Meet your new favourite culture blogger!
At the self-described “queer word art group” blog Bully Bloggers, Tavia Nyong’o, an associate professor of Performance Studies at NYU, has written an astoshingly good takedown of this moment right here in our world, at the nexus of the outrage over John Tyner’s bizarre encounter with the US Transportation Security Administration and the bluster and booty-shaking of Kanye West’s new album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, making the case that we are now living in the Age of Hysteria (sadly, no relation to the Def Leppard album).
Nyong’o is wickedly smart, cuttingly insightful and frequently very funny. Witness:
But opportunism and even cynicism are politically ambidextrous. Tyner’s panicked recourse to every technological appendage he could lay hold of to disseminate the news of the feds touching his junk is the Everyman counterpart of Kanye’s privileged victim. Both are virtuosos of the new communicative media that promise greater sociability even as they reduce us to gadgets. But where Tyner seeks to restore a certain modicum of privilege for the male genitals, quietly ensconcing them back in their protective coverlet, Kanye has cock, balls, and indeed, asshole dangling in the wind, admitting he’s a monster, and daring us to do something about or with it.
Watch for prairie dog‘s review of the new Kanye album in this week’s print edition, hitting the streets on Thursday!
