In his editorial “Superman that ho,” Nandan Prasad, while acknowledging the aesthetic genius of the recent work “Crank That” by Chicago-based new-media artist Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em (indeed, Prasad writes, “[e]ven I can’t resist trying to learn the dance so I can join my friends in ‘crankin’ that'”-a desire which, to be sure, we all share), critiques the work as politically conservative and as emblematic of hegemonic male discourse.
Prasad writes, “every time I dance to the song or snap my fingers to the beat, I feel a huge pang of guilt for what I feel is my tacit approval of the song’s offensive lyrics, more specifically, the continued use of the word ‘ho’ to refer to a woman.” This embodies, for Prasad, the “degradation and objectification of women in the mainstream hip-hop industry.”
This is a commonly heard complaint against the recent crop of young artists from urban areas working in the hip-hop genre and it appears on the surface to have merit.
Doesn’t referring to women as “hos” and “bitches” constitute a reification of the status quo, a reaffirmation of institutionalized violence against women? Before we make this easy critique, however, we would do well to look more closely at texts such as “Crank That” to see ways in which they might actually subvert patriarchal discourse. Indeed, I believe that “Crank That” constitutes a profound challenge to male chauvinism and indeed to capitalism in general. By revealing the performative element of masculinity and the essentially “simulated” nature of late-capitalist consumerism, “Crank That” situates itself squarely in the tradition of such great works as Homer’s “Odyssey,” Jean-Michel Basquiat’s graffiti art and Deleuze and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus.”
While initially, lyrics such as “haterz get mad cuz, I got me some bathin apes” (a reference to the exclusive line of urban clothing known as “A Bathing Ape”) seem to unquestioningly affirm consumerism, their context in fact implies the opposite reading. Soulja Boy asserts that he is “all too clean up in this ho” (clean being a reference to an expensive style of dress); that is to say, his very consumerism reveals itself as excessive, as too clean. Thus, his reference to the frustration of the “haterz” in fact implies the general social inequality created by a hierarchy of consumption; the haterz (proletariat) will be the bearers of revolutionary consciousness, and it is they who are able to notice that he is “all too clean” (i.e., a bourgeois reactionary).
Though the trope of consumption figures largely in “Crank That,” the work’s greatest concern is with the question of performance. Soulja Boy invites us to “Watch me lean, watch me roll/Watch me crank dat Soulja Boy, dat superman dat ho.” This is an incredibly rich and intertextual line, and it deserves much analysis; we might start off by noting the occurrence of what French theorist Jacques Lacan calls “sliding signifiers” (Lacan, “Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious”). “Soulja boy” slides into “superman,” then into “ho”; his initial self-reference, a seemingly arrogant self-promotion of his music, is intensified to an equation of himself with superman-yet this finishes with an equivalence of superman and ho, and the most basic syllogism (A=B, B=C, therefore A=C) tells us that what initially seemed an affirmation of sexist machismo has become a leveling between the artist and the seemingly least privileged terms of this sexist discourse: the ho.
Secondly, we can note in this line the way in which Soulja Boy lays bare the insidious militarization of the post-9/11 surveillance state: the motif of the “soulja” (i.e., soldier), initially taken on proudly as the heart of the artist’s identity, is socially equated with “superman” (i.e., the Bush administration’s ideological assertion of limitless military power), yet this again slides into an equivalence with the ho.
Finally, while the officially published lyrics for “Crank That” imply that Soulja Boy’s activity is a form of aristocratic male ritual (“watch me crank, watch me roll,” etc.) a la Nietzsche’s ubermensch, wherein the male assumes the privileged position of power and his sexual identity seems assured, upon closer listening we can hear that Soulja Boy is actually saying, “Why me crank, why me roll?” Soulja Boy here lays bare the essential emptiness and performativity of masculinity: why is he cranking, why is he rolling?
Obviously, it is because of the entrenched ideology of masculinist discourse. As theorist Judith Butler writes, “acts, gestures, [and] enactments”-such as “leaning” and “rolling”-“…are performative in the sense that the essence of identity that they otherwise purport to express becomes a fabrication manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. [This].suggests that it [the Soulja Boy dance] has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 336).
That is to say: in asking why he cranks and rolls, Soulja Boy shows that the assurances of male privilege are actually a “simulation” (in Baudrillard’s sense): they are nothing but ideological constructions with no tie to ontological reality. There is no reason why Soulja Boy crank, or even why he roll.
Thus, while it is tempting to read works such as “Crank That” as patently ideological and politically conservative, closer readings reveal that they often contain a subtle and powerful critique of the status quo. While on the level of apparent content Soulja Boy proclaims his desire to “supersoak dat ho,” in truth it is late-capitalism, and indeed all forms of privilege, that Soulja Boy is attempting to “supersoak.”
James is a senior in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at j.duesterberg@wustl.edu.
I’m looking back on this masterpiece of an article now, and I realize that it has retained all of its value with the passage of time.