothing, an act which only serves to further reveal the non-transparent, brightly coloured surface underneath. With each article of clothing removed, the viewer is further confronted with another, even more abstract layer of material. In a way, ‘Daniel Darc’ perturbs this expectation of flesh even further. The white powder that roughly constitutes Malik’s form is slowly swept away, gradually erasing the likeness of a body. Finally, the powder is whisked away into the wind, revealing what is underneath the material substance: nothing. Instead of fixing racialised difference on the surface of the body, the delicate surface in ‘Daniel Darc’ practically dissolves it. Far from an essentialised quality, racialised difference joins the ranks of the video’s other aesthetic effects, suggesting it is also a stylistic effect that can circulate between bodies and forms.
The impossibility of a truly naked body in both ‘Allogène’ and ‘Daniel Darc’ reveals the tension between the abstractness of racial logic and its desire to assign fixed meaning to physical difference. Both the rigid, machine-like bodily surface of ‘Allogène’ and the dispersed powder of ‘Daniel Darc’ refuse the translatability of skin’s exterior appearance. These material surfaces distinguish themselves from the flesh that lies beneath, highlighting the paradox of inscribing racial difference as concrete and tangible when in reality it reflects something much more metaphysical and abstract. Withholding the flesh beneath the surface of skin also demonstrates the impossibility of the black écorché, a figure revealing the muscles of a body without skin. According to Stephens (2014: 198), the black écorché is ‘an impossible image in the symbolic order in which blackness signifies as the epidermal outer layer of skin’. In both ‘Allogène’ and ‘Daniel Darc’ the viewer is denied Fanon’s notion of heautoscopy, a gaze that would strip away epidermalised skin, peeling back the imaginary and symbolic skin to reveal the raw fleshiness of the subject within (2014: 199). This refusal aligns with Cheng’s argument that the ‘unmasked’ self cannot be the solution to racism or discrimination, ‘for that ideal elides how the (racialised) self is always already an effect of the mask worn’ (2011: 170). As Fanon eloquently recounts, the racialised self is the result of the process of epidermalisation set into motion through the visibility of the body’s surface. The racialised self is always an effect of the constituting gaze of the Other that inextricably latches on to the body’s visible surface.
The futility of the ideal ‘unmasked self’ is echoed in Malik’s ‘Tout de noir vêtu’, ‘C’est comme si tu portais un vêtement que même si tu voulais tu ne pouvais enlever / C’est comme si tu portais un vêtement que même si tu pouvais tu ne voudrais enlever’ (Malik, 2015c). Even if he wanted to, Malik could not remove the textile covering that is his blackness. Conversely, even if he were able to shed this objectified surface, he would not want to. This apparent standstill provokes further probing into the modes of knowledge and relationality. The bodily figures of ‘Allogène’ and ‘Daniel Darc’ test the limits of vision and shatter the equation between seeing and knowing. While a focus on the skin as a tactile, material surface detracts from the visual sensorial monopoly and invites a deeper relational consciousness, Malik appears to displace the site of knowledge from the body entirely. He pushes the materiality of surface to its extreme: its dissolution. In both the prelude and conclusion to ‘Daniel Darc’ Malik recites from Daniel Darc’s ‘La Taille de mon âme’:
Si tu savais mon cœur rien Si tu savais mes yeux rien Si tu savais mes mains rien Si tu savais mes reins rien Si tu savais mes jambes rien Si tu savais ma peau rien Si tu savais mes cris rien Si tu savais mes nuits rien Mais si seulement tu savais la taille de mon âme.
Malik actively refutes the value of knowledge rooted in corporeality and instead aspires for a relationality that transcends the body. Yet to interpret this rebuttal of the body’s monopoly over relational knowledge as a simple call for spirituality would elide the prominent place of the body in the visual economy of Malik’s work. By insisting upon the abstraction of the body’s surface, Malik designates the body as the base of a deeper inquiry, but one that is not solely restricted to physical corporeality. In this sense, Malik strongly echoes Fanon’s culminating plea, ‘Ô mon corps, fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge’ (1995: 188). The skin thus assumes its role as a point of contact, incarnating the possibility of relating and interacting with the world and others, the site of curiosity and questioning. The consciousness of self and of others is therefore not achieved by an unmasking, or shedding, of blackness as if it were clothing, but through the recognition of skin as a material surface that both challenges visuality’s claims to transparency between exterior and interior and invites the more complex, sensorial contact of universal, human relationality.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Cécile Bishop for attentively reading many drafts of this article and for offering invaluable feedback at each stage.