ANIMAL IN MAN

Various elements important to this analysis—firstly, ‘Animal in Man’ might be understood in direct relation to ‘America’ as a ‘country’ which was and is still built and maintained through ‘slavery’. Chomsky’s ‘Hegemony or Survival’ is a very striking book—length analysis of this—at least in terms of contemporary America in terms of the relation between ‘power’ and the ‘powerless’ and how this system (perhaps quite natural to human-relations) is maintained through ‘differences’. Farmer ‘Sam’ is America itself in every institutional reading possible and deployed throughout history and perhaps a striking example is ‘Jim Crowe’. The metaphorical allusion to ‘slavery’ in the track is quite obvious but there is another analogy I am more interested in bringing into the discussion here—Wyclef Jean’s track ‘If I was President’. Hannibal the pig in Dead Prez’s ‘Animal in Man’ points to the cynicism associated with ‘leaders’ of revolutionary-uprising. Perhaps a vague analogy would be Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe but more close to Dead Prez soil is Rev. Jesse Jackson. Now, everybody knows about him and the fondness he’s developed towards Obama. Nevertheless, I think the idea being that there are various people associated with the process of struggle for freedom yet in instances of acquiring status within such historical and political events or ‘spaces’; assumes the same role against which their very status was previously attained.

Wyclef’s track ‘If I was President’ is perhaps a quite cynical outlook on the idea of ‘blackness’ surviving through to presidential status. “If I was President, I’ll get elected on Friday, assassinated on Saturday, buried on Sunday, & go back to work on Monday”. Here, the idea of ‘identity’ in direct relation to ‘blackness’ is generated with an emphasis on ‘ideas’ and ‘values’ rather than colour—that the idea of having a ‘black’ president is in itself a mere rhetoric which appeals more to the incompetence of skin colour as a justification for one’s identity. The cynicism is in the lies more within the tacit and temporal structures to which Wyclef’s chorus refers. “If I was president, I’ll get elected on Friday” is a play on the first initiation of a ‘black’ person into the presidential ‘space’ regarded quite implicitly as an embodiment alluding to the ‘absoluteness of power as corruption’. So that the very ‘value’ or ‘blackness’ entrenched in a ‘black’ person’s personal and political ideals is “assassinated” the very moment he becomes a human vessel for the former ‘space’—an assassination which takes place the very next day he or she becomes this ‘space’. More so, such values become something historical attached to that subject’s subjectivity rather than his or her ongoing struggle. On Monday, he or she is reincarnated as a ‘president’ rather than the person he or she is in connection to struggle and issues pertaining to understandings of ‘blackness’.

I mentioned in the previous post (The Danger in..) that there is a fundamental danger in how lyrics such as that of Dead Prez are internalised and re-planted within a context such as Aotearoa—especially in regards to the above analysis. The metaphorical dimension in art (if now rap music is ‘art’ in the broadest sense of the word) has to be emphasised in every processes of interpretations in that such lyrics or contents are from the outset grounded or growing out of a specific cultural and political soil which is perhaps quite radical to a certain listener’s own social context.

To be Cont…