I have a lot bubbling around in my brain at the moment. First, I’m thinking about FN Meka, the artificial intelligence (AI) rapper that was signed to Capitol Records and then promptly dropped after it was (surprise!) found to be super racist. Second, I’m thinking about two books that I’ve been working through this summer. The first is Nina Sun Eidsheim’s The Race of Sound and the other is Racecraft by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields. The last thing is how Vice News reported on the shooter at a Chicago Independence Day parade. Forgive me: I’m just going to think out loud for a bit…
First, I’d encourage you to click on the link above to read about FN Meka: focus on Industry Blackout’s petition. The part that stands out to me is: “This digital effigy is a careless abomination and disrespectful to real people who face real consequences in real life. For example, Gunna, a Black artist who is featured on a song with FN Meka, is currently incarcerated for rapping the same type of lyrics this robot mimics. The difference is, your artificial rapper will not be subject to federal charges for such.” Many have accurately pointed out that this AI creation allows white people to live out their racial/racist fantasies in very much the same way minstrel shows did. EDIT: I’ll also add that this “rapper” is a VR creation with lyrics written by someone else (white? Asian? “inspired by” AI?) and rapped by someone else (Kyle the Hooligan, at least for some of the songs), then really what does this say about authorship?
EDIT: This is worth a watch (h/t Imani Mosley)—I think it’s important how Johnson questions to what extent is he a robot, or “powered by AI.” And he does show that the guy behind Meka’s record label is a white guy (via footage from Genius). There’s surely a lot of weirdness going on behind the scenes… (“I only sponsor Meka with my NFT brand”; “My home database is in Salt Lake City”). Uh…
Eidsheim’s book suggests that sound qua sound is meaningless: that the only reason sounds have meaning is because we ascribe meanings to them. These meanings are conditioned by culture, politics, etc. In short, if we say someone “sounds Black” or “sounds white,” there is nothing about the sound itself—the physiology of the speaker, the compression and rarefaction of air that strikes our eardrums—that indicates the race (or any other aspect, for that matter) of the sound’s source. An important component of Eidsheim’s argument is that voices are never constant—they change over time—and that we learn not only how to sound, but how to listen, as well as how to listen to how we sound. In chapter 4, Eidsheim examines how digitally synthesized voices created by the software program Vocaloid “sound race”; her analysis seems particularly appropriate here.
I haven’t listened to FN Meka’s… music? yet (I’m on kiddo patrol so not too much time for adult-themed music) but will spend some time tomorrow going down that rabbit hole in some more depth. The bottom line here is that there is clearly “something it sounds like to sound like a rapper,” and that “something” is highly racialized (or at least is not race-neutral as a lot of other musical styles might be perceived).
The main thesis of Racecraft seems to be that racism gives rise to the concept of race, not the other way around (as commonly assumed; forgive me—I’m only halfway through the book at this point). In a similar spirit to Eidsheim’s work, I’d say, the authors begin by debunking the idea that there is any biological or physiological preconditions for the concept of race before proposing that racism—some internalized sense of superiority and/or hatred—produces race, the meanings we ascribe to different skin colors. Race is a fiction created in the service of the fact of racism, the authors contend. In thinking more about this, it certainly resonates with what Eidsheim is talking about in terms of racialized sound, and I can’t help but think of Michelle Alexander’s argument in The New Jim Crow, that systems of oppression shapeshift and become more difficult to detect and pin down over time: slavery became indentured servitude became Jim Crow laws became the so-called War on Drugs and mass incarceration. Point being: the fact of racism persists, but the fictions it generates morph over time, and I can’t help but think rap and rappers are playing an important role in the present iteration—witness the use of lyrics as evidence (which, thankfully, is finally being legislated against in some places).
Finally, in the wake of the tragic mass shooting that took place during an Independence Day parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Vice News ran an article with the headline “Police Arrest Local Rapper in Connection to Highland Park Mass Shooting.” The article mentions that police “released an image of Crimo” and that his social media accounts were uncovered shortly thereafter. The article does not include any images of Crimo, but does relay that “Photos and videos of the man show him to be tall and slender with face tattoos and, in some images, multi-coloured hair.” Nowhere does the article mention his race: are we to assume it’s white because white is normative and otherwise unremarkable? Are we to assume he’s white because most mass shooters in the United States have been white men? Or are we to assume that he is Black because he is a “rapper”? This to me is a particularly insidious example of racecraft at work. To my knowledge, no other (major) news outlet reported on the shooter’s identity in this way: the author of the Vice (or perhaps more accurately the editor?) article had to know the impact that the word “rapper” would have in this context.
That’s all I have for now… more later this week.