J. Cole�s video for �G.O.M.D.� caught my attention for a few reasons. It was an actual concept video (kudos to Cole and Lawrence Lamont), an increasingly rare crossover of visual and lyrical narratives. The video�s concept, a story of black folks rebelling in the antebellum American South, caught my attention because of my current research on hip hop, temporality, and multiple Souths. Cole�s video is brilliant in the sense it evokes (southern) black folks� sensibility of survival as it traverses historical and cultural spaces. �G.O.M.D.� visualizes what I theorize in my book as the Hip Hop South, an overlap of past, present, and future scripts of southern blackness using hip hop.

Just a few thoughts on the significance of the video:

Still shot from J. Cole's "G.O.M.D."

J. Cole�s characterization of a house slave remixes the trope of the tragic mulatto using Cole�s own bi-racial background. His character simultaneously derives from and questions popular conceptions of house slaves as submissive and complicit. Even when Cole raises a fist in solidarity from the porch of the house, other slaves dismiss his �realness� and effort to show solidarity. Cole�s initial characterization of blackness and protest juxtaposes the hard and more adamant disdain of white folks exhibited by field slaves. Their tensions and conflict are further amplified by the camera work cutting between the physical spaces of �the big house� and �the field.�  The complex intertangling of what is respected, who is respected, and how that respects indicates survival pulls throughout the entire video.

Cole�s efforts to appeal �friendly� and non-commanding via tipping his hat, constantly nodding and smiling, and swallowing of his anger in the face of belittlement by white men signifies a lingering historical-cultural narrative of respectability and privilege for blacks who worked in the house. Yet Cole�s character was Ellisonian in nature: consider Invisible Man�s grandfather�s declaration of protest, �overcome �em with yeses.� Using the grandfather�s warning/declaration helps me contextualize Cole�s struggle to make his blackness visible while working to rebel without bringing attention to his plans.

Additionally, I�m struck Mark Anthony Neal�s discussion of hip hop and �thingness� in the video as �thingness stealing thingness.� The characterization of freedom as a thing counters  the literal  �thingness� of slavery and plantation life. The presence of slaves blending in with the material goods found in a plantation house � candlesticks, heavy drapery, lace, dinnerware, white clothing, etc. � signifies the heavy handed whiteness and nonchalance of white ownership in southern cultural memory. The act of �thingness stealing thingness� (i.e. Cole stealing a key to the weapons closet) has far reaching implications. The scene of Cole stealing weapons and joining with field slaves in solidarity and revolt bridges the historical connotations of freedom associated with the thingness of guns (i.e. Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown) with the struggle to move past thingness and freedom struggles today (i.e. John Crawford, Michael Brown, and countless other unarmed black men shot to death).  





�G.O.M.D.� makes me think about articulations of contemporary southernness and our inability and refusal to distance ourselves from historical markers of southern identity in the present. The video invokes a subversive yet romanticized recognition of southern blackness as akin to slavery. It falls in line with previous pop cultural renditions of a hip hop temporal south i.e. Django Unchained or the Catcher Freeman episode of The Boondocks. �GOMD� creatively signifies a lag in structure and language to articulate protest and struggle in America (and the south) in its current shape and form.