ELIAS MARSDEN AKA BIG POPPA DEUCE

 

In 2004 Dave Chapelle , on his Comedy Central series, Chapelle's Show, spoofed Lil' Jon and highlighted his apparent lack of vocabulary by putting him in precarious situations where he would have to carry out actual conversations. In one episode of Moments in the Life of Lil' Jon, Chapelle's Lil' Jon character is in the hospital with an arm injury. As the doctor enters the scene unfolds much like any other examination with a series of

question and answers.

 

Doctor: lil' Jon?

LJ: Yeah!

Doctor: I understand you may have fractured your arm?

LJ: Yeah!

Doctor: Let's take a look.

LJ: Okay!

 

The humor lies in the delivery. While these are appropriate answers, the characteristic shout that made Lil'Jon famous is totally out of place in this hospital setting. Chapelle takes the joke a step further. When the doctor begins the examination and asks "does this hurt?" Chapelle's character takes a moment to think and then experiences a physical change in his posture and demeanor and replies in a high brow British accent "Not really no." Dave Chapelle's spoof suggested to me and countless others, that the only things I know of Lil' Jon and the only way I can recognize him is via those three words. We know Lil' Jon the hype man, the performer, the producer, but Jonathan Smith from Atlanta remains a mystery to us. As unlikely as it is that a black man from Georgia has a British accent I was able to see the implications. For all I know Jonathan could be a soft-spoken, well versed, discerning man with a sensitive side who realized that being himself was not going to make him any money.

 

It is here that I would like to introduce a new conception of stereotype one that combines the "emphatic yes" strategy of Ellison's narrator in Invisible Man with a targeted economic strategy to increase marketability and profits. In a sense the new stereotype is a re-purposed tool, whose handling can produce entrepreneurial leverage and cultural authority. Hip-hop, in my view, is the most ubiquitous dispersal mechanism of the new stereotype. The music, imagery, personas, and performances all cater to various essentialized notions of blackness in order to nurture and produce black entrepreneurs, corporate powerhouses, and unmitigated financial success for a select few African Americans. Hip-hop culture says yes. It uses its agreement with many dominant conceptions of African American identity as an economic and cultural strategy. It is from this standpoint that much of my work begins to take shape.

 

Big Poppa Deuce began as an attempt to construct the rapper's persona and a performing body from the ground up and explore the process of masking and representational control from the inside out. If Lil' Jon was a public relations project, then I would attempt to create a figure who was just as real through the same mechanisms. Elias Marsden has a mother and father, a home address in Chicago, a personal history and personal goals. He has exhibited growth as an artist, a concern for social and racial issues, and a sense of humor. From the beginning I knew I wanted Deuce to exist in rumors, traces, and ephemera.