If Grace Jones is channeling and contorting the amorphous fluidity of late-capitalism (late? late? late?), then Ms. Lauryn Hill is its incessant and nagging alter-ego; the ghost of a residual anger buried deep beneath the fog of “never having it so good.”
Ms. Lauryn Hill’s “Consumerism” gives audiences a reduction of all isms to one robotic homonym. Not the beguiling fantasy machines of an afro-futurist utopia, but the one-cyborg production line of a gradually homogeneous mashed-up political alternative. As her incarcerated body lets rip its torrent of colliding words, she seems to be doing, pushing, and lashing out at time. Filling it to breaking point (@4:50). This is anger, however righteous, turned into an endless wormhole of Wikipedia links.
While Shaviro plays the professor, stood over his pet flubber with a trembling dissection knife:
Grace Jones is forcing us to confront the way in which, today, even the transgression that might have thrilled us twenty-five years ago is little more than another marketing strategy. Or the way in which, beyond all those discourses about race and gender and “the body,” the only thing that is “transgressive” today is Capital itself, which devours everything without any regard for boundaries, distinctions, or degrees of legitimacy; which “transgresses” the very possibility of “transgression,” because it is always only transgressing itself in order to create still more of itself, devouring not only its own tail but its entire body, in order to achieve even greater levels of monstrosity.
But all we’re left wondering, “How’s this shit going to make Ms. Lauryn Hill any money?” Answers may consist in her newest track “Consumerism” streaming below:
• Lauryn Hill: http://www.lauryn-hill.com
• Obverse Creation Music / Sony ATV: http://www.sonymusic.com
More about: Ms. Lauryn Hill
