Objectify This

Ana Tijoux was born Anamaría Merino in 1977 in Paris, because her Chilean father and French mother were in exile from Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship. When her mother’s job as a social worker put her in touch with hip-hop as an 8-year old, it was love. At 14, Ana and her family returned to Chile and found the country reeling from years of violent suppression of dissent. She helped jump-start the conscious hip-hop movement as part of a group called Makiza at age 20.

Recently, Ana’s gone solo, and the homegirl has done her homework, incorporating elements of 90′s-style hip-hop from the U.S. into a fresh, personal art form. She’s comparable to artists like M.I.A who also incoporate geopolitics into their tracks, and to Lauryn Hill in her relentlessly personal, intelligent rhymes. Her hit single “1977,” from the eponymous album, may be the first music video to invoke Hannah Arendt and LL Cool J.

The “1977″ video begins with a hooded figure. The figure raises its head, revealing itself to be Ana, a visual tribute to LL Cool J’s early 90′s hit video “Mama Said Knock You Out,” which begins with a hooded figure in a boxing ring. LL Cool J’s “Mama” is an early 90′s hip-hop classic because it presents the speaker as an underdog at a time when hip-hop was not yet mainstream. He describes an underground MC’s battle to stay in the limelight -

LL Cool J in "Mama Said Knock You Out

Don’t call it a comeback! I’ve been here for years,
I’m rocking my peers, puttin’ suckers in fear.
Making the tears rain down like a monsoon!
[rest] Listen to the bass go boom!

Boxing was one of the first sports in which black and white contenders faced off against each other in the beginning of the 20th century. Joe Louis broke the color barrier when he became the first black heavyweight champion — and the first famous black athlete — in 1937. He held the title until 1949.

MIA in "Bucky Done Gun"

If hip-hop is about asserting authenticity, LL Cool J uses this boxing metaphor to present himself as the champion, taking on newer and less experienced MCs and the establishment. His self-aware hip-hop is connected to its cultural roots; he cites his family as both personal inspiration and vindicators of a multi-generational struggle, the tough momma who tells her child to knock out his opponent. He contrasts this ethic of defense of familial and communal honor with the selfish hypothetical opponent, just some kid who wants to get rich rapping.

Nas in "Hip Hop is Dead"

“Mama Said Knock You Out” presents the value system born out of that  struggle: self-motivation, innovation, and hard work — a value system which founded hip-hop, and some would argue, America. The camera in J’s video focuses on his powerful fists, associating him with the Black Panther movement. Later artists — M.I.A. in “Bucky Done Gun,” and more subtly, Nas in “Hip-Hop Is Dead” — drew on this boxing metaphor, opening with a hooded sweatshirt as a nod to LL Cool J.

LL Cool J is presumably amenable to those nods, since hip-hop is all about recycling choice samples — in “Mama Said Knock You Out” alone, he uses clips from The Chicago Gangsters, James Brown, Sly & The Family Stone, and his own track, “Rock the Bells.”

Ana Tijoux in "1977"

While the Online Etymology Dictionary suggests that the use of the term ‘hood’ as in ‘hoodlum’ is an independent homologue derived from the Bavarian huddlelump, or ‘ragamuffin,’ the word hood comes from the Old Frisian hode, meaning “guard” or “protection.” Hoods can provide creepy anonymity, because they elide personal identity and erode others’ ability to hold the hoodwearer responsible: they create invisible people.

The blackness of LL Cool J’s hood countermands the whiteness of the KKK’s; we are reminded of the power of the invisible for good and for evil, of the ease with which social roles are donned and shed in a regime that secretly detains and ‘disappears’ dissenters. This is what Ana Tijoux addresses in 1977.

Ana grew up in exile in France (a fact referenced, at least visually, by the presence of the Eiffel tower in the 1977 video), where underground hip-hop is nearly as sophisticated as its U.S. counterparts — witness the collaboration and sampling of Wu Tang on various IAM albums, most notably L’Ecole du Micro D’argent (The School of the Silver Mic), a concept album structured like a course in hip-hop/martial arts which also heavily samples the French dubbing of Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi, while playing with language and addressing gritty themes: street crime, prostitution, social injustice. Of course, Ana was 20 when that album was released, but IAM was already producing influential compilations in Paris in 1989, when she was 12.

Ana’s “1977″ takes a subversive approach to its dissection of fascism.  The video begins with a statement about how difficult it is to differentiate poisonous snakes from harmless ones — but states that the distinction is possible because of the marks they leave behind.

Ana’s lyrics tell us that she was born in the year of the serpent, and she elides the rhyme of her chorus, which should be “siete” of 1977 with “serpiente,” by “shushing” the camera with her finger over her lips, as if to elide both herself and Pinochet’s regime. In both form and content, the song brilliantly aligns her birth with the dictator’s rise to power, demonstrating the unity of the harmless and the poisonous snakes — both of them have the power to silence people. Ana’s hood in the video’s initial frames at once empowers her to speak for the anonymous people and puts them at her mercy: she is at once the venomous and the harmless snakes, as each community member can support or undermine democracy. Of course, the consonant hissing of the shushing sound also unites her with the snake. The chorus goes:
1970 y shhh
1970 y shhh
1970 y shhh

1977 no me digan no
Que uno lo presiente
Todo lo que cambia lo hara diferente
En el año que nacio la serpien shhh

[1977; don't tell me no
that one doesn't presage it
Everything it changes it will make different
In the year that the snake (shhh) was born.]

Woodie Guthrie's guitar

As Frost wrote, the poetry is what gets lost in translation: in Spanish the syntax is mutable enough to allow the word ‘snake’ to be last, so that when she truncates the line by shushing herself she occludes the “snake.” There are several potential readings of the verse: it could mean that she rejects the idea that the undercurrent of fascism isn’t palpable (‘presiente’ is a conjugation of ‘presentir,’ which literally translates as pre-feel, pre-sense), or that she’s being told that the undercurrent is palpable, insistently. This ambiguity increases in the last two lines of the verse, when the (completely permissible, Spanish) passive voice and ambiguous pronoun ‘lo’ combine to make the subject of the sentence completely unknown, unless it is the snake which is barely mentioned before it is hidden, too.

Tijoux’s revolutionary act is her self-implication. Not unlike Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror,” Hannah Arendt’s Totalitarianism proposes that it is personal soul-searching that prevents the rise of fascism: we must be on the lookout for it in ourselves: are we enacting our values? Tijoux doesn’t vindicate herself: in the 1977 video, a hand keeps leaning into the frame and depositing Ana in various scenes, often returning to straighten her clothes in motions similar to Jay-Z’s famous “get that dirt off your shoulder” gesture. This doll-trope in the video raises questions about the power of the individual in society — she describes growing up, becoming literate, and then ends her first verse,

Y fue cuando sentí mi primera impotencia.                                 And that was when I felt my first impotence.

The image of the snake is obviously tied in Christian ideology to the devil — it’s interesting that instead of allying herself with Eve in the garden, she designates herself another snake. It’s a secular, political statement about the loss of political innocence, in religious terms, about the necessity of being on guard against ourselves. She’s taking Woodie Guthrie’s guitar label one step closer: she’s the machine that examines itself for the taint of fascism. Enjoy! And hat-tip to Brad for the intro to Ana.