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The title Confessions of Fire comes from the debut of rapper Cam’ron. I remember finding the album around the time I was starting to understand my position in society. In 1998, I was only six years old, but I was registering that I was a boy who was going to become a man. The image printed onto my psyche: a man, Black like me, in heavy leather, with heavier equipment at work in a rugged steel mill environment.
For a little kid, that image was tough, like a superhero. Cam’ron, I found out later, thought it was corny. It was the label’s idea. The image set a course of who I became, but it’s also fraught with the politics of the Black artist working under capitalism. The long history of the shuck and jive.
The consumption of the image of the Black artist does not happen in a vacuum. Slavery meant the economic exploitation of Black bodies but also their literal and metaphorical consumption, through cannibal…
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The title Confessions of Fire comes from the debut of rapper Cam’ron. I remember finding the album around the time I was starting to understand my position in society. In 1998, I was only six years old, but I was registering that I was a boy who was going to become a man. The image printed onto my psyche: a man, Black like me, in heavy leather, with heavier equipment at work in a rugged steel mill environment.
For a little kid, that image was tough, like a superhero. Cam’ron, I found out later, thought it was corny. It was the label’s idea. The image set a course of who I became, but it’s also fraught with the politics of the Black artist working under capitalism. The long history of the shuck and jive.
The consumption of the image of the Black artist does not happen in a vacuum. Slavery meant the economic exploitation of Black bodies but also their literal and metaphorical consumption, through cannibal…
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