Poetics of resistance: two music videos, Native Gun and June G

By Aaron Asphar

These two videos capture something we find more in US hiphop that emerges from the margins of social life, and I think it draws from a richer magma of cultural memory of black resistance/solidarity than in the nihilistic or aggressive sounds of European cities like London or Paris : while the latter display more tenacious poetics of intransigence and survival, the videos I look at ere give a more cohesive poetics of resistance and a kind of tribal, or ‘native’ solidarity.

I really like this existentially charged song by Native Gun, ‘Pull it back’, is how it speaks out/from/with the experiences of those in his neighbourhood which give their voices through their attitudes and movement. His voice has a real smooth, elastic poetic a bit like Snoop Dog in 'Drop it like its hot', but in Native Gun the voice is cooled by a sense of despair and hopelessness rather than by money and confidence. I think this song reproduces concretely the emotional-social reality, turning this nihilism/hopelessness into an emotional-social language, out of which cohesion and meaning can be made. It is also, incidentally so, a concrete critique or commentary of social life...



I would say the Native Gun video is heavy with this settled sense of social impoverishment, as were some of the early blues musicians. This next song by June G, ‘Back 2 da HipHop’, indicates this kind of cohesion that has rescued itself from this social reality through the counter-reality it produces, hence a we have more of an emotional solidarity and a poetic cohesion between the parts – both in the song but also the way they refer/ gesture/exchange to each other in the video as well..



All in all these videos speak to me of how negativity in social life is turned into solidarity and cohesion, and a strong critical voice against the social, one that gives a real emotional history without which the history of black/sub-cultural resistance would everywhere be as empty and misleading as it is in the heads of politicians and social planners of today. Aaron 23/4

PS, I mentioned the Native Gun song really reminds me of that Snoop Dog song Drop it like its Hot (this version ft Pharrell Williams)...