TLDR:

Album Title: Negus
Produced By: Lord Tusk, Steven Julien, and Acyde
Where to hear/see it: The Brooklyn Museum
When: November 19-January 26th 2020
Bonus: BlackStar x Madlib album is 95% done
Please: Let me know if it's good....because I won't get to ever hear it....apparently.


https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/yasiin-bey-negus/



Yasiin Bey likes to take his time. Twenty years since the release of his debut album, Black on Both Sides, and 10 years since his last release, the artist formerly known as the Mighty Mos Def returns to Brooklyn for the launch of his new album, Negus. But this is no ordinary album release; its eight tracks are not available to buy, stream, or download.

Instead, Negus is an art installation at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, in which the audience can listen to the album via headphones while surrounded by large paintings by artists José Parlá, Julie Mehretu, Ala Ebtekar, and Bey himself, each made in response to the music.

Bey released Negus as an art installation to create “an environment that fosters a focused listening experience, as opposed to a hearing experience, and to couple that with a visual component,” he tells Highsnobiety. He likens the intimate setting to theater or opera; it’s taking place over three months, during which groups of 70 people can create their own “unmediated” interpretations of the album – unmediated, that is, until he granted us this exclusive interview.



For the past decade, Bey has been staying true to his ‘’Travellin’ Man” moniker, living between Paris, Cape Town, Dubai, and now Barcelona: “I live on Spaceship Earth; I go where I feel I’m needed.” During one of these stints, moving through space and time (London in 2015), he was introduced to producers Lord Tusk, Steven Julien, and Acyde. “We clicked and immediately started recording,” Bey tells us. “It was pretty seamless. I love how the content inspired me to produce this exhibition. Without sounding evasive, Negus is something you really have to experience, more than anyone describing it for you.” That’s as far as he’s willing to go, so deep is his dedication to not clouding other people’s interpretations of the album.

If you can’t make it to Brooklyn this winter, here’s a quick take on the experience. It’s 28 minutes of music, stripped back to the bare essentials. The first thing that hits you is the striking contrast to the live instrumentation of his landmark debut; Negus sees Bey’s delivery – with repeated refrains of “Focus” and “What is modernity?” – laid over driving, off-kilter drum machine beats, inflected with sparkles of early ’80s electro. There’s not much else – no horns, strings, samples, or singalong melodies. Negus is perhaps a little darker than what you might expect of the man who brought us “Umi Says,” with its mantra of shining your light on the world. It’s certainly the most minimalist arrangement Bey has ever released.

An experimental piece of music needed an experimental mode of dissemination. After exploring the idea of a cinematic release, Bey settled on a listening experience within a contemporary art context. Before its homecoming at the Brooklyn Museum, Negus went through two previous iterations. The first coincided with the 1-54 art fair at the Marrakech riad of artist Hassan Hajjaj, during which small groups of visitors left their phones at the door before listening to the album. Next came Art Basel in Hong Kong last May, which saw Bey presenting Negus on the terrace of the fair’s convention center, overlooking the city’s iconic waterfront – shipping crates overflowing with white flowers, spray-painted in Arabic and Ethiopic script (“Negus” means “emperor” or “noble person” in the Ethiopian language Ge’ez). A signed polaroid was the only item that the audience could physically take back home.


It was at a dinner in Hong Kong that Bey reconnected with the Cuban-American painter José Parlá. The pair first met 20 years ago, when Mos Def (as he was then known) and Talib Kweli were running Nkiru Books, a store dedicated to African-American literature on Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue. “They’d just got back from doing a concert in Cuba with The Roots – a very interesting thing to be doing back in those days,” Parlá recalls.

“Yasiin is one of the greats here from New York,” Parlá says of the humble everyman. Describing what Bey’s music means to him, the artist continues: “ such a special voice – what he and Talib were saying, it’s from that lineage of intelligent lyricism; a form of ‘edutainment’, as KRS-One would probably have put it. He’s from that camp of Brooklyn artists like Jeru the Damaja, DJ Premier, and Gang Starr. His music was so influential for my generation, and I was – imagine what those songs did for teenagers.”

Over the summer, Parlá spent months listening to Negus in his Brooklyn studio, reacting to its “poetry and improvisational rhythms” by auto-writing with paint and enamel in his signature illegible script, after which Bey layered “a beautiful piece of literature” above strokes of powder pigments and minerals, like amethyst and fool’s gold.

They titled the painting Shakur the beloved of the Eastern band. It will hang in the Brooklyn Museum alongside three other large artworks made in response to the album: Azimuth, a series of deep-blue panels of cyanotypes of the cosmos exposed to moonlight, starlight, and sunlight by LA-based Iranian artist Ala Ebtekar, and Negus Drawings by the Ethiopian artist Julie Mehretu, celebrated for her monumental, gestural paintings.

There’s also a work by Bey himself. Pleasant, a 60-foot-long textile mural, hand-embroidered with copper thread, celebrates “overlooked historical figures,” such as Henrietta Lacks (the “immortal” woman, whose cells have been used in cancer research since her death in 1951) and Nipsey Hussle. It “deals with spirituality and the cosmic situation, and lineage and genealogy within the scientific reality,” Bey says. There’s also a piano piece that fills the space beyond the headphones – created by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, a 95-year-old Ethiopian nun.

Bey only began experimenting with painting around the time he was recording Negus in London: “I’ve always been an admirer of artists like Eileen Gallagher, Arthur Jafa, Sanford Biggers, and Julie Mehretu, so visual art has always been something of meaning to me,” he says between pulls on a cigarette. “I feel like I’ve been involved in the art world since my early days, because I’m an artist.” He is a partner at The Compound Gallery in the South Bronx, which focuses on bridging the gap between hip-hop and fine art. Bey curated its soft opening last August with an exhibition of photographer Christina Paik’s work: “An art gallery is just a space – we want to expand as much as we can on the notion that music is just as vital and important as anything you can hang up on a wall.”


Yasiin Bey with Brooklyn-based artist José Parlá in front of their collaborative work at the Brooklyn Museum.
Highsnobiety / Quil Lemons
But back to the new album. Instead of a singular, central message, Negus is a “layered experience,” Bey explains. “It’s not about how you’re supposed to feel or think. Just because I made it doesn’t mean I’m an authority in someone else’s emotional space. Instead, I want to clear the space so people can have their own experience with the work, as opposed to being didactic about it. You bring yourself, and you take it from there. I want to experience it, too, so I’m trying to get out of my own way, as it’s not just . It’s the energy of Brooklyn.”



In the spirit of multiple subjective interpretations, Parlá chimes in with his own: “Everything now is so popular, so quick, and it has such a fast death. sends a message – it’s not just about mass consumption, it’s not just about making money, it is really, truly, about the art form. saying that artists focusing on their work is the strongest way to create strong messages. I think that’s really courageous.”

In 2016, Bey announced his retirement from Hollywood and the music industry – on Kanye West’s website, oddly enough – “out of frustration from certain things I was seeing and experiencing,” he says. His career started when he was just 13 (under the name Dante Beze), as a child actor. He appeared alongside the likes of Bill Cosby and Michael Jackson before turning his full attention to music. He signed with Rawkus Records and released Black Star with Talib Kweli in 1997, followed by Black on Both Sides a couple of years later, which is still widely considered to be one of hip-hop’s greatest albums.

In regards to Black on Both Sides, Bey cites Jay-Z’s response to being asked how long it took him to make his debut album, Reasonable Doubt: “All my life.” Bey explains: “It was my first record; I wasn’t certain I would get the opportunity to do it again, so I just put it all out of my mind. And then five years later I did another thing, which was very reflective of my thoughts at that time, and then a few years later, I did another one.”

As bling began to dominate the genre in the years following, Bey returned to acting with films like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 16 Blocks, and Be Kind Rewind. He also appeared on stage in New York and London, in Suzan-Lori Park’s Pulitzer-awarded play Topdog/Underdog, and picked up Emmy, Golden Globe, and Grammy nominations along the way.

Ultimately, his retirement came down to time, as “you don’t respect that money if you get it for something you didn’t love,” Bey explains. “That’s just the truth of my own experience. I try to have a good time – not just fun, but a really worthwhile time, whatever I’m doing. Because it’s ultimately about the work; the work is the only reason I have a ‘public profile’, so I always try to keep the focus there.”

Is he making a statement against streaming algorithms, and the way in which Spotify’s payment structure – where an artist gets paid only after a track has been played for 30 seconds, resulting in songs that are top-heavy with hooks and choruses – has affected song writing? “Not putting an album out on a streaming service, on a record label per se, or doing projects that are not necessarily in the recording industry of America’s cycle, doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be working as a creative person,” Bey muses. “There are a lot of other places and spaces to work and express; I’m not hostile against these other means of presentation and distribution, I’m just following a vision I had, and to create as much positive space around it, so that it gets to breathe. It’s not about being all things to all people, or a combative posture. It’s certainly not angry; it’s not a rallying cry or anything like that.”


Nevertheless, Bey hasn’t been one to shy away from speaking truth to power. In Black on Both Sides, he elucidates on the link between political corruption and contaminated drinking water, alongside the freakonomics of American unemployment. In 2006, he was arrested after staging a guerrilla performance of his protest single “Katrina Clap” the night of the MTV Music Awards, and in 2013, he took part in a shocking short film directed by Asif Kapadia, in which he was force-fed through a tube in his nose, highlighting human rights abuses at Guantánamo Bay.

Would Negus have been a more political album if it had been recorded at a different time? “I would say this: the entire cosmic situation is greater than the poverty or wealth of nations,” Bey notes. “At this point of my life and career, that approach influences most of what I do, if not all of it. My work addresses that cosmic reality and references something eternal, hopefully. As far as the political crises that exist around the world, I think they’re being addressed in a lot of different ways across the world, as they have been since time immemorial.”

Even though the public has seen less of him in the last decade, Bey certainly hasn’t been idle: “It’s been 10 years since my last album, but I’ve been active in that time. I’ve never felt a lack of inspiration. I do like to take my time, but time is relative – when people expect it and when it’s the right time are two very different . Even if some people are banging on the table asking for more bread, it’ll be fine. I’m just back in the kitchen cooking up some new flavors.”

One of the new flavors he’s been working on is the hotly anticipated next Blackstar album, produced by Madlib, which he first announced on-stage with Talib Kweli 18 months ago. He says it’s “95 percent done,” and that the follow-up is coming “soon, soon!” He recognizes he’s been saying that for a while – but, after all, time is relative in Yasiin Bey’s world.

Words: Xerxes Cook

Thanks for the heads up. I hope it won't be to hard to listen to the album over the weekend.

For folks interested, here's a link: https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/yasiin_bey_negus

calling it pretentious is pretty small minded
i dont see anything wrong with artists trying to look at music through a lens OTHER than just a commodity for the masses

I think the presentation in the article makes it seem pretentious and is maybe even misleading: by calling it an "album" (whether that's mos/yasiin's choice or not is unclear), it heightens the expectations of a traditional release, and the article sort of exoticizes the idea of a music-centered art installation (by a - wait for it - semi-retired emcee!!!!).

But there's no requirement that a piece of recorded music has to be distributed for popular consumption: it can be a score to a movie that isn't released for purchase/download, it can be incidental music to a different type of performance art (a play), or it can be (as it is here) incorporated into a different experience altogether. This happens all the time with musicians in other genres but has (I think) been less common in hip hop (though I think that's been changing). The process that Parla and YB went through actually sounds pretty organic, not contrived or forced like some of these things can be. And the visuals in that article look cool as shit.

Besides, YB's involvement in other aspects of art culture generally feel much more natural and authentic than folks like Jay-Z or Ye, who (from a distance at least) seem to use art references as a more of a badge of status or cultural positioning than something meaningfully related to their own work. (I love love loved how back in 2011 he got down with the Brooklyn Philharmonic performing "Coming Together" by Frederic Rzewski (and even more loved the fact that the performance was really good). Again, it wasn't forced or contrived; he seemed genuinely engaged in the piece.)

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~

At one point, if you weren’t in the place to be, you just missed it. Then the tapes started coming, then vinyl etc. but it started with just the people in the place to be hearing it.

Peace,

Spirit (Alan)
http://wutangbook.com

Either way it's putting on add airs to an album.

Why would any NEW music belong in a museum? Shouldn't you have people hear it and then decide if it's exhibit worthy?

And to the person who said "That's how hip hop started by being exclusive" I say that they'd have loved to have more exposure - they didn't keep it local and undocumented because they chose to - they jsut had no way to share it. If the Internet was around then best believe it would have been up there.

Some folks who had IT lose IT.

When's the last classic Big Daddy Kane record? Or KRS-ONE? Or Public Enemy. Or R.E.M? Or Madonna?

Would putting anything new from one of them in museum be meaningful?

>Either way it's putting on add airs to an album.
>
>Why would any NEW music belong in a museum? Shouldn't you have
>people hear it and then decide if it's exhibit worthy?
>

is that how any other art works?

>
>

Museums typically buy things that already have significant value from other collectors. Or, have the work donated. Either way, the (very rich) public usually has their say first, about if a work is museum worthy.

>Museums typically buy things that already have significant
>value from other collectors. Or, have the work donated. Either
>way, the (very rich) public usually has their say first, about
>if a work is museum worthy.

You might be able to make that argument for older art (even there I would quibble), but when thinking about recent/contemporary art I don't think is accurate. When a living artist (whether visual or performance) presents new or recent work at a gallery or a museum, the "review" so to speak happens in response to the work and the exhibition - it hasn't been vetted beyond the world of the curators and art culture more generally, and even then that vetting is unlikely to occur at the level of individual works. The process of deciding something's artistic worth happens in large part through the exhibit as an event eliciting response... now, *who* gets to exhibit is super complicated and problematic but a bit of a different conversation.

Regardless, I'm struggling to understand how this is pretentious. An artist decided they wanted to present their music as an art installation, placing the music in conversation with visual art he made independently and with others as well as music by another artist. There are plenty of instances of filmmakers only exhibiting their films in designated spaces (including galleries), or visual artists being particular about where and how their work is exhibited because they have a vision for its presentation. And there is plenty of music that is written and performed, entering the artist's repertoire, but never recorded and distributed. What makes this decision, as an artistic decision, any different?

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~

Really don't want to be combative but there seems to be a misconception on your part. Museums are not galleries. I'd elaborate, but all this is beyond the point. The installation is more about most def than the music and in that regard it isn't that different from some other exhibitions.

i posted 4 links just below to museum shows featuring NEW work and i didn't even look that hard...and the examples are from back in 1985, all the way up to 2020
it doesn't seem like you know what you're talking about

>Really don't want to be combative but there seems to be a
>misconception on your part. Museums are not galleries.

No misconception - museums are not galleries if by "galleries" we are only talking about places where art is exhibited primarily for the point of purchase. But museums don't function purely as repositories for art that has been publicly vetted in some way as you suggested (not trying to be combative either, just reiterating for clarity):

>Museums typically buy things that already have significant value from >other collectors. Or, have the work donated. Either way, the (very >rich) public usually has their say first, about if a work is museum >worthy.

Museums are not merely end points for art that has gone through some vetting process, commercial or otherwise. Go to any contemporary art museum, or any museum that regularly features contemporary art, and you will see exhibitions of an artist's work that likely features (and sometimes centers upon) wholly new, previously unseen, or very minimally-shown work. What has been deemed "museum-worthy" is not a specific piece of art but the general work of a specific artist (and/or their relation to a group or theme, etc) - their new work is deemed worthy of inclusion by association, in a sense. Fire up the website of any city's Museum of Contemporary Art and browse the new exhibits --- showing new work is par for the course.

So when handle said:

>Why would any NEW music belong in a museum? Shouldn't you have
>people hear it and then decide if it's exhibit worthy?

And then howardlloyd asked:

> is that how any other art works?

The answer should at *least* be, "Not really." Because there are countless examples of contemporary visual/plastic/performance art *and* music (especially contemporary art) that has not been seen/heard before being exhibited in museums.

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~

its not a rule anyway...

these people
https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/new-work-erin-shirreff/
have no idea
https://noma.org/exhibitions/jim-steg-new-work/
what the fuck they're talking about
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2010
lol pay no mind
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/jr_chronicles

>
>When's the last classic Big Daddy Kane record? Or KRS-ONE? Or
>Public Enemy. Or R.E.M? Or Madonna?
>
>Would putting anything new from one of them in museum be
>meaningful?
>
>

The answer to your questions is Hell Yes!!!!

I would love to have an exhibit with Any one of those artists.

Judging solely by the description of the new album, doesn't sound like we'd be missing out on much. That Black Star joint with Madlib sounds like the real gem though...hope it sees the light of day

It will be interesting if any of this or new black star get performed. I am hopeful new Black Star at least since it is the both of them and Premier.

Rather than see this an album, we should see this as a musical exhibition. Nonetheless, I'm guilty of being frustrated that this isn't being released commercially for the masses.

If Mos/yasiin had released more material in the last decade, I don't think people would be as dissappointed.

I have an annual birthday trip to NYC scheduled in January for Winter Jazz Fest. I'll be sure to check this.

Then mos started performing and they kinda ushered us out. It was the last listening session of the night. The whole thing was part of a sort of awkward dance party where it seemed most people really just wanted to hear the new album.

What I heard sounded ok, but again I only got through like 3 songs.

The music was quite reminiscent of that garbage True Magic album Mos released before The Ecstatic. A complete and total waste of time and energy even attending the event.

Hopefully the Madlib produced album is a lot more focused than what I heard today.

>Hopefully the Madlib produced album is a lot more focused than
>what I heard today.

Seriously - most artists don't recover from a 10 year period of mediocore (to most) output.

Mos did it from Bobs to The Ecstatic - but in my mind BOBS>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> The Ecstatic. (Each > is an order of magnitude.)

I know he's going to be in a play soon - maybe his calling is acting again?

on Education from Bandana and also did his thing in this linked track as well, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MD8IK19aec , which is some years after his most recent album.

I still think he still has it in him to spit proper bars at a top level.

i too enjoyed some of his features over the years, but let's be real, him and Talib haven't really done great full lengths over the past several years, especially in comparison to their early output

>spitting bars at a top level doesn't equal crafting a great album

Anti-gentrification, cheap alcohol & trying to look pretty in our twilight posting years (c) Big Reg
http://www.Tupreme.com

But I like 99 quite a bit

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~

cuz me and you got a new mos def album and the everyone else just chooses to pretend it doesnt exist lol.

Anti-gentrification, cheap alcohol & trying to look pretty in our twilight posting years (c) Big Reg
http://www.Tupreme.com

I literally just said I knew I was in a tiny minority
Not sure what else you want

I think it's really good. I'd buy it. It's definitely one of those "not what I wanted but still quality product" releases. Reminds me of an N.E.R.D album, but with more rapping.

Anti-gentrification, cheap alcohol & trying to look pretty in our twilight posting years (c) Big Reg
http://www.Tupreme.com

your best bet is to listen back to the nts radioshow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUhjWtuufkU

https://www.nts.live/shows/guests/episodes/yasiin-bey-aka-mos-def-w-lord-tusk-steven-julien-2nd-september-2015

(I'm personally not mad that I might never hear this, because there's always something to listen to, there's nothing wrong with rap in the art world IMO)

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/if-you-care-about-rap-dont-release-your-album-in-a-museum/

*start swipe*

The only way you can hear Yasiin Bey’s first album in a decade is by being trapped in a museum. The installation yasiin bey: Negus, which runs through January 26 at the Brooklyn Museum, is advertised as a multimedia hip-hop experience offering the artist formerly known as Mos Def’s new eight-track release “without the distractions of technology.” But in reality, the installation devalues the music, making it a pretentious, hard-to-access curio as well as the soundtrack for what is otherwise just a banal art exhibition. Sadly, as both an album and an artistic experiment, Negus continues the recent trend of rap seeking irrelevant institutional endorsement as fine art.

The word “negus” means “king” or “ruler” in Ge’ez, an ancient Ethiopian language; in Negus, Bey associates the word with the story of a 19th-century Ethiopian prince named Alemayehu Tewodros. At the Brooklyn Museum, the 28-minute album he inspired plays through the listener’s wireless headphones as they wander a space filled with murals from contemporary artists Ala Ebtekar, Julie Mehretu, José Parlá, along with visual works by Bey himself. The art was commissioned for the installation, after Bey played the artists the album.

According to one of the exhibit’s captions, the installation seeks to “reimagine the possibilities of hip-hop as an art form.” A display just outside the room notes that it also collects a “constellation of historical and contemporary figures who, from the artist’s point of view, have led noble lives,” vaguely through music and art—a group that includes the late rapper Nipsey Hussle, groundbreaking cancer patient Henrietta Lacks, and Ethiopian nun pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, whose original compositions play through the headphones before the Negus album begins.

Though Bey has spoken in recent years about projects being living organisms, and putting them in their proper environment, the Negus experience contradicts the way a Yasiin Bey album is best appreciated. One-time access is self-defeating, because Bey’s music reveals itself with repeat listens; even if Negus isn’t as lyrically dense as his past records, it clearly seems to have an overarching theme that was lost on me at first pass. Most tracks sound like slightly better versions of songs from his lackluster 2017 album Dec 99th; the ones that don’t sound like second-rate Shabazz Palaces. (They were all recorded in London in 2015 and produced by UK beatmakers Lord Tusk, Steven Julien, and ACyde.)

Some of the tracks’ ideas conflict with Bey’s choice of setting: On one song, he repeats variations of “Hey professor, what do you mean by the term ‘civilization?’” The message is clear: White history and culture have long been valued as more enlightened and more refined than those of people of color. Yet here he is, kowtowing to the white gaze and its long-held idea of what it means to be “cultured.” Releasing your album as a museum-only art piece creates an unnecessary barrier to entry—the same culture gap he is critiquing in song is one his installation reinforces. Furthermore, the installation feels like two half-formed pieces forced together. While the visual art is pleasant enough and occasionally in direct reference to the music—or at least Bey’s idea of what the music represents—there is no cohesive vision, and therefore no justification for why they must be experienced this particular way.

Negus is just the latest of many attempts by rappers to be recognized by the art world. There have been obvious connections—Jay-Z performing at Pace Gallery for six hours (with a Marina Abramovich cameo) and shooting a music video with Beyoncé in the Louvre, Kanye West filming choir practice inside the Roden Crater—but also, over the years, flirtation with the art establishment has become a signifier of not only cementing oneself as a serious artist but also seeking validation from communities that have long deemed rap as lower class. In 2015, Drake—after claiming “the whole rap-art world thing is getting kind of corny”—curated a collection with Sotheby’s, and his 2015 “Hotline Bling” video imitated James Turrell’s work. In 2018, Gallery 30 South in Pasadena, California, debuted the first exhibition of illustrations Chuck D drew of scenes from his personal rap history.

The irony of this courtship is that it really began as a closed loop within hip-hop culture itself. Hip-hop’s interest in art (and vice versa) predates Jay-Z, but he is unquestionably responsible for pushing the two worlds closer, and his entry point was the pioneering ’80s graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Before Jay-Z adopted Basquiat as rap’s patron saint, dubbing himself “the new Jean-Michel” and even cosplaying him in a photo spread, the artist was already quintessentially hip-hop. He designed the art for Rammellzee and K-Rob’s 1983 single “Beat Bop,” was close with hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy, and participated in rap performances himself. That intrigue spread outward in all directions in the next three decades, from Diddy buying a $21 million Kerry James Marshall painting to Pharrell interviewing Jeff Koons to art museums putting on local rap shows. Sotheby’s featuring A$AP Rocky and Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in the same video was the logical endpoint.

The museum scene’s reluctant embrace of rap was preordained by two exhibitions at the turn of the millenium. The Brooklyn Museum housed a 2000 exhibition called “Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage” that simply put old rap memorabilia on display. It wasn’t until 2001’s “One Planet Under a Groove: Hip-Hop and Contemporary Art” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts that an art show curated work engaging with, commenting on, and referencing hip-hop culture. Much of the art-rap cross-pollination follows these paths: There are cheap ploys to “elevate” rap to high art and then there is accepting the music and the culture surrounding it as valuable on its own terms.

The Negus installation, like many recent attempts to penetrate the art world, falls in the former category. However, there are recent examples that rap has infiltrated those echelons in other ways, through the work of art world regulars with hip-hop roots like Kehinde Wiley, Awol Erizku, and Rashaad Newsome. The prestigious Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. continues to host various hip-hop showcases every year. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York hosted an event where hip-hop dancers performed wearing knight armor. And rap is building its own institutions, too: In December, New York state contributed $3.7 million to the Universal Hip-Hop Museum being built in the Bronx, set to become the first-ever space dedicated to the culture. Atlanta’s Trap Music Museum has taken a more independent route to canonizing its history, with T.I. taking point on its retelling. These spaces are attempts to create a new art establishment with rap at the center.

In an article called “The Intertextuality and Translations of Fine Art and Class in Hip-Hop Culture,” rap scholar Adam de Paor-Evans challenges the misconception of hip-hop as lowbrow culture. “The use of fine art tropes in hip-hop narratives builds a critical relationship between the previously disparate cultural values of hip-hop and fine art, and challenges conventions of the class system,” he contends. The article argues an intertextuality between the visual and sonic, and between hip-hop culture and the fine art canon, were inherent from hip-hop’s early days. Furthermore, de Paor-Evans asserts that hip-hop, as a politically charged art, subverts the accepted cultural cachet of “high” and “fine” art. Exhibitions like yasiin bey: Negus reaffirm the erroneous belief that rap isn’t serious unless it is bronzed in the grand hall of a museum. But the earliest hip-hop and street-art cultures, the ones that bore Jean-Michel Basquiat and Fab 5 Freddy, asserted the opposite: Hip-hop can tag the wall outside and still be art.

Have to go teach a class but will probably be back to pick this apart later...


-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~

there is somebody out there who read that and thought it was a good idea to release such a piece of bs?

That 2nd paragraph actually makes me want to go see it

IRT to rap wanting art world cred

Isn’t that how it initially came to popularity?

The whole uptown goes downtown, Fab/Blondie, etc...

Yeah, this is a level of mad making I can support.

Totally the artist’s choice. I get it.

I’d buy the album without even hearing it first tho. Really intrigued by how the sound is described in mult articles.

SHRUG