I remember not long ago seeing a video essentially doing this same bit but for Love Sosa; it was a vertical short form video of this skinny blonde white lady reading books in various spliced shots, voicing over with a really long and overintellectualized analysis of the lyrics. It stuck out to me that someone commented that it was distasteful as a genre of joke because it boils down to “this art that Black people made is stupid, wouldn’t it be funny if we treated it like it isn’t?” but then I thought about it for a bit and I think that’s overtly uncharitable. Why can’t it just be treated as art that is worth dissecting with that level of granularity? Sure, there’s a humorous element to doing that because of how different the tone of the analysis is from the piece itself, but that doesn’t mean it’s a derisive or denigrating engagement. If irony can help break the barrier of taking something seriously, why not? I mean, not that there hasn’t been lots of scholarship on hip hop semiotics and its political implications, but you have to find a way to communicate that info to the masses.
Maybe it’s my pathological overthinking to go through about 3 steps of dialectical synthesis just from seeing a short video. Apologies for shadowboxing under your comment, I don’t mean this to be an argument or anything I’m just recollecting.
I remember not long ago seeing a video essentially doing this same bit but for Love Sosa; it was a vertical short form video of this skinny blonde white lady reading books in various spliced shots, voicing over with a really long and overintellectualized analysis of the lyrics. It stuck out to me that someone commented that it was distasteful as a genre of joke because it boils down to “this art that Black people made is stupid, wouldn’t it be funny if we treated it like it isn’t?” but then I thought about it for a bit and I think that’s overtly uncharitable. Why can’t it just be treated as art that is worth dissecting with that level of granularity? Sure, there’s a humorous element to doing that because of how different the tone of the analysis is from the piece itself, but that doesn’t mean it’s a derisive or denigrating engagement. If irony can help break the barrier of taking something seriously, why not? I mean, not that there hasn’t been lots of scholarship on hip hop semiotics and its political implications, but you have to find a way to communicate that info to the masses.
Maybe it’s my pathological overthinking to go through about 3 steps of dialectical synthesis just from seeing a short video. Apologies for shadowboxing under your comment, I don’t mean this to be an argument or anything I’m just recollecting.