MF DOOM and J Dilla are some of the most influential artists and producers of all time. Praised for their innovative approaches to music through lyrical storytelling and profound mixing, they are a main point of reference for contemporary artists. Both artists still have posthumous releases that come in the form of features, remixes, and revisited recordings. The current state of musical consumption especially from Afrikan artists performing for marketability and white capital has left subversive genres at risk of being co-opted and fetishized. Which may happen at a far more parasocial level given the personalization and “underground” nature that provides a space for white exceptionalism and the development of primarily non-Afrikan cult followings. Sadiya Hartman in Formations of Terror, creates a context of Afrikan suffering through something of a spectacle: consumable, commodified, intended for white capitalization. Hartman’s focus is on John Rankin’s letters on American slavery, however, examined and translated through contemporary shows of performance for a white audience, this cannot go unnoticed as acting as a “vehicle of white self-exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment”. The reaction to popular Afrikan musical artists’ centering their music around ambiguously liberal and racially progressive strides toward Afrikan cultural aesthetics is generally regarded as an almost vitriol performance, when in its essence is inherently consumed and marketed via frames of voyeurism, primitivization, and fetishization. There is entitlement over these artists and their performance that is curated intentionally toward white capitalization. This may tread grounds of reductionist discourse toward Afrikan performance as spectacle. However, white entitlement and forms of racial exceptionalism can arguably be examined as a modality of furthering the contemporary pathologization of Afrikan conditions and white and colonial acquisition.
Why are MF DOOM and J Dilla in question? These two artists are notoriously known for their cult followings, composed of white males and hip-hop heads who look toward DOOM’s lyricism and villainous characterizations and Dilla’s heavily regarded genuineness as a hip-hop production pioneer. In this context we need to ask: What differentiates the fans of these “underground” artists from their industry counterparts and why do fans often focalize this point as a means of having an understanding of something alternative, subversive, underappreciated, and misrepresented? Perhaps looking toward how despite the subcultures of subcultures, whiteness as a mode of commodification, in its current context, informs how folks associate certain audiences to certain demographics and asserts the ever-growing cooptation and commercialization of Afrikan art and labor that is created out of the stories of Afrikan personalization and artistic experimentation ranging from childhood to accounts of the experience of a dehumanized being. Looking at the way both these artists passed at the hands of systemic debt and medical inadequacy furthers the distinct disconnect with behaviors of white consumption toward Black suffering and the material and physical detachment of a community of spectators who leverage their proximity and almost anthropological expertise in this production and artistry and in turn disregard how the performance is informed by structural and captive systems they actively participate in and uphold.
**white consumption is broadly defined in this context: anyone can be a white consumer socialized within the structural confines of racialized whiteness such as class and systemic infrastructure and power relations which allow this racialism and proximity to such community detachment and fetishization to occur