Lynette Dixon, “Shuttling Toward a New Blue Sun: The Southern Fantastic and Black Masculinity”
At the 1995 Source Awards, an award show celebrating hip hop, Andre 3000 declared in his acceptance speech for Best New Rap Group, "The South has something to say." This statement has continued to resonate in hip hop as a regional and stylistic intervention into a genre dominated by New York and Los Angeles. Nearly three decades later, Andre’s 2023 album New Blue Sun, a meditative flute-based project accompanied by a visual album (called Listening to the Sun), offers a striking departure from the lyricism in his earlier work. Andre, now 48, explained this shift by stating he does not “have anything to rap about” at this stage in his life. Yet, through this work, he articulates a rich embodied vernacular of play, imagination, and improvisation that reconfigures how we understand Black masculinity in hip-hop and popular culture more broadly.
In Listening to the Sun, the visual album, Andre engages in a series of quotidian, playful gestures: rolling on the ground with his flute, swaying like a tree, embodying a panther, and moving through meditative poses. This performance, though markedly different in style from his earlier work, resonates deeply with what I call the “Southern fantastic” style—a mode of performance that blends the quotidian and theatrical to imagine beyond “the American grammar book” (Spillers 2003) of Black gender. In my dissertation, I propose that style is not simply sartorial, rather it names modes of embodiment that short-circuit the logics of liberal subjectivity rooted in the violence of chattel slavery. The “Southern Fantastic”, which my dissertation traces through Outkast, Missy Elliott, and other Southern hip-hop artists of the 1990s, foregrounds play, imagination, and fantasy as one strategy of “stylistic embodiment” and identification. Andre’s current work extends this lineage, pushing against the rigid grammars of Black masculinity in popular culture. His flute, rubber ducks, and yoga poses challenge the limited performances expected of Black male artists, demonstrating that even though he does not have anything to rap about, he still has much to say.
Patrick Mitchell, “‘It's Not a Phase, This Is Who I Really Am’: Emo and the Contradictions of Protest Masculinity”
Between 2001 and 2008, emo grew from underground DIY scenes to sweeping commercial success, becoming one of the final mainstream rock genres. Central to emo’s cultural impact was its distinct fashion—long, side-swept bangs, black skinny jeans, and “guy-liner.” The emo fashion trend achieved its broad cultural impact amongst its predominantly suburban teenage fans due to the prevalence of retail chains such as Hot Topic (a clothing and accessories store specializing in “counterculture”) cropping up throughout American shopping malls. Emo’s expressive style underpinned the music’s notion of expressing one’s deepest emotions. Although some rock critics celebrated the male emo style for modeling a softer, emotionally open masculinity that resisted the post-9/11 gender backlash (Eisenstein 2002, Tickner 2002, Goldstein 2003, Faldui 2007, Coon 2013), scholars have begun to probe the genre’s legacy of entrenched chauvinistic narratives (Williams 2007; Ryalls 2013; De Boise 2014; Fathallah 2020, 2021; Mack 2021). In this paper, I examine how emo’s “feminized” fashion aesthetics masked deeper misogynistic narratives while normalizing its sentimentality and emotional openness. By applying R.W. Connell’s concepts of hegemonic, complicit, and subordinate masculinity (Connell 1995, 2005) to the post-9/11 socio-cultural sphere, I argue that emo’s countercultural veneer functioned as a protest masculinity that served as both an appeal and a defense of patriarchal ideology—effectively concealing and legitimizing the genre’s underlying gendered contradictions.
Christi Jay Wells, “Race-ing The Rock: Identity, Ideology, and Celebrity in Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s Wrestling Entrance Themes”
Reflecting on composing Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s entrance theme “Electrifying,”
World Wrestling Entertainment’s in-house composer Jim Johnston remarked that “Rock
was actually tough because he’s such a different guy, cross-cultural, cross races, he’s
tough to pin down.” Johnston’s words encapsulate the role of music in creating a
dynamic wrestling character through outfits, lighting, musical sound, and performer
affect as well as the specific challenges in a performance medium often driven by racial
archetypes of crafting a character for a mixed-race performer. In this paper, I analyze
versions and reworkings of The Rock’s entrance music as his character shifted from
Black Power foot soldier to WWE’s public face and a global celebrity.
Though The Rock was initially presented with music and costuming highlighting his
Samoan heritage, “Electrifying” stems from his time with the “Nation of Domination,” a
group of Black American villains whose mannerisms and fashion drew from the Black
Panthers and Nation of Islam. When The Rock became the group’s leader, their style
increasingly reflected the swagger of NFL players including Dion Sanders and Warren
Sapp, and their music was reworked to reflect ‘90s West Coast Hip Hop. When The
Rock became a mainstream protagonist, his music retained its “Nation of Domination”
bassline and tempo while adding electric guitar, often the featured instrument for
WWE’s most popular, and predominantly white, heroes. Informed by discussion of
masculinity, racialized sound, and “the mainstream” from T. Carlis Roberts, Steve
Waksman, and others, I identify the role of “Electrifying” and its antecedents in The
Rock’s process of self-fashioning as a mainstream celebrity, and specifically his
complex navigation of race. Toward that end, I highlight the role of 1990s affirmative
action discourse and backlash in both shaping and blunting the revolutionary
possibilities of the Black Power movement’s style and message within mainstream
professional wrestling.
