Odd Future: Black Absurdism as Realpolitik

Tyler, the Creator and his dystopian cadre of Californian rappers are most assuredly a “f*****g walking paradox”. Since they've kicked their Vans authentics through the door of mainstream America with a bevy of self produced and self released mixtapes, and the now iconic “Yonkers” video, Odd Future has unequivocally rattled the foundations of not just the hip-hop diaspora, but of black self determinism itself. And yes, the group has attracted a hodgepodge of detractors- from seemingly preordained right wingers, and well, people who just don't seem to get it, or care to (the indie-folk tandem Tegan and Sara have been boisterous in their criticism of the group, enjoying their momentary relevance in this scant parenthesis) attributed to their overtly homophobic, sexist, racist, and absurdocetera lyricism. But what I'd like to call attention to, whats been neglected with criminal ineptitude by the American letterers who've covered Odd Future, is the revolutionary component in what these black teenagers are doing; The underlying deconstruction of Black American male stereotypes that would make even Jacques Derrida blush, frankly, these kids get it( “It”being the often contradictory, autocannibalistic beast of American society for a black male).

In the Vice.com articled entitled “Internet Sensation Odd Future is Smarter than We Think” Makena Walsh asserts that the group “shamelessly disassembles with a refreshing blend of honesty, irony, and humor. These kids are as smart as they are provocative”. Ditto, but to reduce Odd Future's cultural ramifications to “fundamentally, just some kids at postmodern play, having fun while making fun of skate culture, the celebrity of extreme sports personalities, and most importantly: themselves” amounts to the shortest pygmy of sociological observation. These “selves” are Black Men in America, an aesthetic determinate that signifies not just historic denigration, but disproportionate incarcerations and laissez faire murders of the times. For what cultural criticism of Odd Future can ignore the revolutionary racial politics abound?

Tyler, the Creator's “Yonkers” video serves as the group's treatise to popular(i.e white consumption) culture. At the video's conclusion, Tyler hangs himself, his legs seizuring their last few jolts as life escapes them. The viewer is left with the image of Tyler's knee sock fitted carcass twirling back and forth in frame, as a haunting synth reifies the visual terror, and how fitting, how logically precedent. Having just presented the world with a shocking new manifestation of black male self-hood(and no, not just because he swallows a roach, or later regurgitates it) that he return to the familiar site of the black body; Tyler's lynching is no callous act of suicide, it's the very negation of his prior exertion of agentiality. An ironic return to White American sociocultural expectation. His is a symbolic sacrifice, that sacrifice being the paltry cultural capital afforded to his back pocket he's been taxed in order to finally self actualize, and He conscienciously returns it to the American cultural apparatus waving a grandiose middle finger.

Reviews

[nrshrews]

I learned about something in an actually interesting way. Good Job!