Critical Excess: Watch the Throne and the New Gilded Age

by J. Griffith Rollefson

Overview

Jay-Z and Kanye West’s 2011 Watch the Throne is a self-avowed “luxury rap” album centered on Eurocentric conceptions of nobility, artistry, and haute couture. Critical Excess performs a close reading of the sonic and social commentary on this album, examining how the album alternately imagines and critiques the mutually reinforcing ideas of Europe, nobility, old money, art, and their standard bearer, whiteness. Reading the album alongside Black critical theory and work on the prophetic nature of music, Rollefson argues that through their performance of black excellence, opulence, and decadence, Jay-Z and Kanye West poured gas on the white resentment of the Obama presidency—a resentment that would ultimately spill over into public life, make audible the dog whistling of the Far Right, and embolden white supremacists to come out from under their rocks. Ultimately, Rollefson argues, Jay-Z and Kanye West’s performance of what Rollefson calls “critical excess” on this hip hop album exceeds the limits of conspicuous consumption and heralds the final stage of late capitalism—“the New Gilded Age.” 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472054879
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	06/07/2021
Series:	Tracking Pop
Pages:	234
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

J. Griffith Rollefson is professor of music at University College Cork, National University of Ireland.  Rollefson is author of Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality.
 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction. Death Dance for Capitalism: Watch the Throne as Prophetic Critique 1

1 "Welcome to the jungle": Essence and the Western Inheritance 33

2 "Lift Off" to Sunday Service: Transcendence, Black Capitalism, Black Rapture 57

3 "After They've Seen Paree": The Mastery of Form 85

4 "Niggas in Poorest" to "That Shit Creil": NIP's Realpolitik in the US and France 110

5 "Sophisticated Ignorance": The Deformation of Mastery 136

Conclusion. Black Noise: Re-composition in the Last Gilded Age 163

Notes 181

Bibliography 203

Discography and Videography 215

Index 217

What People are Saying About This

Justin Williams

“This is an excellent book with a highly original thesis and thorough theoretical analyses of the album and its related themes. Rollefson has a flair for prose that is at once academic and performative.”
—Justin A. Williams, University of Bristol

Regina N. Bradley

“J. Griffith Rollefson delivers a fresh and necessary revisitation to Watch the Throne in time for the pivotal album's 10th anniversary. Rollefson's analysis is wide-ranging and deep-probing, offering an intersectional framework for understanding Watch the Throne as a significant case study of engaging hip hop’s tethering to globalization, commercialism, and racial performance.” 
—Regina N. Bradley, Assistant Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University, author of Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

“Critical Excess offers a much-awaited and outstanding meditation on hip-hop’s drive to imagine the end(s) of racial capitalism. From Fanon to Black gospel, from Magilla Gorilla to Afrodiasporas, Rollefson tracks the iconoclasms of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne, detailing how the record not only anticipated the explosive national and international racial politics of the late 2010s but came to be deeply implicated in their emergence. It is electrifying to see W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Achille Mbembe sit in the company of Jay, Ye, and Mos Def—and wince not. I simply cannot wait to teach with this book.”
—Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University; author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League and Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic 
 

Justin D. Burton

“Rollefson does a solid job of establishing that Watch the Throne was mostly received as a tasteless flaunting of wealth, then presses that reception and offers something far more compelling and rooted in deep histories of double—and triple—meanings in Black arts and cultures. The argument becomes particularly timely in the way Rollefson ties the album’s performance to the contemporary political moment on both sides of the English-speaking Atlantic.”
—Justin D. Burton, Rider University