KANYE'S MONSTER GIVES CRITICISM HELL
Put a black man in a bed next to two dead white women, and you’ve stabbed the heart of the white racial imagination. The music video for Kanye West’s Monster plays out this racial drama with an all-star ensemble: Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj, and Rick Ross. Directed by Single Ladies’ Jake Nava, the video takes the mogul metaphor out of “profit monster.” The set’s high-fashion underworld is photographed in pulp-noir contrast and populated with lingerie-clad models in various states of dead. It’s a veritable hell house—for critics.
Every blog from The Huffington Post to Feministing writes that Monster pushes female passivity to its violent, sexualized breaking point. Really? Sure, they’re dead. Yes, they’re women. But first: they’re models. They’re walking clothes hangers. Think of their twisted limbs strewn about the pages of magazines. Think of their haunting, glassy eyed stares. Their skeletal, fatless figures. Dab a little blood on one, and suddenly we’re in a huff?
It’s not just misguided feminism leading critics down the primrose P.C. path. It’s that they’re forgetting about race. Try: Kanye West is giving the finger to America. Try: Kanye West is lifting up America’s skirt. Kanye West is putting his fingers inside your America, taking a blade to her ivory throat. Sound familiar? Kanye West is a monster because that’s what black men are in the white historical imagination.
The video’s emphases on slow pans, static poses, and mise-en-scene, the so-fake-it’s-camp make-up and hyper-corrected colors show us: it’s about representation not reality. The use of models is similarly telling; Kanye “likes the girls that ain’t on TV” and usually hires not so thin video vixens. Monster isn’t a “surreal response” to how hip hop pictures women, it’s a real response to the undead nightmare of how American whites picture even successful black men—still wondering, in the wake of OJ, if there are skeletons in all their closets (white female ones).
If you need a refresher on Kanye’s racial intelligence give College Dropout another listen. Maybe Kayne is following Jay-Z’s advice, “dumb down for my audience, double my dollars;” Kayne’s newer work delivers critical content in images rather than lyrics. Take Love Lockdown. Kanye’s in a white suit and ultra-white room, but the whiteness of wealth gets punctured by the star’s disasporic daydreams: the animalistic and alien representations of African peoples.
The few critics discussing Monster’s racial politics do so with an all-or-nothing mentality hell-bent on the idea that dead and alive are split down racial lines. Then, they slap Monster with the charge of falling into stereotypes—suggesting, bizarrely, that video should have de-linked race from its representations, thereby de-linking racism from misogyny. The trouble with this thesis is twofold. First, the actual stats of the live and dead. (My body count? Among the 5 dead: 2 not white. Among the 9 live demons: 4 white.) Second, the simple elimination of stereotypes from pop culture isn’t the way to get rid of stereotypes.
The bold directorial choice for Monster would have been to actually create racial lines along life and death, to make the connection inescapable—to perfectly align with racist ideas, like white women’s purity, like miscegenation leads to death for whiteness, like women of color are beasts to be tamed or freaks to be exhibited. Refusing to fully rehearse racist tropes detracts from the video’s ability to reveal these tropes for what they are: the baseless, fact-less, power-trips of white people’s nightmares. I hate Monster’s “just art” disclaimer because I’d love it if the video would really “be negative towards [a] group of people:” white people.
Like its critics, Monster is trying too hard to have its cake and eat it too. The disclaimer smacks of pandering to an audience broader than those able to catch its drift. And that poorly-constructed sentence isn’t the only part of the video that disappoints. After Rick Ross’s chilling, smoke-cloud sloth and door-close on a soon-to-be-Dahlia, Kanye’s bravado lacks bite. Besides his “swallowship” portmanteau, the best part of his verse is his devolution into “nuh-gun-a-doo” nonsense, and I bet the director suggested he put that corpse’s head on his lap. Jay-Z’s claims to rape and pillage ring false after his chuckle-worthy list of “goblins and ghouls.” His Dolce suit is more exciting than the dead woman stuffed beneath the couch during his verse, yet she gets as much screen time.
Only Nicki Minaj’s performance is monstrously good. Her verse is the longest featured but goes by the fastest. Both monster and victim, Nicki portrays a raced, female double consciousness, a Madonna/Whore whose Madonna mimics a white Barbie doll. With her on-screen confidence, her excitingly assonant “pink wig thick ass give ‘em whiplash / I think big, get cash, make ‘em blink fast,” and a genuine, cringe-worthy scream, Nicki’s “I’m a monster” is the only one I believe.
Originally, the word “monster” meant “portent of the future.” Sadly, post-Monster, critics are still avoiding the confrontation with a racist past and present the video begs for. Their color-blind dreams that we should sweep stereotypes under rug to be rid of them will serve only as fuel for our next racial nightmares. If Monster and the swell of criticism following it teach us anything, it’s that the most truly monstrous legacies hide in plain sight.
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