Watch the Throne: A Meditation on Black Power
by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan
“Power to the people | when you see me, see you”—Jay Z, “Murder to Excellence”
Arguably, two artists in the prime of the careers, have never decided to come together in the ways that Shawn Carter and Kanye West do on their new recording Watch the Throne. When Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross paired for 1974’s Diana and Marvin, Ms. Ross was hoping to revive a solo career that had stalled. The same could be said when Aerosmith, signed on to a one-track deal with Run-DMC on “Walk This Way” (Raising Hell, 1986). Michael Jackson was just hoping for the validation of Rock critics with their unwavering devotion to the White Rock god, when Mick Jagger shared lead vocals with him on The Jackson’s “State of Shock” (1984) in what was likely just another payday for “Jagger the Dagger.”
The pairing between Carter and West, begs the question, what’s in it for each? When Bobby “Blue” Bland and B.B. King paired for two live albums in the mid-1970s, it was clear that the two had genuine affection for each other after years of sharing top-billing on the Chitlin’ Circuit. In contrast, Carter and R. Kelly seemed to barely like each other through two recordings and an aborted tour. The disconnect was borne out in the music, which was often recorded in separate studios over tracks that neither artist had any real relationship with, let alone each with other; Best of Both Worlds (2002) and Unfinished Business (2004) were pure calculated and cynical money grabs.
And indeed when word of Watch the Throne began to surface, it was audiences and fans that reacted with cynicism, despite that fact that Carter and West have often expressed real affection and respect for each other—the big brother and the petulant little brother—and have generally produced memorable tracks when they have collaborated such as “Diamonds From Sierra Leone” (2005), “Never Let Me Down,” (2003), “Run this Town” (2009), last year’s “Monster,” and of course West’s production on The Dynasty Roc la Familia (2000), The Blueprint (2001), The Blueprint 2 (2002) and The Black Album (2003).
Such cynicism was likely the product of collective fears that Carter and West’s pairing would not only not produce great art, but would confirm their unwillingness—or more scarily—their inability to say anything of consequence at a moment when many desire their artists to—in the words of Bill Clinton—at “feel their pain.” This was part of Chuck D’s point when he too invoked the spirit of Otis Redding (as Carter and West did on the leaked single “Otis”) to challenge Carter and West to pay more attention to the music’s “heart, rather than swag,” even as he co-signed the duo’s talents and influence.
Yet part of what possibly made Watch the Throne attractive for Carter and West is the fact that they are all too aware of their disconnect from the working-class worlds that produced them—and the unique and isolated positions that each holds at the pinnacle of their craft and celebrity, and the relative power associated with those positions. Their ambivalence is evidenced in the oh-so casual way that the recording was rolled out, minus the usual shock and awe that one would expect from artists of their stature. As such Watch the Throne serves as a meditation on Black Power; not in the sense of the social movement that challenged America in the 1960s and beyond, to live up to its radical democratic tenets, but rather in the will of so many generations of Black folk to imagine the highest quality of life for themselves.
In his now classic essay “Homeboy Cosmopolitanism,” Malian film scholar Manthia Diawara says of this impulse towards individual success, that the “search for the good life is not only in keeping with the nationalist struggle for citizenship and belonging, but also reveals the need to go beyond such struggles and celebrate the redemption of the black individual through tradition.” What has always made hip-hop matter to the masses, even in the days of “party and bullshit,”—which if we’re honest, have always significantly outnumbered the moments of political militancy—is its ability to be aspirational.
This is a point that branding expert Steve Stoute argues in his forthcoming book The Tanning of America: How Hip-Hop Created a Culture that Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy, where he writes that the “force of aspiration,” is the “power that turns nothing into something, that creates worlds and paves destinies, and changes the have-nots into the have-somes and occasionally have-it-alls.” In a country marked by rich immigrant cultures, Black Americans may represent the most aspirational of peoples—willing themselves off of plantations and into some semblance of a (still unrealized?) full citizenship—long before Shawn Carter and Kanye West ever picked up a mic. Black aspiration is Black Power, dating to the time, per the late poet Sekou Sundiata, some “slave” dreamed in her head, a freedom that she would never fully experience.
Yet even this long tradition of aspirational power, falls flat at a moment when there exist and unprecedented wealth gap between the poor and the so-called super-rich and the United States faces a double-dip recession, that Black America could have predicted—and indeed that well-known economist Young Jeezy did four years ago. To be sure this is not the first recession that Black America has bore the brunt of, yet it might be the first in which Black artists are burdened with an expectation to speak to its palpable presence in the lives of their fans and supporters.
In the midst of a recession in the mid-1970s, when New York City was on the brink of defaulting on its loans and then President Gerald Ford threatened to veto any legislation aimed at bailing out the municipality, William DeVaughn could wistfully sing about the “diamond in the back/sun-roof top/digging the scene with the gangster lean,” on his aspirational classic “Be Thankful for What You Got.” The song was as much a cautionary tale about the trappings of materialism (as Black flight was becoming a reality), as it was a reminder that the culture already embodied a sense of wealth where a gangsta-lean—yet another precursor to ghetto fabulousness—was a hard earned commodity, as valuable as the pimp car rolling down the avenue.
Hip-Hop’s genius move from outset was to make the trinkets of everyday life the stuff of hyper-consumption—a story at least as old as Pig Feet Mary selling chitlins’, hog maws, and of course pig feet out of a baby carriage in Harlem in the early 20th century, later becoming a real estate tycoon or White folk dragging the Fisk Jubilee Singers around the globe for a taste of those good old Negro spirituals in the late 19th century, or Henry Box Brown recreating his escape act for European audiences years before the Emancipation Proclamation—I mean, I could go on.
Perhaps no commodity was as valuable to hip-hop as the conceit, the lyrical boast, itself intimately related to the traditions of Black expressive culture whether visualized by the Dandy on Chicago’s Stroll in the 1920s or Nikki Giovanni’s 1969 poem “Ego Tripping” (“I sat on the throne | drinking nectar with Allah | I got hot and sent an ice age to Europe to cool my thirst | My oldest daughter is Nefertiti | the tears from my birth pains | created the Nile | I am a beautiful woman”). When Biggie opined “fuck a dollar and a dream,”—putting into to context the way that hood-controlled numbers running (s/o to Casper Holstein) had been appropriated by the State (with a capital S)—he did so knowing that he was of a generation of young Blacks who were part of a commercial culture that no longer simply had to dream.
There’s no denying that the music changed; the conceits that were once simply metaphors—yes, the dream of Black Power—are now quantifiable assets. What’s a rich rapper to do? Who is there to talk to (especially one who looks like you) when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are no longer in the room? Watch the Throne is compelling because it allows us to eavesdrop on what a particular segment of the Black elite thinks. The trafficking in the toys of the Hip-Hop elite is a given—count the references to Maybachs, but, also Basquiat—and no doubt the gratuitous flaunting of Carter and West’s possessions and status is downright offensive, particularly in this moment—but significantly less so than a “political industrial complex” that funnels billions of dollars into a political process that only 1% of the population that controls 90% of the nation’s wealth benefits from. Give Hip-hop credit; It has built its wealth well beyond and despite of the forces of the State.
Equally important as you listen to Carter and West throughout Watch the Throne is the recognition that this is not your parents’ Black elite; Carter, West and a host of other Hip-Hop generation Black elites were not products of blue vein enclaves, summers at Oak Bluffs, Jack & Jill programs, and Boule meetings. This is a point that Bakari Kitwana makes in his essay “Zen and the Art of Transcending the Status Quo: The Reach from the Hood to the Suburbs” (Jay Z: Essays on Hip-Hop’s Philosopher King ed. Julius Bailey), where he notes, “Jay Z is making sexy the notion of elite class blacks who identify more with the black masses,” adding that Carter is a “bridge between the black poor and black elite in way that current activists in the tradition of Malcolm X can never realize.”
As two of the most accomplished trickster figures—shape-shifters—working in contemporary culture, Carter and West’s seeming thoughtless celebration of their wealth and status, must also be read as potentially signifying on the very elite culture(s) that still deny them full access. As with the controversial “Monster” video and the self portraits of Carter and West that accompany Watch the Throne’s digital booklet, the duo are all too aware—West in particular—of how they are perceived within mainstream American culture; they are still relatively young Black men whose success—if not their aspiration—is framed by the realities of race.
Carter and West are also not wholly oblivious to the kinds criticism that their work might generate in terms of gender; Carter has often gone to great lengths to explain his discursive deployment of the term “bitch,” much the way O’Shea Jackson (Ice Cube) did nearly twenty years ago, notably in a rather stunning critical exchange with bell hooks—an exchange Carter arguably replayed eight years ago with journalist Elizabeth Mendez Berry. When West appropriates Big Pun’s line from “It’s So Hard” in his verse on “It’s My Bitch,” (“I paid for them titties | get your own”), with the song’s late 1980s throwback rhythm track (replete with Charlie Wilson vocals and a nod the PE’s “Brothers Gonna Work It Out”), and given the now well known violence that the late Christopher Rios visited upon the body and spirit of his wife, perhaps the expectation is that audiences will read such a song as a commentary on how far hip-hop’s gender politics have progressed in some quarters.
In a rather persuasive reading of Watch the Throne, critic Hua Hsu argues that the recording “captures two artists who no longer need dreams; art cannot possibly prophesy a better future for either of them.” Yet, I would argue that Watch the Throne is, at it best, mostly about the dreams of Carter and West’s fans, supporters and even detractors—and their collective wills to live the best lives possible for themselves and their families.
