How Should A Person Be (Dressed)?

September 20, 2012

Fuck Yeah Menswear colonizes rap and removes all its poetry, all its irony. FYM sucks all the gravity out of the music and culture. Fuck Yeah Menswear takes the “black” out of “Black Republican”. It takes the “n//s” out of “N//s in Paris”. It is “R Money”. It’s sad and a little evil at the same time.

And that aspect of #menswear culture, with its constant SWAG and CRISPY and FUCKS WIT and etc. is pretty ugly to me. I mean, to put it clearly, why wouldn’t a bunch of rich white guys want to hear music almost exclusively about degrading women, iced out Audemars, and wearing Margiela in a Murciélago. It is irony free lifestyle music for the rich or rich-aspirant, which I sort of think makes up most ardent #menswear enthusiasts. Even my sort of personal hero, Kanye West, as Jordan Sargent pointed out last night on Twitter, pays explicit homage to American Psycho at the beginning of the “Love Lockdown” video.

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I do like this essay, it’s thoughtful and well-written and well-constructed - but I’m kind of struggling with this characterization of Fuck Yeah Menswear. I always pretty much thought the site was hilarious because it was making fun of #menswear dudes (of which my boyfriend, who owns orange moleskin trousers, is kind of one), not rap music. Like, to me, the joke was that the figures were embracing the excesses of rap but doing it in this totally wrong context, in a kind of irony-free, privileged, “tasteful” way, and like, how kind of fundamentally ridiculous it is to spend so much money to look that simple/classic whatever. It was, to me, more of a joke about how WASPs don’t get hip hop than about WASPs making fun of or appropriating hip hop.

I mean, I’m not buying their book, I think it works as a blog that’s a joke about #menswear, but I can’t imagine it will work outside the tumblr context. (None of the tumblr-to-books I’ve picked up at the bookstore really have, even of tumblrs I thought were great.) But this is making me question the site/why I liked it/whether it was an okay white-person engagement w/ rap music aesthetics. I don’t know, am I giving the writers and readers too much credit? Maybe I’m assuming everyone takes Kanye West as seriously as I do (which is, completely, earnestly, extremely), and they were actually making fun of it as well?

11:56am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSRIbyTkv05K

(Notes: 19)