The image above is from Floodwatch by way of Unkut. When I saw this ad/teaser/whatever I got really excited for reasons I’ll describe in a moment but what I initially did was connect it to this quote from Shots Ring Out’s article:
“Gloss is dead…Well, mostly. This would seem to effect rap more than anything. The rock kids are fine with a DIY aesthetic (or a faux DIY asthetic). Maybe crossover stars like Timberlake (or even Kanye) can get away with big budget affairs as they will get enough exposure to justify the cost. Everybody else needs to realize that shooting it with a cell phone and uploading it to YouTube is good enough.”
I’m not excited about ‘Cuban Linx 2′; I never even think of it because I really don’t think it will be anything more than “okay” and while this ad doesn’t get me excited about the album it does get me excited about, well, this ad and that’s enough for now.
The simplicity and low-budget-ness of the ad have the effect that a glossy, well-lit, maybe even kinda photo-shopped image just can’t. It looks like it was shot on the floor of a High School or something and has this great florescent-lights-from-above flare that a certain kind of obsessive “professional” would avoid or remove in post-production. There’s way too much cocaine and although we know (or assume) real coke isn’t used in video shoots, there’s a certain charm to how much and just how fake this cocaine looks. It doesn’t matter if it’s fake because we know it’s a posed picture and the ad wisely doesn’t waste it’s time trying to to achieve realism, it’s just real because of it’s messy, simplicity. Part of the simplicity is it’s use of cliches. The cocaine, the guns, the hoodies, it is all familiar but rendered in a way that is real and palpable and works within expectations without becoming a tested-with-an-audience PRODUCT.
Because this is an ad for Raekwon it gets bonus points because we know Raekwon could easily make a conventional, mainstream-looking “attractive” poster and get away with it. However, it’s also worth noting that there’s just something really genius about this image and design and I feel it extends beyond the DIY or “faux-DIY” aesthetic discussed by Shots Ring Out. If I saw this nailed to a lightpole in Baltimore it would pique my interest just as well (probably more, actually). I say that because this isn’t just a famous rapper “going back” and co-opting a low-budget style, it’s done with the same kind of cohesive but ugly genius that Wu Tang have honed since the beginning. The ‘C.R.E.A.M’ video isn’t just a cool low-budget video (the way ‘Protect Ya Neck’ is), ‘C.R.E.A.M’ uses the low-budget feeling to its complete advantage; it becomes it’s own, like style and not just “the best we could for a couple grand”.
Popular music and all popular art is inevitably tied to money and as a result, that “D.I.Y” sense, that acceptance of sloppiness, and messiness is a negative. It’s a ruse to keep weird people, people who don’t play the game (like Wu Tang) out- but occasionally, as Wu Tang’s 90s popularity suggested, this aesthetic breaks through. In a way, stuff like Soulja Boy and his Youtube popularity is a similar breakthrough Soulja Boy uses the Youtube aesthetic of his generation just as this ad uses a real location and uses people (is the coke-covered guy Rae? I can’t tell) that have some connection to that location, but still poses them without totally losing that sense of reality. It plays the corporate game of giving a specific audience exactly what they expect but unlike most corporate product, it gives the audience a little more than escape or fiction.
It also makes me think of many early 90s Southern rap covers more than it does 90s East Coast designs. The cover of ‘Mr. Scarface is Back’ in particular, in its ability to create a scene that is obviously staged but through well-wrought detail, feels even more real than maybe, an actual crime photo of a deal gone wrong. German movie director Werner Herzog called it “ecstatic truth”: “ecstatic truth…is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization” (301). Herzog is famous for taking his professional film crew and actors to some real-life crazy location and you know, making a movie. The truth, the reality is there in the location but he’s still altering it because he’s constructing some kind of fictional movie around it. Even if he uses “non-professional” actors, as in you know, he uses real Peruvians as the natives of Peru, they are in a movie, they are acting. So, there’s some weird unreality to the reality? Does that make sense?
This isn’t just fiction, staged and fake, there’s something weird going on. This little ad isn’t documentary real, it isn’t Hollywood staged, it falls somewhere in between and in a way, outside of that. It’s the same thing you get on the “skits” peppered throughout the classic Wu Tang albums, those snippets of conversation and argument, some of which are clearly just recorded conversations and some of which are ridiculously well-acted scenes and a few of which strive for some conventional, Hollywood sense of acting and melodrama but never fully embrace any of those distinctions.
-Cronin, Paul, ed. ‘Herzog on Herzog’. London: Faber & Faber, 2002.
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