Staging The ‘Street Boy’

Addressing constructions of authenticity, gender and race forms the focus of this study, which is directed towards the musical performance of Black Norwegian rapper Jesse Jones. Through my discussions of ‘the making of’ Jesse Jones documentary and readings of the music video ‘Gategutt’, ¹ I show how the staging of a ‘street boy’ persona is grounded in appropriations of gangsta rap aesthetics, and how subjectivity is negotiated through sample aesthetics, bodily display, vocal performance and the audiovisual construction of urban space. Jones’s gangsta persona relies on ‘staging the real’, connecting genre-specific conventions of ‘keeping it real’ with issues concerning the politics of relocation. On the one hand, I maintain that the display of the stereotypical Black male gangsta enables transgression through a conflation of marginalised urban males across notions of time, space, ethnicity, race and cultural belonging. On the other hand, I attempt to demonstrate that the audiovisual construction of Jesse Jones’ hypermasculinity draws on heteronormativity, where fixed notions of masculinity prevail. Hence, the audiovisual display of Jesse Jones opens up for critical perspectives on how the ‘marginal’ is constructed and negotiated through cultural appropriation and recontextualization in a vibrant transcultural space. ²