₊˚✧ Bladee and Hyperculture ✧˚₊
In Integration of the Instincts and of the Spiritual, an essay taken from The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul discusses the origins and significance of jazz music as a form of protest and expression among African American slaves. He explains that, faced with extreme oppression, slavery, and despair, the enslaved individuals turned to music as a means of conveying their suffering and maintaining hope through faith. As such, Jazz became a profound and authentic art form that encapsulated both their current anguish and their aspirations for salvation.
Ellul draws a parallel between jazz and religion by referencing Karl Marx's notion of religion being the ‘opiate of the masses’, suggesting that, much like opium or alcohol, the emotional and ecstatic experience provided by jazz offered a form of escape or temporary relief from the harsh realities of slavery. As a side note to this, I’ve always enjoyed Rick Roderick’s takedown of Marx's notion of religion being the ‘opiate of the masses’ when he said, in his lecture on Marcuse, that ‘The truth of the matter is Marx was wrong; religion is not the opium of the people. Today, opium is the opium of the people. It works better. I mean opium works better than religion did.’
Returning to The Technological Society however, Ellul posits that this reliance on music for solace may have inadvertently reinforced their subjugation by providing a coping mechanism that did not directly challenge or change their oppressed condition, highlighting the irony and significance of jazz evolving from its roots in slavery to becoming a dominant and influential form of music in the modern world. This transition underscores the profound impact and enduring legacy of jazz as both a cultural and artistic phenomenon that originated from a context of profound suffering and resistance.
Whilst Ellul presented this analysis in the words of a French intellectual of the 1950s, it is a perspective which makes even more sense when we consider the influence of jazz and blues on the global phenomenon of present day hip-hop, an influential genre which, as Mark Fisher once theorised, ended up in similar kind of anhedonic stagnancy where, like jazz before it, the ‘culmination in delirium brought deliverance,’ writes Ellul, ‘but only as opium and alcohol did for others.’
Similar to jazz then, the revolutionary potential of hip-hop became another example of the cultural subsumption of resistance into capitalism. For both Fisher and Ellul, this subsumption was not limited to music, of course, with Ellul writing:
‘It is good that a marked eroticism is wrecking the sclerotic traditional morality. It is well that poetry, thanks to such movements as surrealism, has become really expressive once more. But these phenomena, which express the deepest instinctive human passions, have also become totally innocuous. They question nothing, menace nobody.’ (Page 416, The Technological Society.)
Here, Ellul offers diverging pathways into discussing both the dark surrealism of Bladee’s lifeworld as well as his overall poetic merit, but I will choose instead to stay with the global significance of hip-hop for now since there is another Fader interview, ‘Being Bladee’, where the artist, despite his suspicion towards genre, acknowledges that, ‘All music today takes inspiration from hip-hop.’ Here, I’m inclined to (re)visit Yung Gud’s interview with Fader, where the Swedish music producer of mixed-race heritage, discusses the complexities of Yung Lean — a white rapper — engaging with American culture, particularly hip-hop, which has deep roots in the Black experience shaped by centuries of oppression.
Gud contrasts this with his own experience in Sweden, where American culture is both captivating and overwhelming. He notes that while Swedes consume vast amounts of American culture, they don’t carry the same historical responsibility as white Americans to step aside in the cultural space. In fact, due to the competitiveness required in the global music industry, Gud argues that aspiring Swedish artists might need to embrace a different persona; borrowing from cultures with more assertive and self-promotional tendencies, to create something new and impactful. As such, it is less about those artists wanting to appropriate cultures and more about artists seeking to promote their voices through the dominant systems of transmission. I agree with practically everything Yung Gud relates here, and have already written about the way appropriation and identity works in relation to hyperculture:
‘…it is Byung-Chul Han’s contention that ‘globalization de-auratizes culture and turns it into hyperculture.’ Once again, on page thirty-six of his text on ‘Hyperculture’, in reference to the chapter on ‘The De-Auratization of Culture’, Han writes that, ‘Under conditions of hyperculture, different forms or styles from different sites and ages are de-distanced in a hyper-present.’
It could be said that hip-hop as a genre then – a genre like R&B, in addition – having been thoroughly commodified and sent global, entered into the realm of the ‘hyper-present’, its positionality as a genre having ‘become detached’ from its ‘spatial-historical embeddedness’ to use Han’s terminology. Would the model of hyperculturality explain the perfectly reasoned – although somewhat appropriated – allusion to Nelly and Rowland’s ‘Dilemma’ that can be found in Yung Lean and FKA twigs’ ‘Bliss’?
Before concluding his short text with an equally terse chapter on the ‘hypervision’ of Nietzsche’s ‘wanderer’ – a wanderer whose world ‘is still peppered with deserts…’ – Byung-Chul Han considers the phenomenon of ‘Appropriation’. The philosopher and cultural theorist writes:
‘In recent times, the paradigm of the ‘Other’ or the ‘radically Other’ has been introduced into many humanities disciplines, and since then appropriation has come to be seen as something rather sinful. […] Appropriation is not per se violent. Colonial exploitation, which destroys the Other in favour of itself and of the Same, must be strictly distinguished from appropriation. Appropriation is an essential part of education and identity. Only an idiot or a god could live without appropriation. […] Without appropriation there also is no renewal. Hyperculture desires such appropriation; it enjoys the novel. It is a culture of intense appropriation. The one who appropriates the Other does not remain the same. Appropriation leads to a transformation of one’s own. Therein consists the dialectic of appropriation.’
Dialectics aside, who would have thought that after all that talk of the ‘violence of transparency’ and toxic positivity operating as the modus operandi of Western reality, Han would arrive at a thoroughly Baudrillardian ‘philosophy of culture’, writing: ‘On the model of the term hyperculturality, it could be called hyperreality.’
It is demonstrable in the culture today, just as it is demonstrable in the music of Yung Lean and elsewhere, that hyperreality is here to stay, and yet ‘De-sited, de-auratized cultures’ are not, in the words of Byung-Chul Han, ‘…replications devoid of any authenticity. They achieve another Being, another reality, which shines in the absence of the auratic.’
If it is true that we have entered the ‘threshold’ of another way of Being in the world then could it be argued that the ongoing attempts to ‘correctly’ reorient the referential positionality of our culture’s ‘spatial-historical embeddedness’ away from the ‘hyper-present’ is a neo-reactionary project that belongs to the Contemporary Left just as much as it belongs to the Political Right?’
Gud’s view that appropriation in a globalised world is less about cultural theft and more about the creation of new identities through the borrowing of cultural elements aligns with Han’s notion of hyperculturality. This appropriation is not necessarily violent but is rather a necessary part of cultural evolution and identity formation in a hypercultural world.
Bladee’s music, with its themes of nihilism, transcendence, and the search for salvation, resonates with the idea that while we live in a world where cultural forms have been de-auratized and commodified, there is still the potential for these forms to carry profound meaning and offer a glimpse of something beyond the nihilism of the present. His ambiguity towards genre and his resistance to being categorised reflects a broader cultural movement where traditional boundaries and categories are increasingly irrelevant in the face of a hypercultural reality. Therein, Bladee’s work can be seen as both a reflection of and a reaction to the hypercultural world we inhabit. Whilst it may seem to participate in the anhedonic conclusion that Fisher criticises, it also hints at the possibility of transcendence and renewal within this hypercultural framework, much like jazz did in its own time. In this way, Bladee is not just a product of hyperculture but a potential harbinger of its future directions.
Either way, it is a profoundly neoliberal strategy to focus on the moral failure of the atomised individual in hyper cultural society when the problematic resides in the nihilism of the the system itself. Similarly, it is this nihilism of the moment which Bladee’s music practically always infers. However, unlike Lean, there is interwoven into Bladee’s music the underlying theme of the transcendent, where the nihilism of drugs and alcohol — the despair of the present — is often transmuted into a hope for salvation.
When jazz first emerged, reactions were mixed. In a similar way, it is fascinating as it is reassuring to see young people embrace hyperpop just as younger generations and artists embraced jazz as a symbol of freedom and modernity, while many older and conservative people saw it as a threat to traditional notions of culture, music and genre. As such, it may be the case that Bladee actually invokes the redemptive and liberating qualities of jazz more than he does the strictly recognisable anhedonia of contemporary hip-hop, and in his ambiguity in all things, especially genre, Bladee becomes a menace to those systems of categorisation which you can still find on popular platforms like Spotify.