Big Brother: Black Men & Celebrity Culture
We’ve been taught our favorite celebrities can earn untouchability—but at what cost?
I am someone deeply bound by nostalgia. I think often about the people and art forms that shaped me in elementary and middle school.
How Kanye West got on live TV during a Hurricane Katrina charity telethon and said, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” How the first-ever episode of The Chappelle Show literally closes with Dave Chappelle portraying a blind KKK leader who doesn’t know he’s Black. How Lil Wayne rapped on seemingly every beat imaginable on Da Drought 3, including Beyoncé & Jay-Z’s “Upgrade U” and Young Dro’s “Shoulder Lean,” and pretty much said, “These are my songs now.”
It’s these kinds of moments, performances, and artistic offerings that cement certain figures as icons, or even idols, in our minds. It’s almost as if they’re elevated to a place where they can do no wrong because we feel that what they’ve “given us” is so right (cue The Boondocks’ R.Kelly episode).
Recently, I’ve been curious to learn more about JPEGMAFIA. I haven’t listened to much of his music, but, based on his personality and the people I know who listen to him, I just feel like I’d be a fan.
Per a friend’s recommendation, I decided to check out JPEGMAFIA’s interview on Talib Kweli’s People’s Party podcast. I’m intentionally choosing not to link the episode because Kweli has used his public platform to persistently harass Black women. Maya Moody, the woman at the center of this harassment campaign, tweeted she was “receiving death, rape and human trafficking threats from his fans everyday.”
Four months prior to Talib Kweli’s initial tweet directed at Maya Moody, JPEGMAFIA joined Kweli’s podcast for an interview in which they talked about artists not having to abide by society’s standard of professionalism—citing Lauryn Hill as someone whose position as an artist, and the quality of her work, justifies her not having to be at shows on time or even show up at all. Telling Kweli about the impact his art has had on him, JPEGMAFIA says, “You’re a legend. You’ve earned the right to do whatever the fuck you want.”
JPEGMAFIA is not alone in believing artists can “earn the right” to be deserving of a certain amount of privilege and exemption because of the meaningfulness or success of their work; I would venture to say that’s a relatively common idea, especially as social media “stan” culture has continued to grow and evolve—although this is by no means a new phenomenon. However, it makes me question the harm we may inadvertently cause by perpetuating this kind of thinking.
Over the past few years, I’ve witnessed different variations of the following statements to justify the harm these artists have caused:
R. Kelly made Ignition (Remix).
Kanye made College Dropout.
Dave Chappelle made The Chappelle Show.
In one of The Chappelle Show skits, Dave Chappelle even jokes that Michael Jackson wasn’t guilty of abusing children because “he made Thriller… Thriller.”
As a Black man, I think about this line of thinking among Black men to justify the harmful actions of Black men—knowing Black women, queer folks, and children seem to experience the brunt of this harm. It makes me think about this tweet from Kia Speaks:
For many Black men, we’ve been taught to look at older Black male mentors in our lives as “big bros.” These can be men we know or public figures we only have parasocial relationships with—either way, we’re not only expected to listen to these men no matter what, but we can often extend a certain level of immunity to them because of their importance in our lives.
In the United States, men are raised in what bell hooks calls a “dominator model,” which teaches us that “we are all natural-born killers but that males are more able to realize the predator role.” Within imperialist, white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, dominator culture holds to the belief that “the pursuit of external power, the ability to manipulate and control others, is what matters most.”
Our big bros are handed violent instructions within these systems of oppression and then hand them to us without us feeling like they can be critiqued—and even if we recognize our big bros’ words or actions as harmful, we often let them go because, in our minds, they’re above reproach. All the while, we overlook the ways in which people have been and will be hurt by those words or actions.
Lots of Black men I know look at Jay-Z, who Kanye West describes as an “idol in my eyes, god of the game” in his song “Big Brother,” as their big bro because he gave them The Blueprint to how to achieve capitalist success—although in Jared A. Ball’s book, The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power, he describes Black capitalism as a “fantasy” that enriches a “minuscule Black bourgeoisie en route to truly helping a far more prominent, and mostly White, power structure further enrich and protect itself.”
As I work through my own relationship to my favorite childhood artists and what it looks like to engage with their art knowing the harm they’ve caused either through their art or in their lives, I’m left wondering what we risk when we place our favorite celebrities on such a pedestal that we’re still okay with consuming their art regardless of the violence they’ve caused. What messages do we send? Who do we leave behind?
I think Kia Speaks describes big bro culture as “killing the black community” because, within this culture, we tend to sacrifice our own, especially Black women, queer folks, and children, in order to maintain this power structure. The dominator model in which we’ve been socialized rewards us for prioritizing our favorite artists’ work over the people those artists have harmed. When we consume that work, we feed the business operations that fund it and incentivize more of it being made—and more money being made from it.
What does it look like for us to build systems and an ethic where people are the priority and not profit? Where commercial success and monumental artistic achievements aren’t perceived as being of higher moral value and deserving of absolution from accountability? Where, as bell hooks states, men “choose against violence, against death” because “they want to live fully and well, because they want to know love”?
People will always cause harm, and be capable of causing harm, but the world I dream to be nostalgic for one day is a world in which we all did our best to care for one another through our art and in our lives.
Because another world is absolutely possible if we learn and unlearn towards it and collectively struggle for it. All of us, together. Knowing accountability can be transformative and not a death sentence.
