Conference Agenda

Musicologists and media studies scholars tend to analyze music videos as art. Yet like so many staples in the music industry—the charts, commercial radio, album tours—music videos got their start as promotional vehicles. Using hip-hop group Run-DMC as a case study, this paper describes the “promotion effects” of one of the most significant developments in music promotion in the late 20^th Century: the music video. Unlike music commodities such as records, cassettes, or compact discs, music videos were never meant to be offered for sale. Instead, they enhanced the listening experience with a powerful audiovisual paratext. This audiovisual space opened new frontiers for artist branding, combining audio markers with visual and often narrative elements.

Through a close analysis of the now-classic music video, “Walk This Way,” by Run DMC and Aerosmith (1986), I show how music videos allowed new and experimental forms of collaboration between artists in ways that had previously been impractical. Building upon previous reporting on and analyses of this well-known video, I analyze the collaboration through the lens of co-branding. As the group’s sponsorship deal with Adidas had shown, Run-DMC and their team, which included Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin, were willing to experiment with novel co-branding partnerships. In the case of “Walk This Way,” two unlikely collaborators were brought together: Run-DMC, a young breakout hip-hop group that had the potential to bring rap into the mainstream, and Aerosmith, an aging hair-band desperately trying to resuscitate a career beset by bad behavior and excessive drug habits. While these two groups might not have ever agreed to tour together, the music video they filmed had them performing together day after day, night after night on MTV. Rather than blurring the lines between rock and rap, the collaboration left the two groups’ brand images and sounds crystallized and rendered more distinct.

From the perspective of the rock ethic, selling out is something to avoid. For the hip hop world, as Dan Charnas (2010) has chronicled, the boundaries between music and business have always been much more porous. As “Walk This Way” shows, the sudden and definitive success of music videos in the 1980s engendered a host of new behaviors and roles, as well as budget—and creative—allocations for musicians and other industry players.

International actors engaging with rap music—and the specificities of Black culture encoded within it—necessarily interpret it through their own cultural and linguistic contexts, resulting in a refiguration of its norms, aesthetics, and meaning. I interrogate this process in the music of Singaporean Tamil rapper Yung Raja, one of the most popular rappers in Southeast Asia today. Raja imbricates citational processes of doing style present in both Hip Hop and Tamil film music, and I examine the congruences and tensions betwen these two genres that emerge in his music, particularly as they relate to expressions of masculinity. Raja evokes various hegemonic cultural tropes, such as the badman of Hip Hop, defined by his virility, wealth, and affinity for violence, and the hypermasculine mass hero, the pinnacle of Tamil celluloid masculinity. Style, however, requires constant negotation. Doing style inherently denotes a form of aesthetic, performative, and sartorial excess, yet simultaneously allows for the possibility of too much excess—a contradiction evident in the complimentary yet teasing Singaporean expression, “wah, stylo milo.” Raja's embrace of excess and whimsy challenges these hegemonic tropes while also reflecting trends of alternative expressions of masculinity in Hip Hop, exemplified by artists such as Pharrell Williams or Childish Gambino. Yung Raja navigates style in a manner that signals novel and hybrid constructions of masculinity in Tamil rap, and provides new perspectives on the modes, models, and stakes of style in the broader world of rap and Hip Hop.

In 2018, Fergie’s performance of the U.S. national anthem at the NBA All-Star Game garnered widespread attention due to her slow, sultry delivery and unconventional vocal embellishments. Within hours of the game ending, DJ Suede the Remix God, created and posted a humorous music video remix that exaggerated the imperfections and awkwardness of the performance. Over the last decade, DJ Suede, has gained fame through his unique and viral hip-hop remixes of unconventional moments in popular culture. However, elements of humor and playfulness in contemporary Black popular music remain largely untheorized in music studies.

In this paper, I frame DJ Suede as Black male millennial satirist and social whose music-making practices provide a unique perspective by which to investigate the intersections of popular music, race, and Internet humor in the 21st century. I demonstrate how DJ Suede’s work is situated within a broader tradition of African American humor and reflects the resonances of 1990s and 2000s Black stand-up comedy, sitcoms, and sketch shows. Drawing from African American humor scholarship, hip-hop production, and Internet studies literature, I argue that Black musical remixers, like Suede, play a crucial role in contemporary popular music production, using humor as a tool of resistance, coping, and reclamation for everyday Black people. By analyzing Suede's production practices, YouTube video remixes, and conducting in-depth interviews, I illustrate how hip-hop musical humor serves as an exploration of Black American experience and navigation of the racial hypocrisy and contradictions in the U.S.

Furthermore, I contextualize Suede's remixes within the comedic landscape of 1990s and 2000s pioneered by Black comedians such as Dave Chappelle, Wanda Sykes, and Chris Rock, illuminating the comedic sensibilities that underpin his work. Finally, through this analysis, I map out an aesthetic of absurdity in hip-hop, where elements of contradiction, playfulness, surrealism, nonsensicality, and contemplation are used to question and confront the absurdity of everyday Black life. Ultimately, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of African American humor in shaping contemporary popular music and the creativity, resilience, and agency of contemporary Black cultural producers in this current era of viral music-making.