Black Skinhead

When Kanye West unveiled on Saturday Night Live the first single of his recently released album, Yeezus, my first reaction was: “What is this Marilyn Manson shit?”

The song has since grown on me.

Black Skinhead is a primal, raw, and visceral tune that is a far departure from West’s grandiose pop sensibilities (seriously, how sing-along worthy is the entire Graduation album?). For that alone, West deserve praise because, really, how many megastars, once they’ve made it to the top, have simply played it safe (looking at you, Hova¹)?

But then you factor in Black Skinhead’s lyrical content, and the usual damning portraits of American racism, and classism, and, to quote Lou Reed, “no one is doing what Kanye is doing.” At least not on a mainstream level.

There is a reference, early in this drum-heavy, industrial-rock track, that talks about the perception of bigots when they see black men paired with white women: “They see a black man with a white woman/they want to kill the King Kong.”

The King Kong reference is an age-old racist stereotype, but one that is, surprisingly, alive today. Check out this Vogue cover of LeBron James and Giselle Bundchen from 2008, and on the right…

Vogue denied making the reference on purpose. LeBron said he didn’t really care. But it’s hard to believe the cover was not intentionally provocative.

All this reminds me of the Will Smith dating-comedy Hitch — great film, by the way, lol — and how studios cast Eva Mendes as the female lead almost solely because she fit a specific color. According to many reports, the studio execs didn’t want to cast a black actress in the lead, because that would, apparently, turn the movie into a “black movie” — you know, like the Tyler Perry films of today or the Taye Diggs/Angela Bassett films of the 90s that belong in a subgenre of Hollywood. But the suits at Columbia also didn’t want to cast a white woman, because they worried it would offend American viewers — you know, like the King Kong imagery.

So instead, they cast Mendes — who’s freaking stunningly gorgeous, by the way — because she’s brown, the middle between black and white.

Anyway, I’m babbling. So yeah, though no tracks off Yeezus will earn permanent spot on my “all time playlist” (songs that I basically listen to at least once or twice or dozen times a month, every month, for years and years years) like many of West’s earlier classics — like Gorgeous off My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, with its clever, snappy, anthemic rhymes and gnarly guitar riffs; or the head-bobbing, chest-pounding Touch the Sky and soulful Heard ‘Em Say off Late Registration; or the gym-ready, made-for-workouts Stronger off Graduation; or the inspiring, oldies-rap-resembling, Through the Wire from The College Dropout — Yeezus is an album I have much respect for. And I like Black Skinhead, a lot.

Footnotes:

1: Jay actually fully admits to dumbing down his music in order to have it go pop and become hits. He mentions this not only in the book Decoded (where he admits Empire State of Mind was written to be a fluffy pop song) but also in this rhyme off Moment of Clarity:

If skills sold, truth be told, I’d probably be/Lyrically Talib Kweli/Truthfully I wanna rhyme like Common Sense/But I did five mil, and I ain’t been rhyming like Common since