1 Money Trees

In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson famously uses the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles as a metaphor for “the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.”1 Jameson seeks to make clear that the vertiginous experience evoked by the hotel’s symmetrical towers, rounded lounges, and glassed elevators is not unique but instead an emblematic condition of postmodernism. To make this claim, he juxtaposes the Bonaventure Hotel with an account of helicopter flight from Michael Herr’s 1977 work of literary journalism about the Vietnam War, Dispatches. In his reading of Herr, Jameson argues that the book’s lexicon, which “fuses a whole range of contemporary collective idiolects, most notably rock language and black language,” typifies the breakdown of narrative in the late twentieth century: “This first terrible postmodernist war cannot be told in any of the traditional paradigms of the war novel or movie—indeed, that breakdown of all previous narrative paradigms is, along with the breakdown of any shared language through which a veteran might convey such an experience, among the principal subjects of the book and may be said to open up the place of a whole new reflexivity.”2 Herr’s refusal of fictional tropes gestures, in Jameson’s account, to a proto-articulation of a “whole new reflexivity,” later to be described as “something of the mystery of the new postmodernist space.”3 From our vantage point today, it seems rather clear what aesthetic form this “new reflexivity” has taken: documentary.

Dispatches opens with the abdication of objective journalistic standards: “We knew that the uses of most information were flexible, different pieces of ground told different stories to different people.”4 What this means is not that reality has no meaning, but instead that there is, in Herr’s words, “not much chance anymore for history to go on unselfconsciously.”5 In his reflexive prose, Herr positions himself centrally among the soldiers he interviews and travels with, often juxtaposing official narratives released by the U.S. government about the war with the messy experiences of soldiers on the ground. This juxtaposition produces the book’s own methodological rationale, an argument for the necessity of the documentary aesthetic in the 1960s and 1970s. As Herr notes, if “conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it,” then Herr’s focus on personal experience and emotion strives to represent the war in its reflexive, mediated complexity.6 Indeed, Herr describes his role as that of documentary storyteller: “So we have all been compelled to make our own movies, as many movies as there are correspondents, and this one is mine.”7 By blending techniques from film into prose, Herr captures the juxtapositions that define what we can now think of as a failed precursor to the more secretive U.S. military engagements of the 1970s and 1980s. Jameson’s negative comparison of Herr’s Dispatches to the “war novel or movie” only underlines what makes this reflexivity unique: in its combination of narrative breakdown, first-person experience, and vernacular language, and in its origins as long-form, impressionistic war reportage for Esquire, Dispatches is a work in the documentary aesthetic.8

That the category of “documentary” was not used by Jameson in the 1980s and early 1990s to describe postmodern aesthetics is understandable. After all, documentary was often critiqued during postmodernism as a naive, exploitative mode in photography and film.9 Similarly, its literary equivalent of the period, in which Herr was often included, the New Journalism, seemed opposed to postmodernism in its sometimes archconservative politics and in its insistence on the role of the author as a major mediating force. Yet for Jameson, Herr’s documentary prose marks something like an attempt at cognitive mapping through its collective vernacular, even if it ultimately represents less a totality than vertigo in his reading. Indeed, as Jameson’s invocation of Herr implies but does not examine, a whole swath of documentary art from the 1960s to the present has aimed to create new modes of conceiving the relation of subject to structure, exploited to totality. Documentary art—ranging from works like Herr’s Dispatches to conceptual artworks like Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974–75)—emerged to represent poverty, exploitation, and modes of being in the postwar United States while also using experimental modes to critique the older tradition of documentary that, as Rosler argued, “has been much more comfortable in the company of moralism than wedded to a rhetoric or program of revolutionary politics.”10 The “moralism” that Rosler points out is indicative of both New Deal–era documentary’s polemic messaging and the logic of formal purity that came to be associated with modernist aesthetics. With Rosler and others working in the documentary aesthetic, documentary art moves beyond these origins and limits. Today, documentary experiments continue in an even more prominent fashion, including celebrated literary works such as Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015); photography projects like Trevor Paglen’s Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes (2010), Taryn Simon’s Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015), and Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo’s Border Cantos (2016); installation art projects by Ann Hamilton and Fred Wilson; and digital documentaries like the video game Kursk (2018) by the Polish game studio Jujubee and the web-based Offshore (2013), an interactive documentary by Brenda Longfellow, Glenn Richards, and Helios Design Labs.

As Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg argue in their book Documentary across Disciplines: “Contemporary documentary practices reach across media and across disciplines to form a rich site marked by imperatives at once aesthetic and political. Far from any notion of ‘fly-on-the-wall’ immediacy or quasi-scientific aspirations to objectivity, such practices understand documentary not as the neutral picturing of reality, but as a way of coming to terms with reality by means of working with and through images and narrative.”11 If contemporary documentary art exists in an expanded field—no longer defined by medium specificity or simple binaries of truth and fiction—then it may be that documentary offers a framework for representing our immediate history and contemporary moment in a way that can make visible the structures of exploitation emblematic of the present.12 When critics like Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle or Walter Benn Michaels, in very different ways, find in film and photography a renewed assertion of cognitive mapping or aesthetic autonomy, what they may be noticing is less a commitment to the concepts of totality or autonomy than it is documentary form itself. The documentary aesthetic is newly prominent today but has a history of documenting both subjective experience and structures of exploitation that coincides with the emergence of finance capitalism in the 1960s.13 Therefore many seemingly postmodern works might have different meanings if viewed as works in the documentary aesthetic.

For example, Jeff Wall’s well-known 1982 photograph Mimic (fig. 3) would not be classified as documentary under traditional definitions, but by thinking of it as such, I hope to make the point that documentary form is a mode of artistic production today that surpasses its earlier, more rigid definitions. Mimic uses the aesthetic of a documentary genre, street photography, even though it is a posed and carefully composed photograph restaging an incident that Wall witnessed on a Vancouver street. Walter Benn Michaels has argued that this photograph represents the difference between individual feelings, ambitions, and expressions, and the economic system that, in his view, renders those sentiments irrelevant and even harmful to the pursuit of economic equality. The photograph represents an act of prejudice, a tense encounter between a white, seemingly working-class couple and an Asian man. The Asian man represents, here, a new, educated, upwardly mobile immigrant class, resented by the white man as his prospects point downward. Wall’s photograph, for Michaels, asserts its autonomy as a photograph, and in turn the photograph’s form “assert[s] the autonomy of structure in relation to affect.”14 Racial difference and class difference do not correspond and are indeed in an inverse relationship in the photograph. Yet the irreducibility of prejudice to exploitation is made available through the photograph’s documentary presentation, through the use of a mode of photography that we expect to represent subjective experience as evidence of a structure of exploitation.

In Michaels’s view, Wall rejects the generic conceits of street photography. This rejection makes it all the more compelling to read the photograph’s form as a refinement of documentary aesthetics, a shift away from the familiar genre of street photography and toward a more rapacious documentary aesthetic. What has led critics to think of Wall’s photograph as postmodern is how the subjective experience of prejudice, to borrow Douglas Crimp’s phrasing in his landmark essay “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” is “a function not of presence but of absence.”15 That is, the racism expressed by the photograph’s white male subject represents resentment and hate but does not immediately represent the economic and racial structures that have produced that feeling. As a restaging of an experience, Mimic documents an act of prejudice that becomes, in the photograph, evidence of a shift in economic relations, as the prospects of the white working class begin to dwindle as manufacturing and industry are reconfigured under globalization. Yet the value of the photograph as documentary is that it can only represent this structural condition by representing something else, a feeling produced by exploitation but one that exceeds its cause. The personal feelings and ambitions captured in the photograph are central to the project of documentary. Emotional and personal relations are not a false front for structural analysis to topple over. The feelings of the subjects in Mimic are visible alongside the structural relations of those very subjects, and the photograph captures this tension. Just as Herr’s Dispatches places experience in relation to other, official discourses about the Vietnam War, Mimic juxtaposes feeling with structure, and in so doing it participates in the documentary aesthetic by presenting an account of the social world.

Documentary practices have expanded since the 1960s, and this expansion has been facilitated by the untethering of documentary from narrow constructions of political perspective, factuality, and medium specificity. Important documentary projects of our age cross media—they include journalistic writing classed under the headings of the New Journalism, literary journalism, and submersion journalism; conceptual and archival art practices that critique the museum as an institution and seek to break down the walls that separate the museum from society; memoirs that have populated bestseller lists from the 1990s on; major works of comics nonfiction like Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1991) and Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1996); and popular music across genres that trades in personal authenticity. Documentary produces a way of thinking of everyday life’s distance from social structures as a site for aesthetic experimentation amid what seem to be intractably compromised conditions. Turning everyday life, real objects, and the structures that exploit and give them meaning into art through documentary form presents the contradictions of our contemporary moment as operating through both the unprecedented ubiquity of finance capital in everyday life and a surplus of subjective experience determined by, yet sometimes in excess of, those structures.

In this chapter, I will focus on works that foreground the tensions between individuality and systems beyond individuals in ways similar to Herr’s Dispatches and Wall’s Mimic. These works cross media forms, and they are particularly in sync with neoliberal culture, as they foreground the ties between personality and economy. In D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary film Dont Look Back, Charlie Ahearn’s fictionalized film about graffiti and hip-hop culture Wild Style, Ed Piskor’s comics series Hip Hop Family Tree, and Kendrick Lamar’s album Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, individual styles are bounced off of consumer culture, collective imaginaries, corporate exploitation, and global capitalism. These works are part of rock and hip-hop cultures, arguably the now-universal languages of our time, and they capture how experience and structures work in a negative relation under finance capitalism.

Cultures of Resistance

D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back chronicles Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour in England. As a work of cinema vérité or “direct cinema,” the film records overheard conversations rather than direct engagements with the camera or filmmaker. In one striking moment in the film, though, the agency of the filmmaker is more apparent than usual. Interviewed by a reporter from the BBC’s African Service, Dylan is asked how he got started as a musician: “How did it all begin for you, Bob? What actually started you off?” Dylan responds with an “um,” and then in an unprecedented bit of editing, the film cuts to a younger Dylan playing “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” about the assassination of Medger Evers, in front of a group of African Americans in a rural setting. Keith Beattie details that this scene—“which was filmed in early 1963 during a voters’ registration rally at Silas Mage’s farm in Greenwood, Mississippi—was shot by Ed Emshwiller while working on a television programme dealing with civil rights.”16 The applause at the end of Dylan’s performance behind a pick-up truck at this voter registration rally is blended into the cacophonous applause in a theatre in England, as Dylan begins playing “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” alone on stage. This transition presents Dylan’s career as one of stark contrasts. Notably, the interview sequence here differs from other media interviews in the film, where Dylan is often confrontational and prickly with reporters. As Jeanne Hall has noted of this scene, “Pennebaker’s abrupt interruption of what might actually have been a productive (i.e., informative) interview is telling and perfectly in keeping with Dont Look Back’s systematic critique of the value of conventional reporting methods.”17 The documentary, then, presents a mode of filmmaking that is at once more personal and more abstract than conventional modes of representing personhood, especially in the case of Dylan, a figure who is beginning to refuse to participate in conventional ways with interviewers.

Once an overtly political songwriter, the Dylan of Dont Look Back has changed—his songs are more poetic, less political, and when he opens his concert with “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” he looks visibly weary, his face unexpressive. What seemed like a moment of civil rights sympathy, even activism, in the jump cut to “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” has become aloof obscurantism by 1965, in part because, the film implies, the wearying grind of media exposure has worn down Dylan’s taste for sincerity. Dont Look Back charts the difference between Dylan’s folk history and celebrity blankness. And in the film’s final scene, when Dylan reads a review of his recent concert that claims he is an “anarchist,” he jokes, “Give the anarchist a cigarette,” and then after a pause says, “I don’t think it’s cool to be an anarchist.” The camera lingers on his face. As he gazes through sunglasses out the car window, Dylan’s personality is unavailable to us, the viewers. He is just as confusing to us as he is to the media that searches for ways to describe his politics after his shift into celebrity rock culture. The familiar politics of the progressive folk singer vanish, and as Dylan becomes a rock celebrity, cool and hip styles become the only explanations of his work, even if his work seems inexplicable without reference to personal experience and political commitments. Dont Look Back presents a vision of celebrity wherein politics become illegible and individual style becomes a kind of blank affect.

While Dont Look Back focuses on an iconic individual, Wild Style fuses individual style with collective events, gesturing not to the impersonal effects of celebrity culture but instead to ways in which artisanal crafts can help form a community. As Kimberley Bercov Monteyne has argued, the film is at once a documentary and a musical, and in his depiction of the South Bronx, Wild Style’s director Charlie Ahearn “underscores the power to be found in noncommercial spaces of creativity associated with early hip-hop and Black and Latino youth culture in the early ’80s.”18 Tracking the life of the graffiti artist Zoro (played by the real-life graffiti artist Lee Quiñones), the film includes a number of musical sequences that feature early hip-hop groups, along with sequences of Quiñones at work with spray paint. While its overarching plot is fictional, Wild Style is filmed in the documentary aesthetic: it features musicians and cultural figures like Fab Five Freddy who play themselves, has largely improvised dialogue, and is shot on location in the Bronx. The film concludes with a large outdoor concert, performed in a bandshell that has been painted by Zoro. Initially frustrated by his vision for the bandshell, Zoro has to move beyond his romantic conception of the artist as a tortured, isolated individual: “I’m trying to paint this figure in the middle, and it’s not even coming out right. I’ve already got the hands on the side, like the hands of doom, representing the city and the environment around this artist, and what I’m trying to draw is the artist in the middle. And he’s like painting all by himself in his own world, and he don’t care about nobody around him. And that’s what the hands are, everybody around him.” Upon hearing this, Rose (played in the film by Lady Pink, another real-life graffiti artist) responds with a critique of Zoro’s individualized vision: “I don’t like your mural. I don’t like the idea. . . . You only worry about Zoro. Concentrate on what the whole thing is about. It’s a jam. Rappers are gonna be coming down. They’re gonna be the stars of this thing, not you.” Zoro’s face lights up after this, and he completes the mural, replacing the solitary artist with an electrified star at the center of the stage. Zoro imagines his graffiti star shooting lightning from the stage, no longer signifying resistance to oppressive forces in society but instead energizing a collective performance. This imagined electricity is paralleled by the concert itself, which features Busy Bee Starski and the Fantastic Freaks rapping in front of a large, dancing crowd. In a film about an illegal art form, graffiti, and a mode of musical performance that is intensely competitive, rap—one sequence in Wild Style features a rap song performed as a game of basketball—artistic craft is both individualized and collective. Graffiti artists and rappers alike are valued because of individualized styles that make them distinct. These styles emerge in the 1970s Bronx, a part of New York City decimated by the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway from 1948 to 1972. A structure designed to facilitate the circulation of goods and workers—a hallmark of neoliberal capitalism’s burgeoning logistics industry—the expressway produces a space for individual expression within exploitative conditions. Yet these styles achieve their full expression when artists participate in a collective environment.

The aesthetics of Dont Look Back and Wild Style solidify the terms of music documentary—on one hand, the history of popular music relies on iconic individuals whose personalities coextend with their styles, yet on the other hand, music is a collective enterprise, born of communities of craft. In our neoliberal culture, music functions as something of an exemplar of entrepreneurial individualism, yet it is also a mass form that can exceed commodification. In some instances, these individualized expressions facilitate pleasures and communities formed by craft. In these moments, one glimpses what it might be like to abandon isolated individualism for collaboration and collective work outside of familiar exploitative hierarchies. These valences of individual style, collaboration, and exploitation become even more apparent later in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Documentary and Hip Hop, 1989

The year 1989 figures centrally in our histories of contemporary aesthetics. Not only does 1989 give us the convenient benchmark of the end of the Cold War, but it is also a point around which we can find an explosion of influential, experimental documentary. In 1988, Errol Morris’s film The Thin Blue Line was released and Adrian Piper’s influential performance/video work Cornered was first exhibited. Allan Sekula began his documentary art project Fish Story in 1989, and the second volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus was nearing the end of its serialization in Raw, to be published as a book in 1991. In more traditional media, Jeff Widener’s 1989 “Tank Man” photograph at Tiananmen Square became another iconic work of photojournalism. More specifically, 1989 is a signal year for the history of hip-hop music. Public Enemy’s anthem “Fight the Power,” the opening song in Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing, begins with Chuck D rapping, “1989, the number, another summer,” and N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton, released in August of 1988, would appear on Billboard music charts in 1989 as well. Both groups trade in documentary tropes. Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” music video is a documentary work itself—a live performance and street gathering, intercut with archival footage of the civil rights movement. N.W.A.’s rap narratives include both street authenticity and structural analysis, as in their iconic anthem “Fuck the Police.” As Jeff Chang, Joshua Clover, and Eithne Quinn have argued, the coincidence of Public Enemy’s Black nationalism and N.W.A.’s gangsta lifestyle in 1989 represents a kind of fork in the road for hip-hop music.19 As N.W.A.’s gangsta rap gained popularity, the Black nationalist politics and aesthetics of Public Enemy waned. In his history of hip-hop culture, Chang details this transition as a shift away from Reaganite messages of abstention, which dovetailed with Black nationalism’s emphasis on self-discipline: “Reaganism had eliminated youth programs while bombarding youths with messages to desist and abstain; it was all about tough love and denial and getting used to having nothing. Even the East Coast utopians like Rakim and Chuck D talked control and discipline. By contrast, excess was the essence of N.W.A.’s appeal. These poets celebrated pushers, played bitches, killed enemies, and assassinated police. Fuck delayed gratification, they said, take it all now.”20 Joshua Clover characterizes this move from discipline to excess as “the internalization of struggle,” a pivot from Black nationalism’s vision of “a confrontation at the border of the ghetto and suburb” to gangsta’s “spectacle of Black youth and a Black underclass ensnared (and even reveling) in a world of immanent violence that retreated from borders of geography, race, and class—and turned the violence on itself.”21 Eithne Quinn similarly finds in gangsta rap a turn away from the politics expressed by rappers like Chuck D and places the style squarely within the logic of neoliberalism: “Much of the timeliness and persisting resonance of gangsta rap derives from its dramatizing of reconfigured relations within the cultural marketplace, during an era in which profit was increasingly upheld as the only measure of worth.”22 As Quinn points out, what makes gangsta rap unique is not that it is a cultural commodity designed to turn a profit but that gangsta rappers themselves broadcast their profit-driven intentions as a central feature of the genre’s expression.

Despite the initial public outcry against gangsta rap, N.W.A. and subsequently Dr. Dre’s 1992 album The Chronic would recenter rap music around a gangsta, consumerist lifestyle, one that relies on aspirations to wealth and leisure as much as it does on first-person experience and authenticity as rhetorical poses. Writing about rap music during the summer of 1989, David Foster Wallace noted in Signifying Rappers that rap’s commingling of the rhetoric of collective politics and the rhetoric of hustling and consuming positions it towards the kind of sincerity he would associate with the generation of writers to come after postmodernism in his well-known essay “E Unibus Pluram.” In Signifying Rappers, Wallace writes, “Serious rap’s the first music to begin creative work on the new, (post-)postmodern face the threat of economic inequality to American ideals is wearing: the dreadfully obvious one: viz., ‘freedom’ becomes not qualitative but quantitative, quantifiable, a cold logical function of where you are and what you have to exercise it on.”23 That is, in rap music, Wallace finds the departure from postmodern irony he would later predict in a generation of writers, like Dave Eggers, who would embrace the form of the memoir. Rap got there first.

In 1989, rap music was quickly becoming a mainstream form, signaled not only by a rising number of singles and albums on the Billboard charts, from Public Enemy and N.W.A. to Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing,” but also by Yo! MTV Raps, which began as a weekly show in 1988 and was converted to a daily after-school show in early 1989 because of its immense popularity. With this success, of course, rap also entered into finance capitalism, as a facet of the entertainment industry and as a way to make visible, and even heroic, the acquisitiveness and self-interested greed of the entrepreneurial individual so often associated with neoliberalism, removed from the politics of community building that lingered in Public Enemy’s Black nationalism. Village Voice critic Greg Tate’s 1993 poem “What is Hip-Hop?” seizes upon rap’s imbrication within capitalism, its movement from regionally specific subcultures to popular culture:

Hip-hop is the perverse logic of capitalism pursued by an artform

Like capitalism, hip-hop converts raw soul into store rack commodity

Like capitalism, hip-hop has no morals, no conscience, and no ecological concern for the scavenged earth or the scavenged American minds it will wreck in its pursuit of new markets24

Tate’s poem is critical, though it concludes with a recognition that hip hop constitutes a blues vernacular for the present, not despite but because of the form’s imbrication with entrepreneurial pursuits. Because of this imbrication, then, hip hop is less a music form, or even a poetic form, than it is a multimedia mode, and one that is formed around documentary tropes. From its origins in the 1970s Bronx, alongside graffiti art and breakdancing, to its contemporary resonance as music, art, film, game, fashion, marketing category, and design template, hip hop has created and overwritten markets, while also remaining tied rhetorically, politically, and aesthetically to authenticity and reality.25 This gritty “up-from-the-streets” authenticity is central to hip hop’s appeal. As Adam Bradley has noted, autobiographical rap often strives to make “new meanings out of familiar circumstances,” and along those lines, I view it as part of a larger swath of documentary art that emerges out of the increasingly privatized United States.26 The dispersal and evacuation of public resources occasioned by privatization has a precursor in the environment from which hip hop emerges, the Bronx in the 1970s, and the depleted infrastructure found there would become more commonly experienced in the United States as privatization and the erosion of public resources became more prominent in the 1980s. In the Bronx, due to “white flight,” plummeting property values, and high unemployment, all commonly attributed to the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, the distance between an economic system that promised wealth and everyday lives structured around poverty and dispossession became clear. Wealth was geographically proximate yet distant in reality, and the path out of poverty was no longer apparent. As documented in Wild Style, hip hop emerged out of that distance.

Hip Hop Family Tree’s Archival Life

Like hip hop itself, Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree is a multimedia project. Initially serialized on the website Boing Boing starting in 2012, Piskor’s series has been published serially as single-issue comic books and collected in four large treasury-edition books to date. Issue 12 of Hip Hop Family Tree also included an album, and Piskor designed Public Enemy action figures based on his illustrations of the iconic group for the media company Press Pop. Hip Hop Family Tree is a documentary comic, with a bibliography of both reference works and songs in the back of each volume. Yet unlike the comics journalism of Sarah Glidden or Joe Sacco, or the comics memoirs of Alison Bechdel, Marjane Satrapi, or Art Spiegelman, Hip Hop Family Tree is an appreciation. Hillary Chute argues that documentary comics about war and trauma tend to use “inventive textual practice to . . . express trauma ethically.”27 The documentary comics that Chute classifies in this way, like Spiegelman’s Maus or Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde, privilege an ethical mode of viewing, one that remains ambiguous and conflicted. Yet documentary can capture not just trauma but also exploitation, a process less prone to be punctuated by moments of astounding violence than constituted by something like Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” or David Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession,” modes of exploitation that rely on subjects to produce wealth over long periods of time through predatory financial structures like disproportionately high rents and prices.28 As the comic’s original subtitle, A Look into the Viral Propagation of a Culture, makes clear, Hip Hop Family Tree is less a record of tragedy and trauma than a documentation of how something like a collective style was fashioned by multiple agents in multiple places, often under conditions in which artists were not credited or compensated for their efforts. As the “family tree” in its title suggests, the comic proceeds episodically and generationally, moving from figure to figure, group to group, place to place as it tells the story of hip hop. There are flashpoints in the narrative where key figures are featured together on the same page, as in the dramatization of reactions to hearing the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” on the radio for the first time (fig. 4).29 The structure of Hip Hop Family Tree is chronological and synchronic, a narrative that keeps a multitude of individuals, groups, and institutions in play over time.

Importantly for Piskor, hip hop and comics have an analogous relationship as popular media forms structured around the marketplace and shaped by exploitation of the very artists that defined, created, and refined those forms. One of the earliest strips published on Boing Boing, and one included in the back of book 1, is titled “The Hip Hop/Comics Connection.”30 As Piskor details on these pages, comics and hip hop have shared origins in poor neighborhoods in New York City, referencing the Yellow Kid, a street urchin in the Hogan’s Alley comics published in both the New York Journal and the New York World in the 1890s, alongside the lyrics to the Bronx-based Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 song “The Message” (fig. 5). Yet origins are only part of the connection. As Piskor notes, both forms are built upon transformation, the assumption of larger-than-life identities, and the importance of the battle and the team-up. The strip also makes clear that both hip hop and comics fandom share a pleasure in the archive, in tracking down rare singles, first appearances, and epic confrontations.

In Hip Hop Family Tree, this archival sensibility appears on the page through Piskor’s illustration style, influenced by the graffiti art documented in films like Wild Style as well as by R. Crumb’s portraits of obscure and mostly forgotten blues, jazz, and country musicians. The archive is also present in Piskor’s references to video documentation of rap battles and performances, his citation of lyrics and interview segments, and, most important for “The Hip Hop/Comics Connection,” his use of now archival cartooning techniques such as the Leroy lettering system and zipatone shading and his covers that mimic comics like Tales from the Crypt, Uncanny X-Men, and Fantastic Four. Piskor’s use of actual ink and paper and the book’s publication on thick, yellowed paper stock make material the archival impetus of the comic. Hip Hop Family Tree tells a history using historical forms, materials, and styles. This archival style makes the period documented in Hip Hop Family Tree, the 1970s and 1980s, present to the reader as a material object and as a narrative, transforming neoliberalism’s past into neoliberalism’s present.

Other moments in Hip Hop Family Tree depict how hip-hop music was molded by financial concerns from its very origins, at the same time as it was discounted as art. The first volume ends with an account of a 20/20 television news feature on hip hop, concluding with the broadcaster’s voice-over: “Not everyone can sing, but anyone can rap!”31 The easy, almost instinctive dismissal of the medium parallels the history of comics, viewed even as recently as MOMA’s 1990 High and Low exhibit as mere raw material for the artistic practice of figures like Roy Lichtenstein. Hip Hop Family Tree champions the underdog persistence and over-the-top personae of early rappers. Like the unsung comics artists who toiled for publishers in the same period, their underground status makes their accomplishments all the more earth-shattering in Piskor’s view. The dismissal of hip hop as a mere fad that requires no artistry is also countered by the comic’s accounts of entrepreneurial visionaries like Sylvia Robinson, Rick Rubin, and Russell Simmons. Throughout Hip Hop Family Tree, Rick Rubin appears as a Tintin-like figure, a wealthy teenager interested in the style of the “Black punk rock” he encounters through a cassette recording of the Cold Crush Brothers.32 In book 1, Rubin appears three times—in his “Richie Rick” introduction, at a Ramones concert at CBGB, and then performing with his own band the Pricks. In his concert performance, making a splash clearly trumps music, as he smashes a guitar over someone’s head and then reads the newspaper the following day looking for a mention of his band’s antics.33 In later volumes, Rubin and Russell Simmons partner to promote Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, and other groups, with Simmons taking lead when it comes to fashion. Their motives are always clearly poised between artistic vision and economic gain. Simmons raps on a b-side about “keep[ing] all the money,” and Rubin stages a food fight with the Beastie Boys when he notices a lot of reporters around.34 Management and publicity is part of the “viral propagation” of hip hop as it transitions to national distribution.

A recurring moment in the comic involves the making of rappers into celebrity musicians, often through the assumption of new names and looks. The utopian stylings in Hip Hop Family Tree make rap a magical transformation, akin to a superhero transitioning from alter ego to costumed titan. Yet within the comic’s larger structure, those transformations are juxtaposed with economic realities. For example, Debbie Harry asks the Funky 4+1 to go on tour with Blondie. Sugarhill Records founder Sylvia Robinson threatens to replace any member of the group who leaves on tour, reminding them that “any of [them] can be fired from the group and replaced” according to the terms of their contract.35 As Piskor then notes, “the ‘Business’ of Hip Hop has taken all the fun out of the culture,” as Li’l Rodney C! and KK Rockwell decide to leave the group, breaking it up in 1983 before ever recording a studio album.36

What marks Hip Hop Family Tree as a work of documentary art, more than even its content, is its form. As I noted above, Piskor’s art style synthesizes graffiti style and analog cartooning technology. And as in the bonus comic book included in the first boxed set of the series Piskor uses period styles from comics history to represent historical distance.37 In the bonus comic, Piskor documents the connections between hip hop and superhero comics artist Rob Liefeld. Liefeld became a comics star in the 1990s after his influential runs on Marvel’s The New Mutants and X-Force. He later left Marvel to cofound Image Comics, a creator-owned comics company in which artists and writers, rather than comics corporations, own their intellectual property. As Piskor details, Liefeld was featured in a Levi’s commercial directed by Spike Lee in 1991, and he draws this moment in the style of Liefeld, featuring impossibly rippled muscles, narrow ankles, and form-fitting clothes. Then, the comic turns to Liefeld’s brief meeting and planned collaboration with rapper Eazy-E, following Eazy’s appearance at a comic shop signing. The comic concludes with Liefeld abusing artist Dan Fraga, paralleling the kind of exploitation Piskor also documents in the music industry. The economic cannot be divorced from the artistic and the personal—indeed, they coextend when personal relationships are defined through finance.

In this bonus comic, it becomes clear how Hip Hop Family Tree is a documentary that occupies an expanded field, meshing music history with comics history, using the visual language and historical specificity of comics illustration to produce a period style that captures artistic vitality, collective belonging, and economic exploitation. In his illustrations of rap battles, for example, Piskor’s technique adapts the rhythm of rap to the form of the comics page, breaking the page up into multiple panels, often containing multiple word balloons with bold lettering announcing emphasized syllables. In book 1’s documentation of Busy Bee Starski and Kool Moe Dee’s battle, Kool Moe Dee unquestionably wins. In hip hop history, this triumph has come to symbolize a departure from early “party rap” and a shift to harder-edged MCing. Piskor uses word balloons as a way to mark the interactivity of Starski’s well-known routines (fig. 6), followed by Kool Moe Dee’s commanding rap, large text blocks in word balloons with only an enraptured audience listening, not participating (fig. 7).38 By using the comics form in this way, Piskor adapts an audio recording to a spatial design, making visual a historical event otherwise accessible today only through audio.

What Hip Hop Family Tree accomplishes, then, is the mediation of hip-hop history through comics, featuring stories of creative production within compromised circumstances. The comic’s archival practice represents history as a site for enthusiastic recovery and artistry. Acknowledging how exploitation determines lives, Hip Hop Family Tree’s vision of art, craft, and style nonetheless makes clear the vital, self-taught, lo-fi history of our contemporary moment, in a way that also makes those lo-fi technologies accessible and understandable rather than obscure and hidden. Exploitation, trauma, and tragedy are givens, the comic suggests. What is to be valued are moments when those givens are heroically suspended, when work sustains and nourishes life.

Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City’s Tensions

Kendrick Lamar’s 2012 album Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City bears the telling subtitle A Short Film. With the title written in black ink on what looks like a Polaroid snapshot, the album’s cover art presents it as a visual artifact rather than a musical work (fig. 8). The album’s gatefold, or the CD’s booklet, contains more snapshots, displayed as if in a photo album. A short film titled m.A.A.d., directed by Kahlil Joseph, uses a mix of the album as soundtrack and was installed as a two-screen video work at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2015.39 This filmic and photographic framework is in stark contrast to Lamar’s 2013 tour partner Kanye West, whose 2013 album Yeezus calls attention to itself as audio media in its cover image of a blank CD and its abrasive use of synthesizers and voice, simplifying beats and rhymes to a one-man show. Lamar’s “short film” of a record features many voices and is structured around a documentary aesthetic that casts the record as both a recovery memoir (in the tradition of both Malcolm X’s autobiography and often-violent addiction memoirs like James Frey’s fabricated A Million Little Pieces) and an inner-city gangsta film in the tradition of Boyz in the Hood or Menace II Society. This multifaceted formal structure—the record as family photo album, recovery memoir, and gangsta film—is nothing new in rap music. Indeed, the wedding of rap persona to the lived experience of the rapper was something of a cliché by the time Lamar’s record appeared, with other contemporaries such as Danny Brown rhyming that he’s “sick of all these niggas with their ten year old stories,”40 or Pusha T embracing the cliché when he raps, “They ask why I’m still talking dope, why not?”41 Lamar’s record, though, reaches beyond either dismissal or bravado in its cyclical narrative framework.

Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City revolves around the minivan featured in the snapshot on the album’s cover. On the album’s first track, “Sherane a.k.a. Master Splinter’s Daughter,” a tape starts playing, and Kendrick and some others pledge their lives to God and ask for forgiveness. Then the beat starts, and Kendrick tells us how he met a woman, Sherane, at a house party. They text back and forth until the present tense of the album, when Kendrick takes action: “Grab my momma’s keys, hopped in the car, then oh boy / So now I’m down Rosecrans in a Caravan.” Kendrick has borrowed his mother’s Dodge Caravan, pictured on the album cover. When he arrives at Sherane’s house, he is confronted by four men who ask him where he’s from. The album then takes a flashback detour, detailing Kendrick’s day prior to this confrontation, as he listens to music, freestyle raps in the backseat of another car, and robs a house with some friends. Then we return to the present tense of the album, as Kendrick is pulled out of the van in front of Sherane’s house and beaten up. After this, Kendrick regroups with his friends, drinks, and returns to Sherane’s house where his friends fire shots at those standing on the street. Kendrick and his friends later speak with a woman about God, saying the prayer that also begins the album. The album concludes with the anthem “Compton,” featuring Dr. Dre, where Lamar celebrates the history of gangsta rap. Interestingly, though, the last moment on the album is Kendrick saying, “Mom, I’m fixin’ to use the van real quick! Be back in fifteen minutes!,” thus making the end a new beginning to this story about cycles of violence and redemption.

It becomes clear upon listening to the album and viewing m.A.A.d. that the snapshot of the minivan itself denotes its value to its owners in Los Angeles’s car culture. The film features a number of aerial shots both of Compton and of the Los Angeles interstate system, alternating with point-of-view shots from within the backseats of moving cars, including a minivan like the one pictured on the album’s cover. The car is both a site of mobility within Los Angeles and a secure vantage point from which to look at others and bond with friends. Yet also, in a telling detail shown in the video, the minivan is a family car, with family stick-figure decals on the rear windshield. On the voicemail that plays at the end of album’s first track, Lamar’s mother asks for the van: “Kendrick! Where you at? Head home! I’m sitting here waiting on my van. You told me you was gonna be back in fifteen minutes!” Later on the album, in another voicemail following the track “Real,” Kendrick’s mother again asks about the van and then reports that Top Dawg Records (one of the labels that released Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City) has called for her son. She concludes:

If I don’t hear from you by tomorrow, I hope you come back and learn from your mistakes. Come back a man, tell your story to these black and brown kids in Compton. Let them know you was just like them, but you still rose from that dark place of violence, becoming a positive person. But when you do make it, give back with your words of encouragement, and that’s the best way to give back. To your city. And I love you Kendrick, if I don’t hear you knocking on the door you know where I usually leave the key. Alright? Talk to you later, bye.

The temporal layering here is also a commentary on the record itself, as we experience the journey that establishes the record, that led to the rap persona of Kendrick Lamar. That rap persona is formed out of the very experiences that he is charged by his mother to escape from and return to. Lamar’s rap persona is a figure of recurrence and repetition, endlessly replaying the experiences of a young man on the Compton streets, bound to the idealism of his family and the violence of his immediate surroundings.

This representation of life as cycle is also a representation of the structures of exploitation that underwrite life in the contemporary United States and that are most acutely felt and experienced in economically marginalized places like Compton. Indeed, cars like the minivan serve on the album as emblems of circulation, and circulation is both full of promise and constantly halted on the album. If the automobile offers mobility, a seemingly secure vantage point, a sign of family belonging, and also a space for homosocial commiseration, then the streets themselves promise a different kind of interaction. The contrast between the car and the street, as is made evident in the album’s cover snapshot, is a difference between a commodity and a public space, a commodity valuable because it rides on top of, and through, the faulty infrastructure below, the cracked and poorly maintained street.

Yet on Lamar’s album, that cracked infrastructure is the very place where value is created through exploitation and dispossession. As the song “Money Trees” with Jay Rock makes clear, Compton is lined with “money trees,” yet getting “shaded by a money tree” in Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City comes from plundering one’s own community, sticking up one’s neighbors—“Go at a reverend for the revenue.” The chorus of the track points to the limited possibilities in Kendrick’s Compton—“It go Halle Berry, or Hallelujah / Pick your poison, tell me what you doing.” The stark dichotomy that runs throughout the album is represented here through a familiar dyad, the female body as the material world versus the “Hallelujah” of the spiritual world, the fantasies of gangsta life versus the mother’s call to “give back with your words of encouragement.” The second verse of “Money Trees” makes the Halle Berry/Hallelujah dyad more explicitly a matter of capital:

Dream of living life like rappers do

Bump that new E-40 after school

You know “Big ballin’ with My Homies”

Earl Stevens had us thinking rational

Back to reality, we poor

The financial aspirations of the baller—figured in the lyrics by Earl Stevens, also known as the rapper E-40—are juxtaposed with the reality of structural poverty. The transition from the “rational” world of finance, sponsorship deals, and brand management occupied by Earl Stevens to the “poor” reality of Compton is abrupt, even caustic, in its juxtaposition of luxury and poverty. In “Money Trees,” stick-ups and robbery emblematize the attempt to achieve wealth and also the quest for spiritual salvation: “Everybody gonna respect the shooter / But the one in front of the gun lives forever.” Indeed, as Jill Leovy’s book Ghettoside documents, homicide thrives in segregated neighborhoods with restricted mobility: “Indices of residential segregation are strong homicide predictors. Homicide thrives on intimacy, communal interactions, barter, and a shared sense of private rules. The intimacy part was also why homicide was so stubbornly intraracial. You had to be involved with people to want to kill them. You had to share space in a small, isolated world.”42 Locked in a binary, material gain and lasting value are produced at the same moment, the stick-up that can end in homicide. In “Money Trees,” you are either the robber or the victim.

In the song, though, the neighborhood itself contains the promise of a solution: the “money trees” that line the streets, the high costs of living and high profits reaped from neighborhoods like Compton that are expropriated by landlords, retailers, and the privatized prison system. Indeed, as stated in a 2007 report, when compared to other ethnic demographics in Los Angeles, Black residents spend the highest percentage of their income on rent, 31 percent, and have the lowest homeownership rate, 38.1 percent.43 The same report also makes clear how disproportionate prison time is for Black residents of Los Angeles—the 2003 felony arrest rate in Los Angeles was 3.7 percent for Blacks versus 1.4 percent for Latinos, 0.8 percent for Whites, and 0.5 percent for Asians.44 During this same period, California was contracting with a private prison corporation, the Corrections Corporation of America, resulting in the company’s revenues in California doubling between 2008 and 2012, the years leading up to the release of Lamar’s album.45 In Joseph’s m.A.A.d., Black male figures appear hanging from streetlights and storefronts, making literal the ways that the “money trees” that line Compton streets in Lamar’s song are made up of exploited subjects, suffering from dispossession for the financial gain of the corporations and individuals who benefit from privatization. The “money tree” stands as a symbol of economic structures of exploitation that make a place like Compton function within Los Angeles as a site of exploitation through disproportionately high rents, high grocery costs, and participation in privatized organs like the state prison system and charter schools.

In “Money Trees,” then, Lamar diagnoses the problem—the way that wealth is extracted from Compton and how that wealth seems attainable because it once belonged to the dispossessed. As Leovy notes, a change in legislation in Los Angeles has produced a decline in the homicide rate by renewing public infrastructure and support, the very systems eroded through privatization: “An eight-hundred-dollar-a-month check for an unemployed black ex-felon makes a big difference in his life. The risks and benefits of various hustles surely appear different to him. He can move, ditch his homeys, commit fewer crimes, walk away from more fights.”46 Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City’s documentary aesthetic positions this struggle as experientially cyclical yet also structural when viewed from a different vantage point. The album’s closing anthem, “Compton,” takes as its subject an overdetermined site for rap music that has become a synecdoche for a mythic gangsta lifestyle:

Now we can all celebrate

We can all harvest the rap artists of NWA

America target our rap market, as controversy and hate

Harsh realities we in made our music translate

To the coke dealers, the hood rich

And the broke niggas that play

With them gorillas that know killers

That know where you stay

Roll that kush, crack that case, ten bottles of rosé

This was brought to you by Dre

Now every motherfucker in here say:

“Look who’s responsible

For taking Compton international

I make ’em holla”

International Compton here signifies a way of thinking, a framework for understanding a global condition of limited possibilities, of stark dyads that offer no synthesis. The only way out of Compton, Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City argues, is to look at Compton from an elevated vantage point, signaled by the sweeping synthesizers of Jess Blaze’s beat and the triumphalism of Lamar and Dr. Dre’s lyrics. As Justin A. Williams has noted, the use of synthesizers on Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City creates an intertextual connection, invoking “early 1990s Compton under gang peace treaty, full of parties and barbecues, depicted in music videos from [Dr. Dre’s] The Chronic,” and also serving as “a leitmotif for Compton that becomes attached to the horrors of the city and the anxieties of its inhabitants.”47 Indeed, as the view of the L.A. freeway suggests in m.A.A.d., this elevated perspective signifies economic success, even as it remains focused on the same community and land that Lamar depicts as violent and anxious. This shift in perspective can be read as analogous to the abstracted view of finance capital, as homes, credit cards, education, and cars become not individual debts but instead bundled financial risks to be monetized and leveraged. Lamar’s framing of these two levels signals a savvy negotiation of neoliberal culture. On one hand, Lamar and all of us live within a neoliberal economy, yet on the other hand, an awareness of the exploitation that underwrites that economy can lead one to desire an alternative system. As Tricia Rose remarks in her account of hip hop’s cultural politics, even though “we live in this market economy, let’s try not to let market value and personal profit rule over love, collective well-being, and sacrifice for the larger good.”48 Lamar’s embrace of gangsta rap history leverages a neoliberal form toward a sense of collectivity and belonging, an awareness of exploitative conditions, and a vision of an alternative structure in which expropriated wealth remains with those who have been historically exploited.

As Ivan Ascher has argued in his account of the contemporary United States as a “portfolio society” increasingly structured around financial instruments that produce profits out of the debt of individuals: “On an ideological level, yes, ours may be a world where we are all investors, each of us taking and hedging risks as we see fit. But as the metaphor of the racetrack serves to remind us, the ideological cover provided by neoliberalism cannot entirely conceal the fact that investors depend on other investors in relations that are at once reciprocal and thoroughly asymmetrical.”49 This asymmetrical relation consists of two different frames or vantage points—one, the individual subject who takes out a loan, and who may or may not manage to make minimum payments on their debt; and two, the financial officers and investors who leverage bundled debts on the derivatives market. As Ascher writes: “It would seem to be a division between those who are free to run a race and those who are free to bet on its outcome. Or, to put it more generally yet, it would seem to be a division between those whose lives keep placing them at risk and having thus to seek protection (say, in the form of a loan or an insurance policy) and those whose position of relative security, by contrast, gives them the opportunity to take risks—say, by lending to others or betting on the probability of default.”50 Subject to the operations of the derivatives market, an individual’s loan has a financial life that extracts profit from everyday life, in a way that remains largely invisible to the debtor except insofar as monthly payments or the failure to make monthly payments both make profit for the diversified portfolios of investors.

The story of hip-hop music coincides with the increasing exploitation and infrastructural dispossession that we now routinely associate with our era of finance capitalism. The postures, rhetoric, modes of empowerment, and economic success of hip-hop style have in turn produced an attractive vision of the hustler as entrepreneur that has proven flexible and exportable across the globe. What Lamar’s album does is represent the gaps and fissures, the economic structures that produce both a vision of the individual as hustling entrepreneur and a palpable anxiety that alternates between desperation and hopelessness in the face of rampant poverty amid massive accumulation by the wealthy. His invocation of tradition and his autobiographical reflections present cycles of violence and poverty as designs, mediated through tropes in gangsta rap and consumer culture. In an article about rap moguls’ relationships to Occupy Wall Street, Eithne Quinn warns against “neoliberal determinism—affording too much agency to neoliberalism—in explanations of how individuals operate within rampant capitalist dynamics.”51 Lamar’s album and its artistry only make sense if one heeds Quinn’s warning. It is at once a piece of neoliberal culture, fashioned around hustler tropes and a narrative of individual development, and at the same time a call to recognize a cycle of violence and poverty as a structural condition, reproduced through cultural tropes of wealth and hustle.

If Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City presents a vision of the individual rapper, poised between street authenticity and the entertainment industry, everyday Compton and International Compton, structures of exploitation and a vision of collectivity, then Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree celebrates the street culture out of which hip hop grew, finding nostalgic comforts in old media and collectivity. What these two very different kinds of texts—a concept album that calls itself a film and a comics series that calls itself a family tree—have in common is their documentary aesthetic. This documentary aesthetic engages an expanded field, across media forms, to represent modes of dispossession and exploitation amplified by finance capitalism from the 1960s to our present moment. Dont Look Back’s Dylan poised between folk authenticity and theater-packing celebrity and Wild Style’s collective yet individually styled artists capture both the promise and capitulation of politics and performance during neoliberal culture’s emergence. In Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City and Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree, structures of exploitation and individual exertion are distant, even invisible to each other. This is less a problem of cognitive mapping than an indication of a truth of our moment—that financial structures have become abstracted from the social relations they exploit, perhaps all the better for them to topple and for those relations to be reformed from outside of finance’s channels. In both Lamar’s and Piskor’s documentary works, history is a site of conflict, a place to recover crafts that can both diagnose and point beyond neoliberal culture.