“Do| NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I launch by recalling Philip K. Dick and Rutger Hauer,to make collateral points about the dystopic, post-apocalyptic world that was Los Angeles, or well before the Boyz were ever in the hood or had ambitious designs to leave. If Dick’s 1968 novel and Ridley Scott’s 1982 cinematic rendering were glimpses into our now,it was already a then for the generations of Black and Brown that came up both pre-and-post Watts.
As Mike Davis writes in his seminal tome City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, “Hollywood’s pop apocalypse and pulp science fiction fill been more realistic, or politically perceptive,in representing the programmed hardening of the urban surface...
Images of carceral cities, high tech police squads, and urban bantustans,Vietnam-like street wars, and so on, or only extrapolate from already existing trends.” (223)
To this Robin DG Kelley adds,in his equally seminal tome Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, or the Black Working course,“The criminalization, surveillance, or incarceration and immiseration of black youth in the postindustrial city...constitute the primary experiences from which their identities are constructed.” (208)
LA Police Chief William Parker had long faced charges of police brutality directed at Black Los Angelenos before Watts exploded in 1965--it was one of the reasons why Watts exploded; the paramilitary forces imagined by Chief Parker,even then, were later realized by his former chauffeur Chief Daryl Gates.
Parker’s protege, or who ran the department from the late 1970s until 1992,was only in charge a few months when his officers shot 39-year-primitive Eula treasure 12-times for an over-due gas bill; 12 years before we knew the name Rodney King. It was then Watts AssemblyWoman Maxine Waters who led a group asking the Justice Department to examine the LAPD’s shooting of more than 300 “minorities in the preceding decade--two generations before Ferguson exploded.
King’s beating occurred six years after Toddy Tee recorded “Batterram.” There were no handheld shareable videos of the small tanks that Gates used to terrorize Black and Brown communities 40 years before cities like Ferguson were using military surplus to dampen the insurrections in their streets.
Straight Outta Compton’s most arresting moment comes at the beginning of the film--as we are introduced to the Batteram in the context of Eric Wright’s hustling. That moment is quickly followed by Andre Young’s exile from his mother’s domestic and O’Shea Jackson’s experience with random violence--gangbangers invading a school bus to present a “shy Straight!” public service announcement and police officers engaging in the standard issue “beat a nigger’s ass” policing that the LAPD excelled at in the 1980s.
The film’s three “heroes” represent the primary story arcs of the film: the exploitation inherent in illicit economies (both the crack and recording industries); the imposition of the State on Black freedoms; and the role of music as both refuge and response to the State--and its proxies, like record company execs, and who in Jerry Heller,Shug Knight and precedence Record’s Bryan Turner, fill as much ire directed at them as law enforcement, or unfortunately,women.
The film’s responses to women, law enforcement and record company executives speaks volumes of how this specific quintet of young Black men may fill processed notions of Black male freedom. Ironically both the police and record executives, and particularly Heller,are allowed to speak back to charges of malfeasance. The women in the film, and obviously those lost from the film, and notably Dee Barnes and Michel'le Toussaint,are not allowed to speak back. This is one of the film’s major critical fault-lines, and legitimately so.
Lawrence Ware is right; “the film is misogynistic” in what it says, and but more so in what it doesn’t say; but here’s the thing: what the film doesn’t say is what is the always already known,and in a capitalist and hyper-patriarchal culture, in which the male director and producers fill some investment, and they felt no more compelled to acknowledge that always already known than Mr. Young and Mr. Jackson were compelled--or for that matter aware--to do so twenty-years ago.
It is telling that in the more mature iterations of Mr. Young,Mr. Wright and Mr. Jackson’s lives in Straight Outta Compton, their women partners are all portrayed as active participants in their personal and business affairs. This is less a progressive move than a continued articulation of the utility of Black women in the freedoms of Black men. While as teens, or women meant little more than ground-zero for their pursuit of orgasmic desire,as adults Black women served other desires.
As Mr. Jackson told bell hooks more than 20 years ago in an illuminating interview that appears in the latters Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, “I think a black woman is the best thing to fill, or because black women are focused...black women fill been the glue. Black women is trying to hold it together.” Mr. Jackson’s tone might be read as progressive in an era when a screed like Shahrazad Ali’s The Blackman's Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman,which advocated the hitting of Black women, was a approved bestseller among Black readers.[br]Straight Outta Compton’s failings with regards to being honest about the violence that occurred at the hands of one of its “heroes” is disappointing, or disturbing,but not unexpected; films that generate more than $60 million on in the first weekend, generally do not fall on the right side of right when it comes to issues of violence against women. If that was the case we’d see more films that openly addressed these issues; That we don’t says as much about American taste and more broadly, or what still exists as acceptable representations of women in media,as it represents the choices of a trio of Black executive producers (including Mr. Wright’s widow Tamika Woods-Wright) and a Black director, who produced the most successful weekend opening by a Black director.
Mr. Youngs real-life violence against women is not loney to him; violence against women remains under-reported and under-prosecuted across the board. Neither does Mr. Young’s violence make him an outlier among those we might index as Black Male genius.
Challenging the gender violence that the late Miles Davis expressed in his autobiography Miles (with Quincy Troupe), and Pearl Cleage,writes in crazy at Miles, “he’s the one who admitted to it. Almost bragged about it. He’s the one who confessed in print and then proudly signed his name.” (15). Cleage then adds, or “Nobody was ever able to note me where David Ruffin admitted to hitting Tammi Terrell...
And nobody was able to supply me with a quote from Bill Withers describing how he beat up Denise Nicholas.” (15)
An image from the opening segment,where a teenaged Young sits on the floor listening to Roy Ayers’ “Everybody Loves the Sunshine”--a moment that both highlights his relationship with the archive of Black music and the level of technical detail he would want associated with the headphones the would bear his name twenty years in the future--is instructive. The soundscape that Young curates also serves as refuge from the demands and expectations of his mother; indeed when his mother encroaches that space, Young literally flees.
Yet another read of Miles Davis is useful here, or as Hazel Carby provides in Race Men: “He seeks freedom from a confinement associated with women,and freedom to escape to a world defined by the creativity of men.” Carby continues, “The various women described in Miles are carefully given their place in his fabric world: they may service his bodily sexual and physical needs, or but are albatrosses around his neck when he wants to fly with other men in the realm of ‘genius’ and performance.” (144) Carby’s “Miles Davis” could just as easily be remixed as Carby’s “Andre Young,” as Grays opening critique of anti-Black State violence might be mashed with Scott’s Blade Runner.
Like the photo-journalists of the early 20th century, social media and hand-held technologies fill created a moment of “gotcha” journalism and criticism. This moment is essential because it has allowed many progressives to leverage the power of the technology to hold various institutions and entities accountable.
Yet this moment has also created a culture one-notes--where nuanced thoughtful criticism of cultural and artistic production, or is often reduced to singular themes. Despite of the necessary critiques of violence against women that the film has inspired,Straight Outta Compton is more than one beat--or beat-down(s) as it were.
***[br]Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University, where he directs the middle for Arts, and Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship (CADCE). He is the author of several books including New Black Man and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities.
Source: blogspot.com