The rap industry’s continued support of artists known for their sexism and domestic violence – Chris Brown, Kodak Black and XXXTentacion, for instance – is symptomatic of a larger societal aestheticization of violence.
First, a distinction between actually participating in violent acts and merely depicting them in one’s art must be made.
Despite being charged with aggravated battery of a pregnant woman, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment and witness-tampering, Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy, also known as XXXTentacion, released a debut album that reached the No. 2 spot on the Billboard 200 chart in late August.
This is a prime example of when we must be ethical and conscientious consumers.
While such acts of violence may be partially produced by a systemic culture of abuse, fear and poverty, the glorification of such acts only serves to further entrench prejudice and inequality.
I don’t mean to demonize rap or hip-hop.
“We are so behind in imagining that rappers are intelligent, whole people,” said poet and critic Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib in a recent episode of the Kenyon Review podcast. “The history of hip-hop has, at the root, real writers who are trying to innovate a form.”
The presence of violence in this form, then, should be unsurprising to anyone knowledgeable about other forms of art – cruelty is clearly a common touchstone for all of them.
From popular film, television and literature to the esoteric realms of avant-garde performance art, our society has proven itself to be utterly fascinated with the intersections between art and physical, emotional or sexual violence.
How, then, should we, as both willing and unwilling consumers of media, interact with such displays of brutality and harm?
Part of the usefulness of art is that it can allow us to understand our world’s unfortunate reality of violence in a contained, distanced and potentially cathartic manner.
In these kinds of interactions, the intention of the viewer and artist can supersede the art itself.
Art’s value is diminished if it was made simply to commodify or sensationalize pain, and, conversely, approaching art for the sheer shock and thrill of its subject prevents the observer from understanding any of the historical, political or social commentary the piece may be making.
The inundation of violence into our everyday lives should be met with other forms of art and media that cultivate kindness and understanding.
Maggie Nelson writes in her book “The Art of Cruelty” that “the obsessive contemplation of our inhumanities can end up convincing us of the inevitability of our badness, and that we likely do ourselves a disservice by staying riveted by top-of-the-hour, ad nauseam ‘proof’ that humans always have steadily pursued the bloody businesses of genocide, state-sponsored war, terrorism, and individual acts of sadism across space and time.”
I worry that in our obsession with what is wrong and painful in this world, we frequently forget the beauty of life and the things that make it worth living.
We may feel we are in an era of madmen, but this does not mean that we cannot continue to love one another. We can lift one other up and create art that says violence, while here now, will not be allowed to stay.
jhoffer@indiana.edu
@jhoffer17
