Portraying Insurgency: Justice's Stress + Jay Z and Kanye's No Church in the Wild

Remark: Sorry this is a really long one.

In this post, I argue that Stress by Justice focuses on the real difficulty for a general audience (centered at the middle class or a little bit below) to relate to anthropologically distant insurgents. In contrasts, Kanye and Jay Z's No Church in the Wild makes a much bigger effort to bridge that distance, which makes it less ethically and politically challenging.

Justice, the French electronic music legends have a very powerful song called Stress with a controversial music video by Romain Gavras. The music video portrays the progress a group of French that seem overwhelmingly black and Arab youth from the poor Paris suburbs through the city. The camera follows them while they vandalize, harass, and break everything that stands on their aimless path. Watching it is like a punch in the stomach, and you come out not really knowing what to think.

In their infamous Watch the Throne, Jay Z and Kanye have, in addition to the crazy Mercy*** and this one, a beautiful song called No Church in the Wild****. The religious undertones of this song and the way it describes the struggle of following religious values amidst the absurdity and cruelty of the real world are fascinating, but I will not go into them in this post. This song portrays an epic battle between what seem to be protesters and a faceless, nationless police armed with shields, batons and teargas guns. Somehow by the end of the music video, the fight is accompanied by green laser lights and an elephant (??).

No Church in the Wild clearly makes empathy with the protesters very easy. Their rage is relatable, especially given the slowmotion close-ups on their enraged or pained faces. In front of them, there's nothing to relate to because you can't even see people behind these masks. The protesters are riddled with symbols, a particularly powerful one is the protester that sets himself on fire, a clear reference to Mohammed Bouazizi's powerful gesture from December 2010.

However, in Stress, the unabashed violence is baffling and difficult to withstand. There is no explanation for it, and its victims seem to not deserve it at all. At the end of the music video, the cameraman is beaten up and yelled at "Does filming this get you off, you S.O.B?" The quote is from this good Time article about the music video. Although Justice's record label claims that the videoclip is intended as a parody of media portrayal of poor Parisian suburb youth, I think it's much more about the way this youth's violence is a challenge to the ethics and politics of a middle class audience as well as to leftist artists and intellectuals.* The violence is not a direct translation of an ideal of greater justice, it's a much more visceral reaction to oppression and the absence of hope.

I'll paste my thesis from above here, just because it sums up the point well and this is already long. Stress by Justice focuses on the real difficulty for a general audience (centered at the middle class or a little bit below) to relate to anthropologically distant insurgents. In contrasts, Kanye and Jay Z's No Church in the Wild makes a much bigger effort to bridge that distance, which makes it less ethically and politically challenging. What I mean by less ethically and politically challenging is that Kanye and Jay Z's music video embellishes the reality of insurgency in a way that makes it more relatable to the audience, but also reduces the extent to which the issues of institutionalized racism and economic inequality are more urgent and difficult than it seems.

I think both works are needed politically, but work of the kind Gavras** does is more original; it takes much more courage and begets much less recognition.

*: This reminds me of something Lucas Iberico Lozada (his face doesn't actually look like this) told me, not in those exact words: if something like a revolution happens it will look much more like the England Riots than anything else.

**: An equally perplexing and interesting work by Romain Gavras is the movie Our Day will Come (original title Notre Jour Viendra).

***: My good friend Tarek Soubra pointed out that Mercy is not in Watch the Throne, sorry about that.

****: Found out much later that Gavras also directed No Church in the Wild. Not really sure what it means for this post.