Color isn’t accidental in an American context where we have learned about black and white since kindergarten, often at the expense of a nuanced understanding of the diversity of racial experience. Still, as Toni Morrison argues persuasively in her book of essays Playing in the Dark, the white/black binary is pervasive in our historical imaginary (Morrison’s focus is on canonical literature but her observations easily translate to the realm of the visual). The recent trend in music videos to film in black and white often serves to highlight and accentuate the ways in which race plays out as a tool of commerce.
Beyoncé’s dual personality project I Am . . . Sasha Fierce has birthed several black and white videos for her ballads. In “If I Were a Boy,” - B’s sappy rehash of Ciara’s “Like a Boy” (also in b&w) - the perverse nature of the singer’s betrayal is accented by racial politics absent from the song itself. B cheats on her black boyfriend with a white man. The boyfriend is further endarkened by his consistent placement in deep shadows (he is in the blurred foreground in the picture to the left watching B and the white man) and shots of him driving at night contrasted with the extreme whiteness of Beyonce’s police partner – the white man she is cheating with. Having the other man be both white and a cop further highlights his position as part of the dominant power structure. Gaga’s recent video for “Alejandro” is either a statement about the interpenetration of homoeroticism, the Catholic Church and the military or an excuse for the singer to deep-throat a rosary and make attractive men dance in high heels, Spanx and bowl cuts. Black and white film lends an air of verisimilitude and realness to any music video, and Gaga clearly plays on the ways in which using black and white film and supersaturated sepia (with the intentional splashes of red a la Schindler’s List – change out a human heart for a girl’s dress) evokes old Hollywood. The use of a monochromatic palette also reveals the Aryan nature of Gaga’s vision in “Alejandro.” A “Latin-themed” song about sex with men named Alejandro, Roberto and Fernando births an eight minute epic that visually disavows the presence of the Hispanic/Latino male in the song replacing him with a sea of classically European men in some sort of pseudo- Stalinist state.
Toni Morrison describes the “blinding whiteness” that functions as “both antidote for and meditation on this whiteness – a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing” (32-33). This blinding whiteness is made visual in music video texts like “Alejandro” and perhaps most vividly in Kanye West’s video “Love Lockdown” which places the outspoken rapper in an all white apartment that mirrors the coldness of his despair. The unease provoked by the shadowy presence of blackness can be seen in the hurt face of B’s boyfriend in “If I Were a Boy,” relegated to the video’s margins and in the ways that Rihanna’s body becomes animalistic when covered in black body paint in the b&w video for “Rockstar 101.” Suddenly the light-skinned Barbadian becomes darker and more the Other (and the whole video screams for comparison with Grace Jones).
These spectacular uses of blackness remind me of Julia Kristeva’s frequently quoted concept of the abject, “the jettisoned object” which is “radically excluded” drawing us toward “the place where meaning collapses” (2 in Powers of horror). The abject is that thing which makes us ill to look at, that thing which is a part of ourselves we would rather cast aside than acknowledge. Kristeva cites corpses, bodily fluids and the skin on turned milk as instances of that thing which was a part of our self and yet it turns our stomach and so we keep it out of sight. Much as we try to ignore or disavow the abject it sits in our peripheral vision and, like Peter Pan’s shadow, refuses to stay in its appropriate place.
For the music video for his track “On To The Next One,” rap superstar Jay-Z presents a vision of conspicuous consumption that understands the nuances of high society. As others have noted the black and white video draws extensively from the work of modern art in presenting seemingly unrelated images that include expensive cars, flaming basketballs and a ghastly skull. Jay-Z and Swizz Beatz rap directly to the camera in a straightforward delivery and all of the other images used in the montage are similarly framed in a style reminiscent of pieces in a museum or gallery. The video is a haunting one and I can see why its imagery has only added fuel to those conspiracy theorists that argue Jay-Z and other successful musical artists are members of the Illuminati, giving their souls to Satan in exchange for success. This is a video celebrating Jay-Z’s arrival as the premiere rap artist of a generation, a 40 year old CEO with eleven number one albums under his belt and the perfect partner in Beyoncé. Racial politics are also written into the video with the rapper’s mention of his alignment with Barack Obama (“Obama on the text”) and his referencing of the racist practices of Cristal champagne (“I used to drink Cristal / them fuckers racist”).
I keep returning to this video not because of the catchy chorus and able rhymes but because of the haunting images and the evocative use of the black and white aesthetic. While there are images of blackness as an eerie presence, the overwhelming feeling from the video is that the abject and haunting figures are aligned with the
“blinding whiteness.” Specifically, I am struck by the figures of the pale-faced topless male drummer, the white face of man wearing a black hood and black lipstick, and a suited figure dressed like the Joker of the Batman movies and comics. The flat affect of these figures with their cold stares stand in stark contrast to the boasts of Jay and Swizz Beatz and also the imploring look of a young black girl in a basketball jersey. When you add in the oscillating white backgrounds and the dripping white liquids that slide down black brick walls and puddle like milk, whiteness in “On To the Next One” suggests an abjected space, a place of unease and dis-ease.I used the adjective haunting which seems especially apt given the use of the Jok
e figure which evokes Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight even if the two are not exact doppelgangers. Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance was itself a celluloid haunting coming to our movie theaters after his tragic death, the extra-textual knowledge adding layers to an already nuanced portrait of a man with either no past or multiple pasts. In Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon writes that examining haunting requires attention to “what appears to be in the past, but is nonetheless powerfully present” (42), and the Joker operates this way both in The Dark Knight and in “On To the Next One.” The experience of being haunted, according to Gordon, “troubles or even ruins our ability to distinguish reality and fiction, magic and science, savage and civilized, self and other, and in those ways gives to reality a different color” (emphasis in original 53). In a song where the chorus is really just the chant “on to the next one“ stressing the need to stay ahead, the video’s use of haunting figures troubles easy distinctions between past and present, between a racist company’s past and their present, between a dead movie star and his avatar in a current video, between the swirling ink of a Rorschach test and the disavowal of potentially outmoded psychiatric method. Racist pasts loom large in music videos when the color contrast comes to the fore and is used for aesthetic, commercial and submerged political purposes. “On to the Next One” switches up the binary described by Morrison, shifts the haunting and abject to the white bodies and leaves the bodies of color in control, leaving them to speak as the narrators of the rapped truth. Women’s bodies remain presented as spectacle, yet both the white female figure and the woman of color dancing are presented as not static but moving art pieces along with all the other bodies shown here.I just keep coming back to those unearthly, deathly white faces staring out at me without any feeling and am repelled by their presence and fascinated at the same time. This is the abject looking at us from within the black frames offered by “On to the Next One,” for once the figures of color rule the roost and blinding whiteness unsettles, discomfits, turns my stomach. The color contrast speaks a potential for new racial politics of the visual, a potential constantly eroded though by the push of the economic machine and the need to reify an existing black/white binary that makes hegemonic common sense.
