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Mo Meta Blues Analysis

453 Words2 Pages

In “Mo Meta Blues” Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, examines his career and life through a postmodern lense. To start, he revisits his upbringing, how kids used to tease him for acting and dressing “white”. He retrospectively questions what this means claiming “Trying to be white? What the hell does that mean?” (55). He concludes that when people called him white they meant that he was missing out on the traditional black experience, which he believes is inherently inauthentic because “clothes that wannabe gangbangers wear on the street? What's authentic about that?” (56). Broadening the scope of this experience he questions the purpose of clothing in identifying culture. “Aren’t clothes a second skin you wear over your real skin to obscure who you really are” (56). This is a …show more content…

Although the essay seemed to jump around alot and have no central thesis, I was able to take away a few key points from the essay. A major topic in the essay was the black community’s relationship with rap and hip-hop. The essay claims that frustrations are felt when “black diasporic communities are taken out of control of their originators and producers” (5). Hip-hop and rap have been appropriated by the masses, and have lost sight of their origins in the black community. This appropriation draws from the commercialization of hip-hop and rap, and artists turning their music into simply a commercial good. Another point I think was interesting in the essay was how hip-hop constantly switches from seriousness to unseriousness. In rap and hip-hop artists can go from threatening to playful in one verse, the essay claims that this quality of the genre allows is to “push the boundaries of the political, in the process redefining the very structures of resistance” (15). This is why, the essay claims, rap and hip-hop are so influential in shaping opinions regarding resisting dominant

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