The things accepted by the American audience in a piece of work by an individual are dependent on generally accepted social standards based on one’s ethnicity as opposed to another. It’s possible to build a perception around those social standards to depict the message that one wants to carry out. An artist named Ryan Peters, better known as Spose, wrote a song and made a video called “I‘m Awesome.” In this video, the white rapper from Wells, Maine describes himself in an ironically positive fashion while using the audience’s expectations and assumptions about his race versus another to illustrate his point.
His point is to make fun of himself and his own life as a white person. The only reason the video is funny is because of the assumptions the viewer makes about the young man’s characteristics and background based on his race.
The video immediately opens with the artist’s name “Spose” in familiar lime-green, pink and black graffiti lettering and moves towards the rapper sitting on a thrown parallel to the ground that spins wearing sunglasses and a cap. There’s spray painted writing and drawings in the white background that takes the audience back to the 90’s and expect Spose to tell us how he “became the prince of a town called Bel-Aire.” So as a viewer with any pop culture knowledge from beyond this last decade, we can already assume that this white guy is about to rap in a parody-like manner because he is not Will Smith and not black.
Spose wakes up in a race car twin bed and delivers the line “I‘m awesome.” Ironically we know that a man that looks like he’s in his twenties that sleeps in a race car bed is most likely living with his parents in the same exact room that he grew up in. The race car bed is a sign of immaturity and the fact that he still sleeps in it implies that he is not very masculine and independent.
The video shows him sagging his pants down to his ankles and he compares his “swagger” to a handicapped person’s walk. He plays on the audience’s knowledge of African-American culture to “sag” their pants and how since he is white he doesn’t know how to do it correctly (as if there was a correct way). The same goes for the way he walks; his imitation of swagger is self-described as debilitated.
He is shown playing basketball with poor skill as common reference to the saying: “white men can‘t jump.” Again, referring to his inferiority as a white man to a sport that is mostly made up of black players. He also is shown trying to break dance on a cardboard mat, but has a black dancer double do the dancing for him. We already know that break dancing is a widely African-American practiced dance, and just that he would want to fake that he break dances only goes to further show that he is stereotypically not ethnically known as a dancer.
His surroundings are a reinforcing factor of his race. He lives in Maine, a state known to be highly populated by white people, so the concept of him being a rapper is contrasted in an environment that isn’t known to “foster” that talent. There are scenes of trees, a small church house, a yard filled with junk, mobile homes and ships in a harbor; a showing of what the culture in Maine is like and how the viewer can see that a rapper is not usually surrounded by those things in a video.
A common rap song usually has an artist boast about his abilities and describe very urban surroundings with a video to show it. By doing the opposite, Spose creates a comparison between what the acceptable standards for a black young man and a white young man.
A black young man in America that wants to rap is easily accepted and commonly found in the genre. There is one notoriously successful white rapper and just being the only one makes mentioning his name unnecessary. The question of a young man’s race in his pursuit of a rapping career is more closely associated with the backgrounds that entail a rapper. The most common upbringing of a rapper is living in an urban neighborhood with high crime rates and poor living conditions. The race that is most associated with this kind of upbringings is African-Americans. This has inspired lyrics since the beginning of the genre itself from black rappers. For Spose to be a man raised in a small town in Maine comes off as a joke, not just because it literally is a joke, but because of the fact that it’s opposite of the audience’s expectations. So in the video he is able to make the viewer easily discredit him as a good rapper, because good rappers are praised for writing lyrics in which they show hubris in defiling young women and abusing drugs on a daily basis, as opposed to not having any friends and being physically out of shape.
In American pop culture, there seems to be an ongoing support for fashion that originated in prison and uneducated black males that are very quick at rhyming their vocabulary. Spose brings it to the viewer’s attention that having a poor education led him to have a minimum wage job and an amateur rapping career. But ironically that is not seen as “awesome” by the American public because he is a white Maine resident. A white man that didn’t go to college, doesn’t have a career, and is an amateur rapper gets no respect when his black counterpart is seen as talented and trying to raise himself out of a bad situation.
So perhaps the socially accepted standard is that white men should be able to achieve more and black men are expected to do less.
In the video, Spose brings up stereotypes about white people like their supposed inability to dance or play basketball. These stereotypes are discouraging to white men in general to pursue careers in any of those things and it’s seen on TV and movies when most basketball players are black and the best dancers are too. This creates expectations for most white men to put their energy into other things like steady income jobs. But the expectations for black men are less and it’s acceptable for them to disregard an education to be an amateur rapper.
If society as a whole looks on one race in America as acceptable to do less, then that race will be oppressed by social norms that, with time, only become more and more common and approved of within the race itself.
Spose’s video uses the assumptions of his audience to manipulate our perspective of a white male rapping and it easily becomes comical because of our prejudices of a race outside of African-Americans that performs rap or tries to obtain an identity similar to that of black people. This ultimately makes his video very successful in his point that he is not a very impressive rapper or a successful person in general.
Just the fact that Spose was able to make a video that unintentionally illustrated this fact is pretty awesome.
Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYws8biwOYc
Site:
http://www.sposemusic.net/
Info:
http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20100318-NEWS-3180346
Song of the Day
"I'm Awesome"
by
Spose
Thanks for reading,
Fernando
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