Essays on the the political, visual and aesthetics of music videos of the 1990s and 2000s Hiphop and R&B.
The narrator to Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man squats a basement with only a turntable and whose ceiling he has adorned with 1,369 light bulbs, powered by electricity poached from Monopolated Light and Power, to create the brightest spot in New York City. In 1993 Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs founds the Bad Boy Entertainment label and, in the years that follow, leads the mainstreaming of New York hip-hop and RnB in global popular culture. Between them, these moments mark the changing coordinates, from the middle to the end of the twentieth century, of an aesthetics of light and the music of economic domination. This collectively written book takes Bad Boy Entertainment as the starting point for a reflection that intersects financial capitalism and gentrification, the motion of light and the nature of value, death and mourning, the history of Black music and millennial video aesthetics. In doing so it seeks to outline the way a music label typically derided as trifling commercialism incarnated the passing of a novel experience of luminosity and a new state of global power.