In 1989, the writer and filmmaker Trey Ellis published a concise, manifesto-like essay titled “The New Black Aesthetic.” His argument was fairly straightforward and, in retrospect, perhaps its significance was the fact that he had to write it at all. Ellis believed that the coming decade demanded a new, eclectic approach to African-American cultural expression, one that would reckon with the full continuum of the black experience, from the city to the suburbs. The signs were all around us: the knotty, urbane films of Spike Lee; the punkish bravado of Fishbone; all the artsy, middle-class kids exploring identities that weren’t beholden to readymade signifiers like “Africa and jazz.” This would be a generation of “cultural mulattos,” postmodern children of the multicultural age who were comfortable in a variety of settings, a kind of hopeful, flexible, and self-empowered embodiment of W. E. B. DuBois’s “double consciousness.”
If only it were so simple. That Ellis felt compelled to issue such a hopeful yet fundamentally basic call speaks to the sad entanglements of American racial politics at the time, and the ways in which representational spaces for African-Americans continued to winnow. So it was a landmark event when, in 1996, Paul Beatty published “The White Boy Shuffle,” a satirical exploration of racial identity’s seeming elasticity. It tracked the life and times of young Gunnar Kaufman, a “funny, cool, black guy” hailing from a long line of “spineless,” far-from-righteous African-Americans: deserters, cowards, a freedman who wandered back into slavery, a great-great-uncle who painted the “COLORED ONLY” signs ubiquitous during Jim Crow. As a literary archetype, everything about Gunnar feels off, from his beach-bum persona to the way his family runs counter to traditional uplifting narratives of the American Dream: his father works as a sketch artist for the racist L.A.P.D.; his mother moves the family from their affluent, white suburb back to “the ghetto.” In the course of the novel, Gunnar, a sensitive young poet and reluctant basketball player, eventually becomes his generation’s messiah. It does not end well: he inspires a movement of disaffected black youth to martyr themselves.
Phil Jackson, back when he was coaching the Los Angeles Lakers, gave Kobe Bryant a copy of Beatty’s book, ostensibly because Kaufman’s fish-out-of-water upbringing reminded Jackson of Bryant’s childhood in Italy. Bryant would later say that he enjoyed reading it, though he didn’t appreciate Jackson’s assumptions about his life. Maybe he felt like his coach was calling his blackness into question as well. “The White Boy Shuffle” was published at the high point of nineteen-nineties multiculturalism—Gunnar, the ultimate “cultural mulatto,” attends a P.C.-obsessed school called Mestizo Mulatto Mongrel Elementary—and the novel was knowingly inauthentic. Yet despite the whimsical deconstruction of blackness and identity and the self-aware iconoclasm of Beatty’s anti-heroes, the same revelation awaits: America will never allow you to be as free as you dream of being, even if those dreams are personal, small, and involve something as simple as not picking up a basketball.
Earlier this month, Beatty published his superb fourth novel, “The Sellout.” It arrives at, and responds to, a very different political moment. If Beatty’s previous novels skewered the early days of institutional multiculturalism and the weird frictions of integration, then “The Sellout” captures a time when diversity has gone completely mainstream. It’s animated by a desire to understand the paradoxes of that time—of a multitudinous America that contains both Barack Obama’s election and Trayvon Martin’s murder. A time when the conversation on race seems both terminal and never-ending, when the promise of ever more conversation is offered as an end in itself. When Starbucks encourages its customers to talk about race with their local barista. As Beatty forewarned in 1996, “Everything was multicultural, but nothing was multicultural.”
“The Sellout” is set in a fictitious “agrarian ghetto” just outside of Los Angeles called Dickens, a melting pot so troubling to California’s cheerful branding that the powers that be have erased it from the map, stealing away the last stable source of the community’s collective identity. The plot is fairly straightforward. It’s about a protagonist—known around Dickens as BonBon or the Sellout, though his family name is Me—whose father raised him according to the rigid dictates of academic theory. For example, his father lined the seven-month-old BonBon’s bassinet with “toy police cars, cold cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Richard Nixon campaign buttons and a copy of The Economist,” firing a gun and shouting racial slurs whenever the boy so much as breathed in the direction of these totems of the white mainstream. Learning the words to “Sweet Home Alabama,” his father forewarned, would not help you fit into the world out there.
When BonBon’s father dies, BonBon temporarily inherits his job as the neighborhood “nigger whisperer,” the ad-hoc mentor who talks young black men off bridges and highway overpasses, and out of their moments of beaten-down desperation. But BonBon soon begins to question the point of selling those around him a bit of hope to get through their otherwise despondent days. He earns the name Sellout when he refuses to abide by the safe political orthodoxies of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, his father’s onetime rivals, a group of myopic local thinkers who gather periodically to figure out schemes for black uplift (sample: “EmpowerPoint, a slide presentation ‘African American software’ package”). The Sellout’s ideas are too “problematic”—“the code word black thinkers use to characterize anything or anybody that makes them feel uncomfortable, impotent and painfully aware that they don’t have the answers to questions and assholes like me.” Those ideas involve restoring Dickens’s place on the map by agitating for a return to slavery and segregation.
Like “The White Boy Shuffle,” “The Sellout” follows the dwindling sunset of American possibility. It’s dark, nihilistic, pessimistic, and impolite, and it makes a mockery of the dream that things will get better—that a new era of racial harmony is right around the corner. “That’s the problem with history,” BonBon thinks, regarding his friend Hominy Jenkins, an old-timer who’s disturbingly comfortable with how Jim Crow warped his outlook. Freedom vexes Hominy; instead, he lives in the past, carrying with him a masochistic desire to constantly be put back in “his place.” “We like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on,” BonBon continues. “But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions and song. History is the things that stay with you.” Eventually, BonBon becomes a part of that history, when he lands in front of the Supreme Court, “the latest in the long line of landmark race-related cases,” from Plessy v. Ferguson to the time they tried to bury 2 Live Crew. Then again, BonBon wonders, what story of uplift do those cases narrate?
No doubt all of this sounds crass and absurd: I’ve just described a book that features an elderly African-American man who begs to be taken as a slave and a younger one who aspires to re-segregate buses and schools. But what leavens “The Sellout” is its humor—the way Beatty lampoons self-important leaders and those naïve enough to believe in them, his ear for how much funnier things get when they’re just a bit off. And then there’s the weight and scandal of the realization, the decaying heart of the matter, when you remember that this is slavery and segregation that Beatty’s joking about. The point, for Beatty, is never to give up and give thanks for being part of America. It’s to cast a sideways glance at the very notion of progress—to embrace what Beatty calls an “unmitigated blackness” that realizes that, “as fucked up and meaningless as it all is, sometimes it’s the nihilism that makes life worth living.”
Just as I was finishing “The Sellout” last week, Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly” was released, and I couldn’t stop thinking about those words: “unmitigated blackness.” The Los Angeles rapper distinguished himself as a mesmerizing storyteller with his 2012 album “good kid, m.A.A.d. city,” a wondrously detailed and at times remarkably innocent chronicle of a day in the life of a young man at the crossroads. “To Pimp” aspires for something different. It is a work of astonishing scale and vision, uneasy and confrontational, given to moments of forlorn cynicism. It’s upbeat music blanketed in darkness, largely uninterested in feelings of joyful catharsis. Nothing about it is easy: the album’s most radio-friendly moments deal with slavery and self-loathing. As Lamar wonders on the closer, “Mortal Man,” “When the shit hits the fan, is you still a fan?”
Whether you love or hate “To Pimp” may come down to your tolerance for music that noodles around toward its own grand ambitions. There’s something mesmerizing about how unrestrained and overblown “To Pimp” sounds, as though this is simply the way it has to be.
“Wesley’s Theory” opens the album with a sample of the reggae singer Boris Gardiner channelling Sly Stone: “Every nigger is a star,” Gardiner croons, a ghost from a slightly more hopeful past. From there, everything quickly swipes left, as Lamar races his bassist Thundercat’s spaced-out solos through the litany of ways in which Uncle Sam always wins. “Institutionalized” is a stuttering wonder, with Lamar and Snoop Dogg tiptoeing through an anti-fairy tale about capital’s corrosive effects.
“To Pimp” is an album built on visionary jazz and cosmic funk; the beats don’t feel like platforms for Lamar’s message so much as a set of obstacle courses designed to test his will. He opens the nightmarish “The Blacker the Berry” with a cool falsetto: “Six in the morn’, fire in the street / Burn, baby, burn, that’s all I wanna see,” he sings, Ferguson protests on the TV, keeping it all together, before he starts rapping about his own hypocrisies, growling and crying at the same time. There are moments throughout “To Pimp” when Lamar seems burdened by his gift, complicit in his own spirals of self-hate, guilty of making music prized by an establishment that he would prefer to destroy. He raps because it’s pathological, because it’s faster this way, because it’s what people have come to expect from him. But by the album’s end, after a revelatory detour through South Africa and a spectral visit from Tupac, he puts himself back together. He’s a critic and a prophet. The single “i” sounded almost off-puttingly buoyant when it was released, a few months ago. Now, near the end of an album spent fighting off paranoia, darkness, and survivor’s guilt, it becomes Lamar’s glowing moment of salvation.
So Kendrick Lamar will lead, but who will follow? It’s increasingly unusual for an artist to make something that seeks to charge and infuriate and baffle an audience in such an unrelenting way. We are much more accustomed to nonfussy art that demands to be liked or shared, bold-faced ideas that are ultimately safe and substance-free, political punditry that feels like overheated playacting. It’s rare, especially as we debate issues of authenticity and appropriation, for a popular artist to draw such a firm (and firmly political) line in the sand—to make art that imagines an “unmitigated blackness,” art that rejects the possibility of a single, liberal “we.”
This isn’t to give “To Pimp” credit merely for being difficult. But, as the product of its immediate environment, the album tells us something about life in 2015, in these last years of Obama, in this time of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, in the same America that Beatty mines for “The Sellout.” It’s an America where many have, in Beatty’s words, turned the page and moved on. Consider these works, then, as attempts to wrestle with the paradox of the Obama years, and particularly the false triumphalism of some new, supposedly “post-racial” order. Recent polling data, for example, suggests that young Americans are the most tolerant and progressive in history, comfortable with difference and identity in ways unimaginable to previous generations. At the same time, however, we are increasingly uninterested in questions of inequality and privilege, oftentimes the drivers for that difference. Both “The Sellout” and “To Pimp” are about how comfortable audiences might feel consuming difference. And yet, Beatty and Lamar protest, we’re still here between the lines, living in a town that’s getting edged off the map, inhabiting identities at a time when we’re told to move beyond them.
“The Sellout” and “To Pimp a Butterfly” both feel indebted to Los Angeles, a dense swath of land that is America’s future demographically, ecologically, perhaps even politically. And yet both BonBon’s and Lamar’s unchained butterflies end up in the nation’s capital: BonBon takes his beef straight to the Supreme Court, while on the album cover for “To Pimp” Lamar and friends bring Compton to the lawn of the White House, a judge with x’d-out eyes lying at their feet. Both works were created in the shadow of Obama, and they are shadowed by the illusion sustained by a black President, and by the fear of being absorbed into that illusion.
Even though “The Sellout” is set during the Obama Presidency, it feels as if it were incubated during the culture wars of the eighties and nineties, with their contestations over these new vectors of identity and authenticity. Back then, there were few accusations quite as withering as branding someone a “sellout.” At a basic level, selling out meant turning your back on the community that shaped you, whether it was the local punk underground or black America as a whole—not that these forms of compromise were equal. But the discourse around selling out assumed a kind of purity in remaining marginal, as though something vital would be lost in that transition from periphery to core. It was a way of insuring that people were true not just to themselves but to an abstract belief in the bonds of community as well. At different times, Booker T. Washington, the N.A.A.C.P., Michael Jordan, and black conservatives have been branded sellouts. The concept is a pillar of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin_._” It’s a theme that’s been parsed by Malcolm X, the Geto Boys, and Oprah Winfrey. It’s an unnamed fear that underlies “To Pimp.”
But the notion of betrayal, as Randall Kennedy remarked in his book on the subject, assumes that the sellout was inside the community to begin with. There’s a scene in “The Sellout” where BonBon recalls seeing a black comedian roast a white audience member for laughing at one of his jokes in an inappropriate way. It’s inspired by Dave Chappelle, who famously walked away from his TV show after he began suspecting that white people were laughing at rather than with him. We have to protect “our thing,” the comedian in “The Sellout” exclaims, which sounded good enough at the time to BonBon. But gradually he began to wonder: What did this mean, “our thing?” How could we serve and protect something so ephemeral, so mystical?
“Loving you is complicated,” Lamar muses on “u,” a dizzying look in the mirror and what it reflects. His album seeks to understand what happens once “our thing” becomes someone else’s property. Perhaps the question, then, is not what it looks like to succeed, to be on the inside. After all, those who couldn’t understand Chappelle’s investment in the sanctity of “our thing”—his desire to keep that unmitigated piece of himself—branded the comedian as “crazy.” Rather, it’s the desires and the anxieties that are unlocked with each unprecedented step taken in the name of progress. It’s the experience of that success, how we live within and alongside it. Ellis’s bold call in “The New Black Aesthetic,” for example, came during the culture wars, a time when identity politics were in flux.
How will future generations conceptualize art in the age of Obama? How has his exceptional rise animated projects like the sitcom “Black-ish,” the movie “Dear White People,” Kara Walker’s sugar sphinx, Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen,” or Beatty’s “The Sellout,” where BonBon’s very blackness is put on trial? What of “To Pimp” and recent albums by D’Angelo and Kanye West that brood over twenty-first-century blackness at a time when Macklemore and Iggy Azalea sit comfortably in the musical mainstream?
What can it possibly mean to “sell out” in this context, assuming you still take seriously such a term? The history of selling out is an index of all that was once unimaginable, all that a previous generation presumed would never possibly sell. Perhaps that’s why the term is no longer so charged. If the notion of selling out once demarcated that hazy zone between fantasy and reality, the exceptional and all the rest, then today we inhabit a moment that, on the surface, far exceeded anyone’s dreams. This is the desperation that drives “To Pimp” and “The Sellout” toward darkness. What does it mean to speak of protecting or compromising “our thing” when someone is always there to remind you that the most powerful man in America is black? The only solution is to opt out altogether—to reckon with that contradiction rather than pretend we can resolve it. “I’m not sure what Unmitigated Blackness is,” BonBon observes near the end of “The Sellout,” “but whatever it is, it doesn’t sell. On the surface Unmitigated Blackness is a seeming unwillingness to succeed.”
Again, if only it were so simple. For the hero of Beatty’s frenzied novel, being branded a sellout is a way of being disciplined. Instead of being chastened, he pursues the audacity of hopelessness, a “nihilism that makes life worth living.” What did he turn his back on? Broken promises and the leaders who try and convince us that things are otherwise. All of which makes the Sellout’s odyssey, from a willfully forgotten black suburb to the highest court in the land, so perfect. He reaches the inside. Sometimes you need to holler. Sometimes you need to write lines so outlandish and full of truth-seeking that they slice through the fray. It will seem crazy, and that’s the curse of shouting from the periphery.
A few blocks away from the Supreme Court, Kendrick Lamar is on the lawn of the White House, unwilling to be merely a rapper. His style can be copied, but there is something pure, something unmitigated, in his core—something that can’t be sold or sold out. That’s the part of him that makes him a leader. A character in a novel, a rapper at the mountaintop—they’re both in places that were never intended for them. BonBon lights up a joint, kicks his feet onto the table, and enjoys the moment. How much worse could things possibly get?
