On Black Ariel Part One:

Kayne West and the Economy of Spectacle

“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles”

There once was a time when the artist formerly known as Kanye West was known as a music producer. His first big break came from his work on Jay-Z’s critically acclaimed Blueprint album, quite ominously released on September 11th, 2001. West produced 5 songs on The Blueprint, and in doing so he set a new trend in Hip Hop. He eschewed the drum-machine-based, pop-friendly style of his more famous contemporaries and instead relied on RnB samples to imbue Jay Z’s world-weary bravado with a tactile sense of soul. 

Soon after he released his own studio album, College Dropout, and again changed what Hip Hop could be as a musical genre. Dropout was a deeply personal album, filled with ennui and palpable vulnerability. A stark contrast from the archetypal gangster persona employed by nearly every other rapper. Over time that vulnerability would become a mainstay in Hip Hop storytelling from the twee romantic longing of Drake to the themes of depression and self-harm that permeate the mumble rap and Drill scenes today. 

Kayne saw hip-hop as art. Something more than just a ticket out of the crucible that is urban Black life. West sought to make his audience relate to his work on a level that was more personal than vicariously living the thrill of outlaw gangster life. That’s not to say that Kanye didn’t present himself as a larger-than-life figure. He was a virtuoso, whose talent and lyrics set him on par with the giants of the game without having gone to jail or taken a rental car to Philly to pick up a package.

And then he lost his damn mind.

This article isn’t about the artist formerly known as Kayne West. Recently he legally changed his name to just Ye, although no one calls him that. Some background on his rise to fame is presented only to explain why, even after all he has said and done, many still revere the man. We aren’t interested in why Kanye is like this. There have been many explanations offered, mostly coalescing around his officially diagnosed bipolar disorder and his undiagnosed runaway narcissism. Instead let's talk about how Kanye operates today, and how it relates to how our entire political economy works in the age of spectacle. 

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In a very real sense, Kanye is still primarily focused on creating art. It's just that his art is no longer about being a frustrated genius waiting for his chance or dealing with the interpersonal consequences of achieving fame. It's not even about womanizing or spending money. Currently, Kanye has transformed his entire life into an art project that is geared toward reaction. It’s important to note (perhaps more so for his fans than his detractors) that Kanye doesn’t read. People close to him, including his ex-wife Kim Kardashian, have noted that he isn’t very political. His initial support for Donald Trump was based on a vibe rather than any ideological belief or commitment. 

To quote Gertrude Stein: There’s no there there. 

The concept of vibes is important to understand here. Kanye has no coherent political project other than to take the opposite position as the Black consensus and frame the inevitable negative reaction from fellow celebrities and the public as proof that he is speaking the truth. You might recognize this as Trumpism 101. It shouldn’t really surprise anyone that Kanye feels a kinship with Trump. He knows little about Trump's policies or politics, he only sees a fellow celebrity prosecuting a personal grievance with elite celebrity culture through liberal triggering reactionary political rhetoric. The hat just fits. 

In the weeks since he wore a “White Lives Matter” shirt to Paris Fashion Week, he’s waived away wearing the slogan deemed hate speech by ADL for its prominent use by the KKK and other associated hate groups as merely being a funny joke. This makes sense because he probably doesn’t know about any of that, nor cares to know. He’s spent more time going after Anna Wintour and supermodels like Gigi Hadid and Hailey Bieber as well as Vogue journalist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson not just for criticizing his recent sartorial choices but also failing to intercede on his behalf in the bitter custody battle between himself and his ex-wife. 

There was nothing behind his “White Lives Matter'' shirt or his schmoozing with right-wing grifter Candace Owens at Paris Fashion week other than provoking a reaction from his former fashion friends. Over the past few years, West has flirted with several different ideological identities from MAGA conservative to born-again Christian. Most recently, as revealed by his seemingly out-of-nowhere torrent of antisemitic comments, he’s on some Black Israelite bullshit. The common thread between all of these quasi-disparate trains of ideological thought is that they exist not as sincerely or well-thought-out philosophical conclusions, but as vehicles for his ire against other celebrities that have wronged him. 

He is not trying to make a political point or reveal some obscured truth. He is merely collecting spectacles because that is how he can most effectively manifest his desire for attention. The substance of what he says matters not to either him or his detractors, only that after he says something like “I’m going Death Con 3 on Jews” all eyes are focused on him. The substance is suborned to the aesthetic of the statement. Wearing the costume of a MAGA conservative or born-again Christian or a Black Israelite conveys all the message necessary. 

“I’m not like everybody else, please like and subscribe.”

Under the Sea of Spectacle

You might have read the title of this article and wondered: “When is he going to get to the Little Mermaid?”

Colorblind casting should be one of those things that conservatives support. According to the only quote that Martin Luther King Jr. ever gave, a person should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Seems like this should apply to actors as well. And yet with every “canonically white” character cast with a person of color in the role, a decentralized phalanx of anti-woke keyboard warriors takes to the interwebs to decry the loss of western civilization. 

We should note that race-swapping a character is not necessary to draw the ire of free-thinking people looking to defend against the dark woke arts. Sometimes just the mere presence of marginalized identities in beloved properties is enough, as was seen with Star Wars characters played by John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran. Brie Larson demonstrated her misandry by starring in a superhero movie about a woman. Marvel's Eternals caught flack for making one of its characters visibly queer. The 2016 Ghostbusters reboot was attacked for swapping the all-male cast of the original with an all-female crew of phantom fighters. Amazon shut down user reviews for its Lord of the Rings TV series to make sure that the expected deluge of complaints about adding people of color to the completely fictional realm of Middle Earth wasn't carried out by bots. 

The main weapon employed by the extremely online anti-woke brigade is review bombing, where people flood review aggregators with negative reviews, often before the movie is even released. After the semi-coordinated effort to lower Rotten Tomato scores, the anti-woke can then claim that there is no real audience for this kind of woke crap. 

But of course, there is an audience for this kind of woke crap, or else multi-billion dollar media conglomerates wouldn’t be producing it.

Disney began producing live-action remakes of their animated classics with 1994’s The Jungle Book, but the idea took off in earnest with Tim Burton’s 2010 version of Alice in Wonderland. Whereas the ‘94 Jungle book sought to be a faithful adaptation of the animated version, the 2010 Wonderland was reimagined as a gritty dark fantasy side-sequel to the original, with twists, betrayals, and girl boss energy. Alice ends the film returning to her world, rebuffing an unwanted marriage proposal and helping to establish trade routes in China. Because nothing says “YAS KWEEN” like smuggling tea and opium in and out of Shanghai. 

With Tim Burton’s off-kilter cinematic sensibilities and the charisma of actors like Johnny Depp and Helena Bohnam Carter, the movie was a huge financial hit and Disney had itself a new formula. Namely producing a slew of live-action remakes of animated classics for a new more liberal audience looking to cleanse their childhood favs of problematic elements. Alice became an international businesswoman. Maleficent went from a stereotype of female jealousy and mania to a tortured anti-hero and Aurora’s unexpected savior. Cruella de-Ville was also given the tragic anti-hero treatment and answered the question: “What if The Devil Wears Prada was an action-packed dark comedy?”

These movies have been of varying quality. Some have earned positive reviews like Maleficent and Beauty and the Beast, others like Cruella and The Lion King not so much. I wasn’t even aware of 2019’s Lady and the Tramp until a few weeks ago. The Little Mermaid may very well be a great movie. Or it could be mediocre as is the case with most of the Disney remakes. However, Halle Bailey’s casting as Ariel means that the movie can longer be talked about as just a film. It is now a spectacle. 

I want to be clear here, the preemptive attacks on the movie by reactionaries are really stupid. Brain-meltingly stupid, actually. The fact that people are arguing for the scientific implausibility of a mermaid with Black skin and features, is a very credible piece of evidence that society has run its course. Halle Bailey’s Little Mermaid is not an attack on western civilization, it is not an attempt to erase white people, and it is not wokeness run amok. The reason why it is not any of those things is pretty simple. Disney is not a woke company. 

Society of Reaction

Guy DeBord’s 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle is getting a lot of traction these days, and for good reason. DeBord writes about how under the post-war mode of capitalist production and consumption, physical goods and services have become less important than what the appearance of those goods and services signifies. People don’t line up to buy the latest iPhone because whatever new functions it features are materially significant to their lives. They do so because owning the latest iPhone signifies that a person is cool and hip, potentially even an artist of some sort, and most importantly financially comfortable. Apple is just as much a vibe as it is a company looking to make money.

This isn't a moral failure on the part of the person waiting in line for Apple products. It's a condition of the society we inhabit. Consumption drives our economy, and in the quest for exponential growth, companies must conjure reasons for people to consume more and more. Why should you drop a grand on a new phone when your current phone is only a year old? Because it can draw doodles on your face, and owning it means people will think you’re cool. Why should you pay to see an almost shot-for-shot remake of a movie you watched a hundred times as a kid? Because supporting a movie that makes conservatives mad makes you a good person. 

Guy DeBord’s conception of a society based on spectacle was more than apt at the time it was written in the 60s, but our contemporary moment has completely vindicated it with the advent of social media. Today the economics of spectacle also includes the reaction to spectacle, the reaction to the reaction, and so on until it's angry emoticons all the way down. Disney and all the other major corporations are well aware of this. Including actors of color or socially conscious themes in their productions isn’t an act of woke propaganda, nor is it a genuine attempt to correct the traditional erasure of marginalized people from prominent roles in popular media. It's advertising.  

This isn’t to impugn the efforts of actors and artists from marginalized backgrounds who are finally getting a chance to tell stories from their perspective. There has been a lot of truly great content produced in recent years that might have otherwise never seen the light of day. (Batgirl notwithstanding.) The problem is that, for the studios financing these projects, the specificity and quality of the content are much less important than what the spectacle of representation signifies. 

Both Kanye West and Disney are investing in the economy of spectacle from different positions. Kanye isn’t very much interested in the substance of what he is saying, he wants to signify himself as a prominent Black conservative because he is constructing his brand around being an iconoclastic “free thinker''. Likewise, Disney isn’t interested in telling Black stories, they just want to signify that they are a socially responsible company where liberals can feel comfortable spending their dollars. Conversations about the prevalence of nostalgia porn in popular media, the quality of mediocre movies, and the lack of new and interesting ideas are all pushed aside. If you don’t like a Disney movie, it's because you are a bigot. 

Kayne used to donate to Democratic party politicians and causes, and Disney used to donate to anti-LGBTQ Republicans until public pressure over the “Don’t Say Gay” bill became too loud to ignore. Both parties are using spectacle to communicate a certain cultural aesthetic and weaponizing the reaction to that projected aesthetic to obscure the inconsistencies and contradictions in what they are doing. 

When it comes to Kanye the problems are clear. He is spouting bigoted, reactionary nonsense and lending a modicum of colorblind credibility to a racist, anti-Semitic, Christian nationalist, and misogynist political project. He may also be trying to pump up business for the conservative social media platform he just bought from Candace Owens’s husband. For Disney, the issues with their marketing of inclusive content are a bit less clear. On the surface, it’s a bit annoying to see diversity weaponized against any and all criticism, but that bad-faith posturing is canceled out by the fact that more marginalized people get to make movies. That is unequivocally a good thing. The problem reveals itself when we take a critical eye on the types of projects in which diversity is being added, the kinds of stories marginalized people get to tell, and what those things say about how equality and equity are pursued in our American context. 

Which is what we will be doing in part two.

Solidarity Forever.