Tanmay Pandya, a third-year student of B.A. Sociology (Research) presented a paper at the “3rd Inter-University Undergraduate Seminar: The City and the Margins” at Indraprastha College for Women, Delhi University.
The title of his paper was “High City, Low Art: TikTok, Urban Visuality, and the Counter-Aesthetics of Rap”. Tanmay received third place at the seminar.
Tanmay's Proposal:
High City, Low Art: TikTok, Urban Visuality, and the Counter Aesthetics of Rap
It is hard not to view a city as divided by power hierarchies. This division manifests into several artistic expressions and among them is the musical genre of rap. Rap reflects this urban division through its “primary thematic concerns of identity and location” (Rose 1994, 10). Tricia Rose, in her book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, argues that rap's sound, as well as its music videos, attempt to bring back the ghetto into public consciousness.
Being a genre that was growing in the age of technology, music videos are essential visual elements to the sound of rap. Rap's music videos became a visual space for the creation of an aesthetic of a historically marginalised region, culture and experience. This aesthetic lies in opposition to the “high aesthetic” that is tied to the classical, to the traditional, to whiteness. Aesthetics have long been a tool of power to create a division of "us" against "them". In the case of rap and America, this urban division through aesthetics is intertwined with race.
Rap music from the 1990s, when the genre was still in its early fame, has resurfaced in popularity through the app TikTok. However, TikTok's technology of separating the sound of rap from the visual of the music video into thirty-second-long videos eliminates this aesthetic that black rap has attempted to bring forth. TikTok's algorithms also seek to curate the app in a manner that excludes the slum, the ghetto and its visuality, again using visual aesthetics as a means to distinguish and divide. Thus, this paper will seek to ask: does the nature of TikTok's technology become a means for disregarding these margins and creating an urban visuality of elite, high aesthetics? The methods this research will carry out shall mainly be archival, using the Internet and TikTok videos as archival outlets. Theoretical texts shall be used for critical analysis and as secondary research.
References:
Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press
