ODD FUTURE WOLF GANG KILL THEM ALL

“everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered” –Barthes



Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (OFWGKTA) feels like an appropriate topic given that the Poetry Foundation posted a blog on the group a week ago. Yet, unlike Bethlehem Shoals' effort to speak to their “work’s” “universality” by comparing different aspects of their oeuvre to Mayakovsky, Marinetti, and the like, I want to speak to what the texts accomplish out of their cultural setting. It is troublesome to find the worth of these texts in the fetishistic relationship their audience has to them. They're doing much more than creating simple sputters of disgust in their viewers. The Shoals article, titled “Odd Futurism,” goes through the perpetually re-ingested action of attaching the energetic aspects of the texts to Marinetti's fascist excitement. This is the most blasé historical approach to the variety of contingencies that led to futurism and ignores a plethora of manifestos that sparked up after that. It is a trite stance that can only be deadening to contemporary poetics. We, as readers, should be sick of it.

Further, the general notion that we should relegate certain “works” of “hip hop” outside of the realm of “poetry” is mindless, ahistorical cock-jocking—there is poetry that entwines me in its complexity (both in and outside of itself) and there is poetry that promotes conformity—that is, poetry that levels, flattens, deadens. The manifesto writers who, supposedly, cock-jock, at present, dwell out of and create in an apocalyptic landscape filled with anthologies of manifestos and the sense of flattening their position takes within a field. In a field of cocks, what's one more cock?




The cock unto itself, like the work unto itself, takes no stance and participates in no dialogue. If we want to speak to what leads to fascist aesthetics one might just as easily posit this lack of dialogue. It is also worth pointing out that poets who engage in manifesto-like activities tend to be the most engaged in democratic dialogues on the ground level (See the coverage of the Wisconsin Protests on the Montevidayo blog, for example). Death to pressing art into platonic archetypes. Death to barring some things from “poetry.” Death to poetry as a category. Categorization and poetics are antithetical.



I am, I admit, an I, an I that is a letter that is pointing out some of the key conceptual flaws that underlie most articles that persist on the Poetry Foundation blog. I do appreciate that this article was there, and I like some of the things that it said. It was refreshing to see this sort of coverage of hip hop in such a venue, as opposed to the typical, decidedly relegating selections that flit into reductive dialogue by considering the subject only in passing without delving into the poetry itself. Whole articles on whether hip hop is poetry or not, or stilted comparisons to Robert Browning, are not appealing, and they fail to take hip hop seriously as poetry. Shoals' article does fall into this at its base, but when it situates itself within the music of the group it tends to be lovingly generous, and this is an approach that I welcome. When Shoals calls OFWGKTA “goofy, inventive wunderkinds” or “high-concept subversives” I'm right there with him, when he starts to read them only through how they are consumed by the wider readership, I lose interest. OFWGKTA may come out of skater culture, but they're also twisting hip hop into something refreshing and new by up-taking a vast field of references. This failure to understand the group’s motives happens primarily because the texts are being widely (/tritely) misread. To quote Tyler, the Creator, himself: “and we don't fuckin' make horrorcore, you fuckin' idiots/ listen deeper than the music before you put it in a box.”

So, why has this group been endorsed by the likes of Kanye West and Mos Def? I don't want to get into the a discussion on the reliability of Kanye West's statements, although I, at times, enjoy them for their blasting honesty. Mos Def, on the other hand, has a history of being a vicious critic of mainstream hip hop. He doesn't regularly jump on convenient bandwagons—in fact, he tends to slander them. And, in terms of Mos Def's own work, it seems strange that he would endorse something that partakes in rape, forced-abortion, pentagrams, and swastikas for shock value.

Notice the radical political stances he takes:



And his respectful, albeit sexual, portrayals of women:



Mos Def is not just noticing a trite surface appeal in OFWGKTA; he is noticing a deep relation to the tradition of hip hop. OFWGKTA’s lyrics and images relate back to hustler rap, MF Doom, the Wu Tang Clan and so on.

MF DOOM:


WU TANG CLAN:


They also reaches further back to elements of experimental jazz; here, I'm thinking especially of the stranged work of Miles Davis in the '70s and '80s.



OFWGKTA uses appropriation and masquerade—that is to say, they breathe hip hop. Their violent presentations come from stage personalities, and their work is in conversation with a history of “Sean Carters” pretending to be “Jay-Zs” on the stage, a stage that is in all of the texts, including both the music and the public persona. The self and the performance are both removed and intertwined. What is key to OFWGKTA is that their work uses its shock elements for things that reach beyond easy connotations. Their entire oeuvre is aimed at taking many of insidious but slightly veiled elements of rap to an absurd extreme within the lyric in order to direct it at the self-segregating, aesthetically-dead elements of American culture. Murder the white bourgeoisie, quit school because school makes citizens that buy in, and do and say things that will make white evangelicals uncomfortable. The performing personae uptakes violent and sexually troubling stances only to splay those stances out and make them ironic. If the reader goes “past the music” like they’re told to, he/she ends up with a vibrant, youthful critique that stabs deep into the shared cultural gut and twists the blade. The reader also gets an entrance into a shaky self that is, as Shoals describes, “undeniably funny, sad, and, somehow, devoid of moral gravity in a way that’s both silly and nearly surreal.”

This art produces twisting, vibrating, lyrical performance out of a series of historically grounded microcosms that overlap and aggregate. It is an art, in its best instances, where the image causes the meaning in the lyric to swell—visual and textual aesthetics become subsumed by a thing-less poetics, a language of being, a world inclusive inter-textuality. And while attributing mystical vibrato to such splayed out, meat-hooked, rebellion-infused griminess with all of its carelessness and misogyny is likely to cause pause, the culture that swells within the text of this poetry denies reductive readings. The trite, stilted approach to reading that relegates these texts to surface level concerns, and only surface level concerns, is indicative of the culture the texts are debasing. The text moves in the veins of Du Bois' double consciousness the way most hip hop does—it's a rebellious work that questions white bourgeois society while presenting an appealing, consumable face to its mostly white, suburban audience (and the urban gentrifying derivatives thereof). Here, however, the consumable face is taken to extremes and into a biting, politicized irony.

While there is content within the text that can be read, indeed, read deeply, the surface operates as a fetishistic veil for a consumptively consumeristic audience seeking out the socially estranged and the culturally weirded—like most presentations of hustling within hip hop, the surface creates a package gleaming with an exotic aura that is designed to elicit a comforting appeal to the established norms of the purchasing audience. There is a certain level of honesty in the lyrics as hustling rap implicitly comments on racial segregation that still exists, to be successful and to flash a diamond-studded watch in the face of those groups that can afford to consume the music is its own triumph. There are countless examples of hustler rap acting from a space of commentary, but I want to turn, briefly, to a video released a week ago by Pusha T:



The first verse is particularly indicative:

I went ahead and asked God for forgiveness
So now I’m just asking you to listen
I’m living in a World (in a world) where my truth can be my lynching
Last words “fuck you all” feel the ropes tension
I’ll never compromise, in it ‘til the powder dries
Best friends drowned in quick sand and help you cowards rise
I floss in their honor, their legacies in bottles
Make them walk like their 30 years is right around the corner
We was all fucking Shawna, you and ‘e’ was fucking on her
I was jealous when you both said her mouth was like piranha
Yea-ugh, spend money like we print money
Buck fifty on the car, that’s little dick money
The AC is forever broke, that’s vent money
Cocaine snowballed from gambling my rent money
Everyday struggle get money, get the crown 4
Always thinking big now they praying for my downfall

This verse partakes in skilled lyricism and is complex in its content and imagery. It also operates within a deep running context of inter-textual signifiers that swell the poetry outside of itself. Yet, it is a beautiful, sad confessional that partakes in violence to attack that which allows for violence. Here any inkling of success, by whatever means, is to be cherished because that success is always hard-won. The lyrics “I’m living in a World (in a world) where my truth can be my lynching/ Last words ‘fuck you all’ feel the ropes tension” are powerful. Though, this verse still partakes in paradigmatic themes of this sort of hustler rap—it is a man on the battlefield obtaining money in spite of the dominant culture that relegates him while taunting him with seemingly unattainable objects in the form of advertisements. Anything that person gets becomes a “fuck you all” directed at the system. Obtaining money and illustrating sexual prowess (although, here, that prowess belongs to male friends of the voice) are key elements of this—to delve into the full extent to which this type of rap tends to objectify and relegate women, and how that connects to social conditions on the ground level is quite complex and beyond my direct concerns here—what is of interest, however, is the way in which these elements of tradition get ripped out, reformed and deformed by OFWGKTA. The stances that hip hop takes become an extreme version of themselves that only exist as a mutated, surreal performance. The original, coded stances become their own leveled field of writhing cocks, but one where the new doesn’t spark up; a field with no fluid fireworks. The “Odd Future” swallows and becomes that present field—a field of writing, glistening complexities—and by doing so, it forces us to dive down into the mess.

On one level, those same tendencies from the Pusha T video are pushed to the limits in order to plow through a storm of competing, exceedingly strange internet culture in order to gain an audience. Given this, the zealous themes of rape and violence against women are troublesome and need to be considered. While the group has female fans, and there is a female member in their collective (their stage engineer, Syd, who also appears as a mental patient in the Jimmy Fallon performance), that doesn't mean the work itself isn't infected with misogyny. I think Tyler, the Creator's video “VCR” does a great deal to start to explain how this work is using rape within the context of performance, and within the context of performance only, to take a stylistic stance. There is still a troublesome core to the culture's stance on women. Yet, it might be less troublesome than the given, immediate reaction to such content our critical dialogue tends to have.



The text goes deep into the basement of debauchery before pressing deeper into the supporting soil, from there it confronts the audience. I won't go into a close reading of this piece, although I think there is enough complexity in it to warrant one, but I do want to note some key elements. The video goes over the edge into the point where it can't be taken as anything but performance—the thing being raped is a plastic, white, blond blow-up doll, and it is being raped in a basement decorated with video tape and grime. The group, with nine male members—that is, “nine cocks, who cock nines”—also has a lesbian in its ranks (Syd, who is mentioned in the song). In an article in the New York Times, She says they “treat [her] like an equal” and that “actions speak louder than words.”

A black artist performing in a dungeon full of swastikas can only be taken as ironic. It reminds me of Dave Chappelle’s popular sketch about a blind white supremacist who doesn’t realize he is black.



Further, it is worth noting that these artists are speaking out of a culture that has been raped both literally through the heinous genetic genocide of slave masters, and culturally through the systematic capitalization of human flesh that drove the triangular trade. The act of letting their performative-selves rape blond, (all the way through) plastic, white women is a declaration of rebellion against an oppressive aesthetic that imitates from an oppressive system (or, here, the system’s history). It is to be a destructive beast that rips at indestructible walls, because it is all one can do.



It is to spray graffiti over helvetica. It is to rape a metal shopping cart. It is to face-fuck a Ronald McDonald statue that tricks children into ingesting derivatives of petroleum products fronting as food. It is to violently reject the religion of your imperialist colonizers and their white ‘g’od. It is the twisted, punk-infused Tupac-ness of OFWGKTA.




Notice the t-shirt:



Again, murder the white bourgeoisie, quit school because school makes citizens that buy in, and do and say things that will make white evangelicals uncomfortable.

Now, I want to turn to Tyler, the Creator’s video “Yonkers.” It is the swelling visual and lyrical complexity of works like this, by OFWGKTA, that makes them worth considering. I hope I can make it do something, I hope its texture can have an effect.



Tyler’s upcoming album is titled Goblin, and the video starts with a splash of text acknowledging this. One can’t help but relate this to Lil’ Wayne—the lyric is actually taken from one of his most popular songs off of the The Carter III:

He’s a beast, he’s a dog, he’s a muthafukin’ problem
Ok, you’re a goon, but what's a goon to a goblin?
Nothin’, nothin’, you ain't scarin’ nothin’

Lil’ Wayne, like Odd Future, pushes past the traditional modes of hustler rap into something else, and Wayne reflects on that in this lyric. Tyler, the Creator’s work is in conversation with Wayne’s work, although Tyler, unlike Wayne, grinds away any sense of the authentic from the surface of his beastly persona that is a performance all the way through. There is also a connection to Wayne, I believe, through the imagery of tattooing. The upside down cross and the word “KILL” written in Sharpie on Tyler’s hand speaks to the fact that this persona can be easily removed. This is a stark contrast to Wayne’s own tattooing:



Wayne’s tattooing has powerful connotations within gang culture, hip hop, and—one might even conjecture—American tradition. I can’t help but think of Queequeg from Moby Dick—that a friend’s coffin carved with a friend’s experience becomes a raft, even out of a stagnant, doom-ridden fate. Tyler’s audience doesn’t get that satisfaction. His tattoos are sharpied on his hand, or in the form of asemic markings on a shirt, a shirt that is easily removed. And when he removes that scripted enculturation at the end of the video, under it are goblin eyes and gold chains of his deformed, performative self. That solid self at the beginning of the video is a thin layer over the performance—the reader has to go through the performance and out to the wider culture beyond the text to capture meaning in a widely-stitched net.




The first visual image after the album title is a simultaneous reference to of Rodin's The Thinker and the silhouettes of Kara Walker. This rings of double consciousness in the most powerful way, and speaks further to the historical relationships I intimated earlier. There is, even with regards to these images, an inversion taking place. The initial silhouette is a standard image in the history of European art, while images of Tyler's lived-body become “chitlin' circuit theater”—his performance splays out its guts and organs through irony and self-debasement. The irony is that the body is always seen through the flickering lights of the screen, and is never a “real” body. Again—look past the music, look past the image. The shadow of the thing, the Rodin, is the bronzed and marbled height of thought this work reaches at, but when that abstracted thought reaches into the lived performance itself, it causes spastic barfing. Thinking with history in mind leaves a foul taste in the mouth—and the lyrics begin to reflect that mouth rot, as the silhouette becomes a possession that covers over the eyes (the gateways to the soul).

For a view of all that rotting inter-textual gunk, go here:

[Yonkers Lyrics]

The visuals, of course, saturate those lyrics with another layer of meaning.


There is a psycho-sexual complexity in the lyrics, as Tyler jumps around between different preferences and levels of femininity and masculinity. I don't want to get into all of the complexities of gender confusion in this video, but take note that it is varied and in conflict with itself. The beginning of the video is self-referential and always confused in the double and triple meanings of its lyricism, that in turn play off of the visuals. The second half of the video runs along the same lines—the lyrics of the goblin possessed self are confused, and shift in meaning from line to line, often directly contradicting themselves.

The conceptual distinction that goes along with the shift of the blackness from the inside to the outside through the ingestion, regurgitation and possession by a solipsistic cockroach echoes the artist's place in society. That placement is a cockroach fed the internet challenge of eating a tablespoon of cinnamon, that is, a pun on “sin I'm in,” that is, poison to a bug. When culture is swallowed it spews back out and turns teeth black.

Those same oppressive cultural contingencies lead to the deformed, possessed performer's death by suicide, which simultaneously evokes a death by lynching. The cultural negativity can't help but become a part of the personality, and that personality is destructive to itself. By turning this out towards white society in a packaged, purchasable form that is consumed as shock-porn, Tyler shoves the darkness in their faces and tells them to swallow it. He doesn't care if they realize what they are swallowing—this is an aesthetics of just retribution and just revenge. It takes its revenge in the only space it can without contradicting its own motivations, in the space of performance. The text makes a strange commentary on the strange commentary that is hip hop—it is a performance all the way down.