THE SOUND OF BLACKNESS IN APESHIT

ABSTRACT

This article aims to address intersectional issues in the field of arts and social sciences around the categories of race and gender articulated by the signifier of “negridade”. Taking as a case of analysis the video of the song Apeshit, released in 2018, this article focuses on the regimes of sayability and visibility that manifest themselves in musical aesthetics. In that discussion, black performance operates a break with regimes of (in)visibility in the sequentiality established by a certain narrative of art history. Sonority, visuality, and corporality trace a sensitive entanglement in a performance, in which one problematically glimpses the reintegration of subalternized bodies to the spaces that were denied to them as spaces of their excellence. The performative dimension of the clip Apeshit allows us to work with strategies of imagination/creation of worlds by minority subjectivities that play with the ambivalences and codes of hegemonic culture in order to trace routes and performative breaks from an appropriation and decoding of the normative and parodic dimension of these codes.

KEYWORDS:
Performance; sound; blackness; art; time