An Artist Describes the Apocalypse According to Busta Rhymes
Aria Dean's upcoming lecture at Machine Project, "Busta Rhymes at the End of the World," will focus on apocalyptic themes in the rapper's oeuvre.
Aria Dean has become a prominent voice in contemporary culture through her work as an artist, writer, and assistant curator of net art for Rhizome. Her upcoming lecture at Machine Project “Busta Rhymes at the End of the World,” will focus on apocalyptic themes in the rapper’s oeuvre that began with his first solo album The Coming (1996) and continued to develop through his fifth, Genesis (2001), as a means of exploring new ideas in Black studies. Dean’s talk will chart a course in Black radical thought from the Black Panthers and the Five Percent Nation, through Afrofuturism and pioneering hip-hop aesthetics, placing Rhymes’s conceptual album suite squarely within this lineage. Now, as we seem to be teetering over the edge of a catastrophic new world order, Dean examines Rhymes’s narratives for “speaking to an apocalyptic blackness” that holds within it the possibility of “eventual regeneration.”
When: Friday, February 24, 8pm
Where: Machine Project (1200 D North Alvarado, Echo Park, Los Angeles)
More info here.
