Conference Grant Reports: Vincente Perez at PAMLA 2024
We are pleased to support our students sharing their work at the premiere conferences in their field. Vincente Perez presented "life is like a party shawty: Teezo Touchdown on Respectability, Quality, and Representation in Hip-Hop" at the Pacific Asian and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) conference in Palm Springs, California. From Vincente:
Thank you for the BCNM fall 2024 conference grant to assist with attending and presenting at PAMLA 2024, in Palm Springs, CA. I attended multiple panels on Poetry, Literature, theater/drama, and strategies for teaching the humanities in the 21st century. I grew as a scholar, poet, educator, and writer.
In my presentation titled "life is like a party shawty: Teezo Touchdown on Respectability, Quality, and Representation in Hip-Hop" I examined a few videos from this campaign as well as interviews on his work to argue that Teezo’s music is a chance to engage with Black artists who attempt to wrestle Black meaning away from whiteness and white meaning-making structures via silly and absurdist work that directly addresses its intended audience: Black people. Teezo Touchdown is a rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer born and raised in Beaumont, TX. For his 2021 “Rid the Mid” campaign, Teezo relied on an eccentric persona and elements of afro surrealism. To promote his music and address the rampant issue of “mid” music, Teezo dips into politics and becomes Mayoral Candidate Touchdown. I build upon Raquel Gate’s theorization of the concept of “negativity” and assert that Teezo Touchdown employs “Strategic Negativity” by donning the persona of a mayoral candidate and running a campaign to rid the streets of mediocre music. Teezo revels in a “Ratchet” aesthetic and employs various negative images to support his inversion of high/low quality measures that could not comprehend how “mid” represents a crisis in Hip-Hop. In my presentation I paired a close reading of the lyrics of “Mid” with performance and video analysis of “Mid” and “Rid the Mid” campaign to argue that Teezo Touchdown is engaged in structural analysis of the state of Hip-Hop and its fan base. Taking Teezo Touchdown’s use of “strategic negativity” seriously requires understanding how he intentionally disturbs the notion of “the Real” by promoting his absurdist work through serious channels. In other words, silliness is the necessary register to effectively explore who Teezo is addressing, why he uses the political campaign as a mode of address, and how Teezo uses silliness to create Black texts that can challenge white cultural hegemony . If “life is like a party shawty”, then perhaps, whiteness, respectability, and other forms of antiblack affective structures are temporary. More importantly, maybe we can “rid the mid” and let Black meaning be, otherwise. Although Hip-Hop and its fanbase mutually constitute one another, Hip-Hop artists provide more than mere music and the fans receive far more than just sound. I argue that taking Teezo’s silliness seriously involves addressing Afro surrealism in Hip-Hop as a central preoccupation rather than a marginal or alternative concern.