The Shade of the Universe

The Mau Maus are characters in Spike Lee's new film, Bamboozled. They're angry hiphoppers, frustrated by the industry's lucrative, high-profile displays of ignorance, and looking for a way — any way — to make their own activist voices heard. But they're at a loss as to how they might make this happen: they can't get a gig and spend most of their time in their "underground" headquarters, smoke dope, pounding out beats and wondering aloud why there's a "C" in the word black. In the film, the Mau Maus grind themselves into that underground, so mad that they can't see any option but the most destructive one.

Outside the film, the Mau Maus are very much alive, a one-off hiphop supergroup comprising "conscious rappers" and now rotating on BET and MTV in the video for their single off the Bamboozled soundtrack, "Blak Iz Blak." They all play characters in the movie, in league with Mos Def's Julius, self-renamed Big Black, a.k.a. "Chairman" of the Mau Maus," who are as follows: Double Black (Gano Grills), 1/16th Black (MC Serch), Mo Black (Canibus), Smooth Black (Charli Baltimore), Hard Black (Mums), and Jo Black (DJ Scratch). For most of the video, the Mau Maus are bunched together in the prow of a speedy-boat, with the Way-Symbolic Statue of Liberty in the background (slaves, as we all know, didn't pass through Ellis Island en route to their new world home). They wear black T-shirts emblazoned with red, raised, microphone-holding fists, and hold blackface masks-on-sticks in front of their own faces. One by one, each crew member takes his or her turn, adopting familiar hiphop video poses, their fierce (masked and unmasked) faces and gestures distorted by the wide-angled lens.

The track begins with a declaration of the Mau Maus' mission and an invocation of their historical predecessors: "Peep the math," Mums says, "Mau Mau be about land and freedom, reparation and apologies for Africa to America odysseys, guerilla-type tactics on them socialistic fallacies, it be about the devastation of the social darwinistic thought, keep-a-brown-man-down sport..." With this summons, the other Mau Maus step up, defining black (as "blak"), as a concept, identity, and material reality, indeed, a way of being, thinking, and breathing. Black is "the shade of the universe." As Mos Def puts it, "I hear the world in all-black surround sound."

Perhaps more than the film from which it issues, the video walks a fine line between satire and pronouncement, accusation and appropriation. Charli Baltimore represents as the "only bitch" in the Mau Mau crew, Canibus swaggers like he does, MC Serch embodies the longstanding problem of race- and community-definition, dating back to the infamous "one-drop rule" and continuing into the present: what makes you black, or more recently, black enough? And DJ Scratch spits the following litany of stereotypes (with the predictable censoring of certain words): "Everything black is wack as shit / Blackheads, blackmail, black cats, and shit, / Funerals, niggers gotta wear black and shit / Black cars, black clothes on they backs and shit / Blackball, if you don't kiss their ass and shit / Blacklisted, see ya nigger, you gone that's it / White bitches, they wanna be black as shit, tan lotion on their wide flat ass and shit."

Such is the tiresome hypocrisy of U.S. commercial culture, ever damning and embracing blackness at the same time, a hypocrisy that has allowed for a certain incursion into the so-called mainstream by minorities, but also one that maintains something of a lid on substantive cultural and political critiques, as too "radical," or more precisely, endangering revenues.