"Look Twice": Black Star Revises The Bluest Eye

Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star (1998) album cover

First edition of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970)

In the true meaning of "revision," seeing something anew, Talib Kweli and Mos Def of the rap group Black Star, revise the words and the ideas of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye in their song "Thieves in the Night" from their self-titled debut album. The song takes its title and its chorus from the closing passage of the novel in which the child narrator, Claudia, reflects on how her classmate Pecola was ostracized unfairly by the black community (and the larger white community) for her alleged "ugliness." Kweli and Def affirm Morrison's argument that, as they put it in the song, "the law of the bluest eye" still governs black experience in America: Anglo-Saxon ideas of beauty, blue eyes, straight, blond hair---are considered the norm. But the rappers also update these "laws" and show how their "jurisdiction" has extended from the segregation-era ideas of racial beauty that the Nobel Prize laureate critiques in her first book. Kweli writes in the liner notes to "Black Star" of reading The Bluest Eye in a high school classroom and how the novel, as he writes, "struck me as one of the truest critiques of our society, and I read that in high school when I was 15 years old. I think it is especially true in the world of hip hop, because we get blinded by these illusions." Within the "hip-hop" context of postindustrial urban African American communities, "the law of the bluest eye" still applies, it guides the actions of the police state in its management of inner-city black bodies.

Kweli at Rawkus Records in NYC, 1999

Mos Def's second verse of "Thieves in the Night" perhaps provides the closest reading of the novel in the song. He begins, "Yo, I'm sure that everbody out listenin agree / That everything you see ain't really how it be." This idea that seeing is not being is critical to The Bluest Eye: Pecola's "ugliness" is never confirmed literally in the text; her lack of beauty is how she is seen by white society, not how she actually looks. Mos Def, though, sees something of the psychology of Pecola's "racial self-loathing," as Morrison calls it in her Afterword, the internalized racism from which Pecola and others in the novel suffer, in contemporary inner-city black male youth:

Most cats in my area be lovin the hysteria
Synthesized surface conceals the interior
America, land of opportunity, mirages and camoflauges
More than usually -- speakin loudly, sayin nothin

Morrison links Pecola's negative self-image to the broader images of normative American identity, family, and home through the juxtaposition of the Breedlove household with the idealized household of Dick and Jane from the primary readers. For Def too, there is a broader national narrative at stake, the very idea of the American dream is little more than a "synthesized surface" that "conceals" a far less hopeful reality. Mos Def seems to argue that it is the worship of materialism, integral to the American dream, that is particularly problematic in black communities when he raps "Gets yours first, them other niggas secondary / That type of illin that be fillin up the cemetery." For Def, the rampant consumerism, perhaps in the rap songs and videos of more mainstream artists, is a form of "mental slavery": "Put you on a yacht, but they don't call it a slaveship." The binary system of racial identification of the Jim Crow era still lingers in the late twentieth century when African American men must chose between being "niggas or Kings." Moreover, the establishment of one's "monarchy" seems contingent on exerting one's power over other blacks, just as Pecola is used as a scapegoat by the larger black community in their establishment of the dichotomy between "niggers" and "colored people" (87).

The American dream family according to the Dick and Jane primers

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good but well behaved, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect, we switched habits to simulate maturity; rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old ideas the Revelation and the Word. (206)

The title of Black Star's song seems to argue that blacks are still in some ways hiding their true identities, like "thieves in the night," as a result of the pressures to conform imposed by mainstream American society. By revising the final passage of The Bluest Eye in the chorus to the song, they repeat and develop Morrison's argument that the conformity of assimilation is a kind of social death, in her words, "hiding from life." The idea of being "not strong...only aggressive" bears a specifically interesting relation to the image of the "thug" in modern black life--inner-city gangsters, Def and Kweli seem to argue, are street tough but not truly "strong" in the sense of strength of character. In lyrics added to the final paraphrased passage from The Bluest Eye, Black Star reiterate that young black men may be "chasin' after death," but are not truly "brave." In a clear reference to the style of 1990s gangsta rap, Talib Kweli writes in his first verse to "Thieves in the Night":

Survival tactics means bustin gats to prove you hard
Your firearms are to short for God
Without faith, all of that is illusionary
Raise my son, no vindication of manhood necessary.

The underground rappers are searching for a form of black masculinity not defined by one's "hardness," but by more spiritual qualities like faith and family. Like Morrison does in The Bluest Eye, Black Star attempts to "find beauty in the hideous." Again, for Kweli and Mos Def, the "thug life" is part of the legacy of American chattel slavery with the prison-industrial complex serving as the postmodern plantation.

[M.D.] Not strong
[T.K.] Only aggressive
[M.D.] Not free
[T.K.] We only licensed
[M.D.] Not compassioniate, only polite
[T.K.] Now who the nicest?
[M.D.] Not good but well behaved
[T.K.] Chasin after death
So we can call ourselves brave?
[M.D.] Still livin like mental slaves
[Both] Hidin like thieves in the night from life
Illusions of oasis makin you look twice
[Both] Hidin like thieves in the night from life
Illusions of oasis makin you look twice