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  • “We erred, we lost, we lived to tell”: The Hip-Hop Gothic of Black Artemis’s Explicit Content
  • Kellie Donovan-Condron (bio) and Marta S. Rivera Monclova (bio)

The term “hip-hop Gothic” seems like a contradiction in genres, a blend that is potentially more intriguing than successful. For popular audiences, hip-hop is a widely accessible, multi-faceted contemporary cultural movement, whereas Gothic literature is often seen as a specialty, an outmoded genre that returns to popularity only during Halloween. Yet, like hip-hop, the Gothic has long been used as a vehicle of social critique, noted for its blurring of generic distinctions. At the Gothic’s European inception in the second half of the eighteenth century, the genre’s texts often masked their engagement in contemporary issues through settings long ago and far away from the presumed context of their readers, in such places as medieval Italy, Spain during the Inquisition, or England’s windswept moors. However, many American versions of Gothic, written much closer in time to the events which they depict, directly engage with race as well as gender and class as a way to grapple with slavery and its legacy in the United States. Black Artemis draws on the power of Gothic literature to subvert social systems in her novel Explicit Content (2004) in order to illuminate the sinister forces surrounding her ostensibly vulnerable female characters, whom she then recasts as their own rescuers. What begins as a chronicle of two young women’s attempt to make it big in the hip-hop industry takes a sudden Gothic turn when one of them disappears into the modern day [End Page 131] “castle in Spain” —an opulent mansion in the New Jersey suburbs with a dangerous secret. This article traces Black Artemis’s turn towards the Gothic, which explores what happens when innocents are separated, sometimes violently so, from their support systems and from guidance, and her transformation of the tropes of victimhood and helplessness into activism and empowerment. This updated, contemporary Gothic frame allows Explicit Content to expose how systems of modern-day sexual slavery, patriarchy, and economic dependency continue to treat women as helpless pawns, and to chart one possible path for such women to become complicated, empowered subjects.

Explicit Content weaves hip-hop and the Gothic together to create parallel stories of Cassie’s and Leila’s efforts to break into the recording industry. Friends since middle school, Cassie and Leila, now in their early 20s, are a songwriting and performing duo. Their partnership is shattered, however, when Leila receives an offer to sign with the label Explicit Content—but on the condition that she sign solo. What Leila doesn’t understand about her offer is that Explicit Content is a front for a range of illegal activities. The label’s CEO, Gregory David Down—called G Double D or G Dub, or most often, simply G, throughout the novel—initially thinks he can use Leila to build his empire, but she refuses to participate in illegal activities, so he resorts to keeping her captive and quiet by force. While Leila’s story develops off the page, the narrative follows Cassie, who has been working with their producer and her lover, Darnell, to put together her own record. Estranged from Leila over what Cassie sees as her friend’s betrayal in signing a solo record deal, Cassie does not know that G has imprisoned Leila. Cassie comes to G’s attention following a contest in which she performs her own material. Believing that Cassie might prove more tractable than Leila, G moves to sign her to the label, setting in motion the Gothic machinery that seeks to trap her as effectively as it has already trapped Leila. While he also keeps Cassie captive, he does so only for short periods, believing—correctly, for the moment—that she will be obedient if he doesn’t push her too hard, too fast.

As the novel progresses, Cassie becomes increasingly suspicious of the workings of Explicit Content, but she also believes that she can protect herself from any evildoing that the label attempts. Cassie first perceives that she’s caught up in something larger than herself...

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