The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 27 January 2015.
Still there is still something that smacks of Camusian suicide in having to go back to Detroit.
Maybe it's just to be around better producers, better collaborators, etc. But it also seems wrapped up in this issue of identity. And this seems to be one of the central preoccupations of our project. Our entire identity is fabricated.
As I read through the rapper's bio page, I begin to sense something more than just factuality present. There's the conscious construction of a history, an identity. Of course, this has to happen with everyone: even with someone like Eminem, you get the sense that he's become a narrative that is way more streamlined and distilled than the original experience. When his partner from Detroit says "Em's from Detroit proper," I have a hard time even placing what that means. Did he live in one of the bombed-out buildings where they filmed "Detroit vs. Everybody"? Did he and his mom construct some kind of shack in the middle of a parking lot? What is Detroit proper?
I assert that, sifting through the rubble beneath that statement, you find absolutely nothing that meets the criteria.
This all bumps up against Sartre's central existential doctrine, existence precedes essence: "man, first of all, exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world--and defines himself afterwards" (Existentialism and Human Emotions).
That process of defining of oneself--whether as a rapper, as a Detroiter, as Sartre's famous waiter, as a 60's rock legend, or as the city of Detroit itself--always involves some inauthenticity, some deliberate suppression of complexity, of contingency--ultimately of one's native subjectivity and transcendence.
I have to acknowledge the rapper in question for allowing his bio to be somewhat more complex than most, but still, there is a deliberate selection of detail in service of cred.
This is suicide.
Our project makes a joke about suicide.
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