Literally, “playing mas” refers to the wearing of costumes in Afro-Caribbean carnival tradition but for a confessional rapper like Starlito, it’s all about employing multiple personae and complicating notions of authenticity by presenting facets of his true, complex self as separate static identities that, by the end of the album, converge. To “’play mas’ affords… the mobility to shift personae in ways that counteract the limitations of identity imposed by the hegemonic gaze…” (697). In her essay, “Afrofuturism and Post-Soul Possibility in Black Popular Music” Marlo David explains: “Contemporary black artists now possess relative freedom to “play mas” with identity. Instead of a static speaker who remains ideologically unchanged for the duration of the album, Fried Turkey’s speaker “plays mas”: shifting between identities at will and re-imagining poetic and sociopolitical modes of expression. What softens the sharp edges of Starlito’s straight-edge storytelling this time around is that he surrealizes many of his stories: telling them through psychedelic lenses of kush, codeine, and insomnia. Where Cold Turkey is concerned with the negation of negativity, Fried Turkey is a mélange of ideologies that fuses Afrofuturist elements with Surrealist ones and balances their obliqueness with the concreteity of trap narrative.
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