The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop

hi May 2008, the Detroit News reported on a spectacular local high school prom entrance. A young African American woman hired photographei^s, at the cost of approximately six thousand dollars, to enact the part of paparazzi to make her feel, as she put it, "like a star" amid the flashes of their cameras.' A photograph of the event, which concentrates more on the paparazzi than on the young couple or their RcilLs-Royce, brings into focus why the yoimg prom goers likely .staged such an enUance: it highlights the importance they placed on being seen being seen (Fig. 1). Indeed, the process uf l>eing represented seems to be the real aim of the young couple's presentation, ratlier than displaying or even photographing their prom splendor. Such an entrance very much attempts to participate in the structures of visibility that frame celebrity in American mainstream media, to bask literally in the limelight shone on "stars." But the entrance may also shed light more specifically on visual expressions in contempordiy hip-hop, which provide some of the most prevalent images of celebrity among black youth throughout the African diaspora, from Detroit to Kingston, Jamaica. The notion of Lhe entrance not simply as a space in which to be seen but as a place in which to perform one's appearance theatrically was popularized in part by rap stars, like Diddy (Sean John Combs), who grab the media spotlight by descending from helicopters or ascending from Itixtuy yachts for event entrances.^ Such displays from the image world of hip-hop inform how black urban youth, like our paparazzi entrance organizers, approach and insert themselves into mainstream stiuctures of visibility and how they use these modalities to represent and reflect on black subjectivit)'.