At the point you find yourself walking down the street, muttering the lyrics to Kreayshawn’s horrendously catchy “Gucci Gucci” under your breath, you have two choices: a frontal lobotomy, performed for the sake of your sanity; or, in an attempt to honour the memory of the brain cells the song inevitably destroys, you do the hopeful thing and just analyze the shit out of it. Me, I’m going with the latter.
“Gucci Gucci”, if you haven’t heard, is the next in the line of viral songs like Rebecca Black’s “Friday”, which circulate around the web with dizzying speed, getting inexplicably stuck in your head despite their creators’s seeming difficulty with things like “melody” or “talent.” Since its release a month ago, it has amassed nearly three million views on YouTube.
Unlike “Friday,” though, “Gucci Gucci” is interesting for more than the very fact that it exists at all. On the one hand, the idea of a young white female rapper “keepin’ it hood” is always going to incite some (deserved) controversy over cultural appropriation. On the other, not only is its central message the, um, kinda’ positive “Girls, don’t be like basic bitches, forget brands and be yourself!”, the video itself is like a miniature lesson in the philosophy and aesthetics of the web. I’m exactly 68 percent sure I’m serious about this.
Still, let’s assume I am entirely sure I’m serious and just roll with it. If Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” borrowed the hazy look and fascination with nostalgia from Tumblr, the chorus sections of Kreayshawn’s video borrows liberally from your average Facebook photo set, all champagne bottles, sweaty bodies and ‘great memories.’ Meanwhile, Kreayshawn’s hype-girl/DJ Lil’ Debbie may as well be the poster child for contemporary hipsterism, her meticulously weird, off-kilter pastiche style worn with an unabashed fuck-you-swagger.
But the video also traffics in another of the web’s trends: demystification. There are numerous angled shots of Kreayshawn looking at another camera, giving the viewer their very own private insight into how these regular girls – who are just like you! – become “One big room/ full of bad bitches”. It’s a bit like what Twitter’s Robin Sloan calls “production as performance” videos, a term he used to describe the work of web senstation Pomplamoose, whose insanely popular cover clips are simply them recording songs.
But that same kind of DIY, “YOU are the Time Person of the Year” ethos also carries a dark side. Kreayshawn’s necklace of a Native American head seems to be worn with an almost courageous ignorance of how tacky and offensive it is, a trait that seems oh-so-web. On the Internet, images ricochet around without anchor. Through sheer pace, signs become free-floating and detached from history. And when that happens, it’s not so much that a cigar is just a good smoke, as it is something you forget is flammable until it sets fire to your house. Moreover, the way the whole video seems to put two white girls in vaguely virtual blackface is, depending on your mood, either bemusing or a bit disturbing.
But if the racial politics of Kreayshawn are, to use the technical term, ‘icky,’ it’s somewhat better in how it depicts women. While even Nicki—“I’m a muthafuckin’ monster”—Minaj can slip into the “get over here and ravish me you big hunk of man” school of thought, in “Gucci Gucci” not only is there no male object of desire, the camera isn’t even a proxy for the viewer’s. This is just Kreayshawn, picking up girls, doing her thing, and just — if we might loosely use the word — ‘rapping’.
And as metaphors for the aesthetics and ideals of the web go, that ain’t half bad. In as much as the internet allows for strangely depoliticised representations of, well, anything, it also lets people carve out a space to simply do their own thing. And far from the downfall of everything, that might be just the web’s strength.
In his now oft-quoted 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”, Walter Benjamin argued that technology’s capacity to mechanically recreate removed the ‘aura’ of uniqueness or originality from art. Far from just a lament, however, Benjamin argued that the resulting circulation of ideas and aesthetics was actually a democratic boon, provided people were willing to analyse and politicize all this new art they were presented with.
Now, we live in the Age of Rebloggability, and the swirling mass of images has increased exponentially. Perhaps the only responsible thing to do is to ramp up the critical, politicized eye Benjamin said technology had made necessary, and just get out there and critique. Besides, beyond being a bit of fun, it may be the only way to save those all those poor, assaulted brain cells.
