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November 30, 2022
Eight years in the past, the Queens rapper Shirt lower and pasted collectively sentences music critic Jon Caramanica had written about different rappers and promoted it as a New York Times feature about himself. He even constructed a phony NYT web site to host it. The piece was meant as artwork—a dialog about gatekeepers, because the plagiarized sentences may have simply as simply been about Shirt as an alternative of Jay Electronica and A$AP Rocky. However that wasn’t the dialog on the time. Nobody praised his creativity as “Duchampian”—that came later. As an alternative, he was marginalized as a “desperate for press” troll; at finest, intelligent at advertising ploys.
All performative stunts should be handled equally, proper? It’s 2022. What can we make of Drake and 21 Savage’s sham Vogue cowl? Absolutely, there are extra flags on the sector apart from a 30-page lawsuit from Condé Nast. Why is one provocative and the opposite determined?
The gatekeepers of artwork are nonetheless in Shirt’s crosshairs on I Turned Myself Into Myself. Over the baroque strings of “Marni Invisibility Cloak,” he’s not rapping a lot as considering out loud: “Many artists usually are not simply pigeonholed as being just one factor.” Later, on “Demise to Wall Artwork,” Shirt confronts the established order, the supposed “revolutions” being handled as artwork actions: “Don’t present me a corny NFT of a shark/ Go swim with sharks/ Kill a shark.” Welcome to the woodshed, the place Shirt works out his frustrations with artwork and art-making.
The album is constructed on the poet and professor Kenneth Goldsmith’s “uncreative writing” practice; basically, all nice writing is behind us, so our solely selection is to recontextualize what already exists. For Shirt, the “uncreative” apply has resulted in gallery exhibitions that transpose the format of experimental arts journal MSS’s (Manuscripts) 1922 cowl with the question “Can A Rap Song Have The Significance Of Art?” or interpolating John Baldessari’s “I will not make anymore boring art” right into a canvas that reads “I will not make anymore boring rap,” like Bart Simpson on the chalkboard. I Turned Myself Into Myself turns these identical concepts into lyrics. “Dave Chappelle Is Fallacious” brings the aphorism “artwork is harmful” to life over a menacing baritone sax loop and a thumping backbeat. His first phrases on the tune—and the album—are, “Those prepared to kill everybody/ Is those in cost” earlier than admonishing that Chappelle’s jokes “…put folks at risk/ The dummies assume it’s humorous/ I feel you have to be extra cautious who you make comfortable.”
Explaining the album’s idea feels flagrantly tutorial, if not the antithesis of rap music. And the album itself could be, if Shirt and Jack Splash hadn’t totally immersed it in Queens growth bap. “718 To The World” flips the McCoy Tyner loop from Black Sheep’s “The Selection Is Yours (Revisited),” but it feels refreshing slightly than redundant, whereas “Cancel Tradition” recollects The Alchemist’s breakthrough work with Prodigy.
After all, the Chappelle commentary—like his Duchampian plagiarism of Caramanica—gained’t be met with common applause, and never everybody will likely be tweeting how Shirt is courageous for talking fact to energy. The point out of an “invisibility cloak” suggests he’s painfully conscious of this, and chooses to recast it as a superpower. Marginalize him if you happen to like; it’s not stopping Shirt from making artwork. He’s someplace in Queens proper now, with a sharpie on the sidewalk, writing a poem about walking.
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