People in the Street Eating Chicken and Meat

Over the past two days I have immersed myself in the mixtapes of Das Racist, Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man. Suffice it to say, I am in love–Das Racist is my new hip-hop crush. One song in particular, “Chicken and Meat,” featured on Shut Up, Dude, stands out for its focus and critique of the mass consumption of animal products and the transnational efforts of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), the multilateral institution governing world trade prior to the WTO, to build emerging markets in ‘third world countries’ for the consumption of fast and factory farmed foods and the proliferation of capitalism more generally. If you haven’t seen the video for “Chicken and Meat,” I’ll present it here prior to further commentary. Be sure to keep an eye out for the shots of MC Heems reading a copy of Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics and Society and MC Kool AD reading a copy of Society of the Spectacle.

Clearly, the absurdity of the video escalates as it progresses. That is to say, as both Heems and Kool AD rap about the movement of transnational capital and marriage of colonization with factory farmed foods, they engorge themselves with animal products, “chicken and meat,” to the point of a knife wielding frenzy. In other words, as Heems and Kool AD internalize, literally consume and digest, the violence of animal slaughter, it manifests in an aggression that is recapitulated and redirected at each other. However, the comedic trajectory and content of the video are not merely the uncritical celebration of fried and fast foods nor the affirmation of the GATT’s efforts to export these eco-gastronomic practices. As the video opens, we are presented with juxtaposed shots of fried chicken and Heems reading Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics and Society, a textbook usually assigned in your typical Western Civilization Gen Ed course progression. This gesture toward a long history of the fast-food restaurant, and the factory farmed meats cooked and sold therein, establishes Das Racist’s critique of the inseparable and coterminous histories of colonization and the subjugation of animals for consumption. This history is referenced and compounded throughout the song. In Kool AD’s first flow, coterminous histories of colonization and the subjugation of animals for consumption, manifesting contemporarily in the fast food restaurant, is seamless as he maps ingredients for a successful pizza onto the Hail Mary, onto figures representative of a rap/salsa-jazz fusion, onto Banana Republic (here, a reference to both the outlet store and the many monoculture, servile-dictatorships of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries), onto Sony brand cameras, onto chicken, “meat,” and pork:

Muevelo, muevelo, ven pa’ca
Oh my god, it’s so hot
Andale, andale, epa, epa
Fastest rodent, check the components
Andale andale epa arriba
Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria
Ave Maria, Ave Maria
Cheese, bread, sauce, pizzeria
Carlos Santana, Juelz Santana
B-b-b-b-bananas, b-b-b-b-b-b-bananas
Young Money, Hannah Montana
Tony Montana, Sony brand cameras
Canon, cannon, shoot me out the cannon
Gum blaster, cut faster
Victor Vazquez no speaky Spanish
No speaky English, freak deaky speechless
People on the street eating chicken and meat
People eating pork with a knife and a fork

Heems expands on this history in his first flow, linking the inseparable and coterminous histories of colonization and the subjugation of animals for consumption more forcefully to the equally inseparable and coterminous histories of capital:

Catch that guap, bridge that gap
Emerging markets we’ve got GATT
We’ve got McDonalds, we’ve got cash
We’ve got weapons, we stay strapped
We’ve got Bennetton, Nike
Louis Vuitton, we get hyphy
We’ve got space race, we are space race
Beats beating up kids always save face
Medicine, mmm science
Venison, mmm wylin’

Here, the violence of animal slaughter returns as it is reiterated in the competition of an arms race/space race between the US and Communist Russia. However, the flow is its most forceful in its conclusion, where both Heems and Kool AD return to the consumption of fast foods in repetition:

People in the street eating chicken and meat
People eating bacon all across the nation
People eating bacon all across the nation
People in the street eating chicken and meat
People eating bacon all across the nation
People eating bacon all across the nation

The themes taken up in “Chicken and Meat” are revisited throughout the album. In their, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” Heems and Kool AD meditate on the misrecognition that results from the collapse of both fast food chains. In this video:

Heems and Kool AD appear in Anthony Bourdain’s fridge. And, where food isn’t of issue, racism, the politics of rap music, odes to Maya Angelou, the boycott of Dinesh D’Souza, and Brown Elvis take its place.

All this is to say, Das Racist is smart from concept to execution. You can find both albums here.

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, The Jam, Chicken and Meat, Das Racist, GATT, Western Civilization