Fresh off the 57th Presidential Inauguration, the fashion community is ramping up conversations over who wore what. For those fashion-forward Dems who couldn’t make it to a ball, there was still an important Inauguration Day decision to be made: which souvenir to buy commemorating the moment in history? Inaugural gear was in no shortage – hustlers flocked to the crowds with pins, t-shirts, “official programs,” bookmarks, hats, and any other item that could be branded with Barack Obama. Unfortunately, the craftsmanship of this year’s inaugural street wear left much to be desired. Have no fear, though, it’s not too late to cop a shirt or bag via Runway to Win, the official Barack Obama collection designed by a plethora of the industry’s finest.
In 2008, the Obama campaign partnered up with the fashion industry to produce a series of runway collections. Runway for Change’s debut collection included limited edition designs from Zac Posen, Marc Jacobs, Pharrell, Beyoncé, and Tory Burch, amongst others. Riding the success of the initial collection, the industry decided to once again team up with Barack Obama for the 2012 election cycle, this time calling the effort Runway to Win. The project was spearheaded by fashion heavyweight Anna Wintour (Editor-in-Chief of Vogue) and included three campaign collections in addition to the inaugural collection currently available online.
Runway to Win kicked off in February 2012 at the Theory flagship store in NYC’s Meatpacking District. Hosted by Anna Wintour, Scarlett Johansson, and Jim Messina, the fashion week event brought together industry elites such as Diane von Furstenberg, Vera Wang, Narciso Rodriguez, Georgina Chapman, Russell Simmons, Diddy, and many others in support of the President. The event also created buzz among hip voters in the youth community, who have proven themselves critical to Obama’s victories. Credited with securing the very best in American designers for the project, Anna Wintour went above and beyond to ensure the fashion industry’s support was felt. Wintour didn’t just host a fundraiser in her home, she did the same at Paris fashion week in conjunction with legendary designer Tom Ford.
The official PIC press release from January 10th, 2013 reads, “Today, the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) announced the launch of the 2013 Runway to Win Inaugural Edition. Top American designers have again volunteered their talents to create unique pieces to celebrate the Inauguration of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.” With prices ranging from $45 to $150, this is a great opportunity for people to support President Obama while adding big name designers to their wardrobe for a reasonable price. To date, the project has included 33 American designers and raised over $40 million for the Obama Victory Fund.
While the Obama campaign is credited with revolutionizing the way modern campaigns are run; the fashion industry is no stranger to politics. Over the years the industry has taken on many causes ranging from the anti-war war movement to feminism to marriage equality. However, the Obama gear niche that was birthed with his candidacy has allowed the fashion industry to directly impact American politics in an unprecedented sprit of design teamwork.
In celebration of XXL’s increasingly irrelevant and often hilarious ‘Freshmen’ list, here’s a list of five freshmen that dipped out shortly after the first day of classes:
#5 – Gorilla Zoe
Zoe’s career started off on a desperate note when his rasp replaced Young Jeezy’s in Diddy’s failed Boyz n da Hood boy band venture. Things seemed to be looking up for a minute when Zoe scored features on ‘Coffee Shop,’ and ‘Bottle Poppin’,’ but then he signed up for a spot with the Urban Wrestling Foundation and held a gun in his glamour pic. ‘Hood Figga’ still jams, though. Zoe was last seen rocking a parking lot show and staying at the Hard Rock Hotel.
#4 – Blu
Ok, we all know Blu is a great MC. But he decided firmly against eating in 2012, embarrassing himself on Twitter by lashing out at L.A.’s Schoolboy Q, mistakenly thinking he was dissed on Q’s ‘My Homie.’ His repeated attempts to perform intense lyrical acrobatics while blackout drunk are flat-out depressing. Blu is no longer my favorite color.
#3 – Pill
Yesterday I saw Pill gooning a cameo in a Cyhi da Prynce video. He was body slammed off MMG in favor of Mr. Ice Box and then tweeted about it. ‘Trap Goin’ Ham,’ Newports, and overwhelming depression on repeat.
#2 – Fred Da Godson
The human cocoa butter ball tried his best to ride the end of Jada’s ‘washed-up old New York rapper’ vibe but forgot he wasn’t poppin’ in the ’90s. His chain got Young Berg’d shortly after his XXL appearance, which featured Da Godson as the substitute rapper by the blackboard, unable to command the attention of his classmates. Note his subpar Paid In Full remake.
#1 – Charles Hamilton
Charles Hamilton’s career was pretty much over the second he got punched in the face by a girl he was battling while wearing a porkpie hat and pink headphones. Then, he shrugged it off as a marketing ploy. Hamilton gave up rapping, but was recently side-hired by Def Jam as Lil’ Reese’s round-the-clock private anger management consultant/punching bag.
Chief Keef’s Arrest and the Digital Possession of His Image
Over the past year, Chicago rapper Chief Keef (government name Keith Cozart) has been the poster child for an often overwrought debate over the cultural repossession and appropriation of gangster rap. Yesterday, only two short weeks after the lukewarm release of his debut Interscope album, “Finally Rich,” the dreaded teenage rap sensation was sentenced to two months in an Illinois youth detention center for firing rifles at a shooting range during an awkward June episode of Pitchfork’s Selector series (in which host Eavvon O’Neal accosts rappers with a series of edgy EDM trap beats which they often prove incapable of – or uninterested in – freestyling over). The clip itself was riotously uncomfortable; a bespectacled O’Neal shepherds Keef into a gun range, where the mutually autistic duo bust shots and struggle through a few beats Keef didn’t like, finally finding something decent enough to prompt the wunderkind to rattle off an uninspired freestyle. Several months later, Keef became the subject of investigation in the murder of Lil’ JoJo, a rapper from a rival Chicago gang. Keef responded to JoJo’s death by tweeting: “Its Sad Cuz Dat Nigga Jojo Wanted To Be Jus Like Us #LMAO.” A few months later, Keef’s appearance in the Pitchfork video copped him two months in a juvenile detention center for violating his parole, which had prohibited him from touching or possessing handguns.
Immediately after Keef’s tweets about JoJo’s killing, Pitchfork retracted the gun range video, basically outing that things had gotten a little too real:
“Pitchfork’s roots are in Chicago and many of our employees and several contributors live in the city. The horror of the gun violence that has plagued our hometown is something we all take very seriously. Many people have pointed out that this episode could be seen as trivializing gun violence, and we feel they have a good point.”
Pitchfork basically hung around the hood until shit popped off, at which point she hopped into mom’s Benz station wagon a few blocks out of sight of her friends. Pitchfork was distinctly aware of its journalistic take on Keef, given that (a) it had widely publicized his status as a juvenile on probation (b) it was happy to promote Keef’s music (which, in nearly every song, references murder) and even egg on his brazenly violent character, so long as it garnered support from the people who watch Keef and Grimes videos back to back. All of a sudden, when the subject of every single Chief Keef song came to fruition, it was high time to invoke the sacred moral high ground that comes with the ironic levity with which Pitchfork and similar sites (Fader, etc.) approach Keef and other violent rappers. Despite a lack of proof that Keef played any role in the killing, the fact that he mocked – rather than mourned – the death of an enemy was suddenly untenable, and spurred a Lawyer Milloy-esque exercise in backpeddling.
While one wouldn’t be wrong to call the flippancy of Keef’s reaction to Jojo’s death callous (or even alarming), I would argue that we temporarily sideline moralization, and instead consider whether Jojo’s murder, and Keef’s reaction to it, should really have been all that surprising. Just hours before his death, JoJo filmed himself taunting Keef’s affiliate Lil’ Reese while he idled in an SUV on his block. In the months leading up to his murder, the baby-faced 18 year-old (of rival Brick Squad gang affiliation) taunted Keef’s 300 crew with a series of disses, copying everything from his flow to his beats to his music video treatments (a bunch of shirtless young men toting enormous automatic weapons). While we can all feel some level of sadness – or, at the very least, sympathy – towards JoJo’s loss, it bears saying that he was, in some sense, “asking for it.” My argument here isn’t, of course, that JoJo deserved to be killed, but rather that given Keef’s music and the undeniable reality of Chicago’s gun violence epidemic, it was fair for JoJo to expect some type of real-life retaliation for his actions.
The important aspect of this turn of events, though, is that Keef’s reaction to JoJo’s murder forced various media outlets into a spasm of moral self-evaluation. The question is: why now? This isn’t the first time that a rapper has been linked to a murder or been filmed holding guns. The fact of the matter is that in the last year, Keef has made real a lifestyle which had heretofore existed in a fantastic netherworld of guns and violence, along with a large share of other American entertainment. The media, in the past, has had nearly full discretion in regulating how real the “gangster image” became. As Pitchfork tried to toe the line between playing along with Keef’s image and normalizing it, they got burned. In real life, Keef is part of a generation of kids that grew up hypersharing their day-to-day lives on the internet; whether through Worldstarhiphop, Twitter, or Facebook, this generation often lets their social interaction spill into the public domain. This spillover can get messy when media outlets accustomed to having full control over an artist’s image find themselves a little too in-tune with the negative and very tangible aspects of the lifestyle.
Instances of this “spillover” are plentiful in the case of Keef’s GBE crew. This fall, a video leaked onto the internet of Keef’s running partner Lil’ Reese brutalizing a young woman with swift hands and a particularly disturbing stomp/powerhop combo. Keef has instagrammed himself receiving fellatio from a young woman, and has had his Instagram account suspended several times for other lewd or inappropriate uploads. Numerous members of his crew brandish illegal weapons in music videos and Instagram shots. Quite to the contrary, though, Keef’s self-portrait can be as tender as it is jarring; perhaps the most frequent cameo-snatcher on his Instagram is his daughter Kay Kay (whose name graces my personal favorite song on “Finally Rich”). While Keef’s verbal outlashes at Kay Kay’s mother are just as frequent, Keef’s commitment to parenthood is undeniable. It also bears noting that Keef’s overbearing control over his own image isn’t limited to Twitter or Instagram. When label head Jimmy Iovine and 50 Cent colluded to schedule a high-budget video shoot in Las Vegas for Keef’s possible single ‘Hate Being Sober,’ Keef was a no-show. He wanted D. Gainz, the video director who shot most of his material since ‘Don’t Like,’ to shoot the video instead. So while Keef’s instinct to represent his own perspective can be attributed in part to his generational comfort with sharing opinion via social networks, it’s also attributable to his unwillingness to be inappropriately caricatured by “the man.”
The Pitchfork incident has pushed the age-old, often abstracted argument about the moral rectitude of supporting violent rap into slightly more uncomfortable territory. Pitchfork knew that Chief Keef wrote violent lyrics and made violent videos, but when they brought him to a gun range, they thought they could temporarily place Keef’s reality in a low-stakes, neutral environment. But with Keef determined to say his piece, the comforting claim that “it’s just music,” loses its punch. The debate can no longer simply concern how lyrics can abstractly impact or influence violence; now, rappers are toting guns and tweeting the aftermath of gang-related murders. Gang confrontations are documented step-by-step on YouTube. The argument that “it’s just art” has been fundamentally challenged by the fact that it seems – quite honestly – to be real life as well. As these outlets continue to reinforce Keef’s image, he continues to put them in dangerously hot water, when they have to answer the question of whether they’re reinforcing certain elements of his persona through their documentation.
I tend to think that this is a good thing, and maybe it’s just because I don’t believe that journalists can remain morally aloof from aspects of the music they promote. The ambition here is not to take a side in the argument on Keef, his actions, or even his music. It’s to explore what it is about Keef that has spurred the world of hip-hop journalism towards this uneasy self-evaluation.