Meka Jean Addresses Identity, Labor, and Being a Queer Black Artist in Her New Visual LP
Still (a) Life is Available to Stream Now on Vimeo and Youtube.
CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA, January 31, 2021— Following her popular 2016 Ivy League Ratchet EP, multimedia artist and shapeshifter Meka Jean drops her new visual LP, now available to watch on Vimeo. The release of this new album is timed in conjunction with the closing of T.J. Dedeaux-Norris’s “The Estate of Tameka Jenean Norris” at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa. In the context of public conversations around appropriation, the recent white-supremacist raid of the United States Capitol building, and the state-sanctioned murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and many others, Still (a) Life is a powerful response to the actual and perceived limitations of Black identity in the United States today.
Album opener “Thought I Told Ya” interpolates Meka Jean’s infamous song “Licker,” first recorded in 2008 at the University of California, Los Angeles. Accompanied by a new video, the track hints at both the creation and destruction of identity. The song serves as a sort of introduction to Meka Jean’s many worlds, from the trap house to the gates of Yale and trying to make it as a queer Black academic artist. The refrain (“I thought I told you / my name is not Shorty”) signals the fact that she won’t remain in one form for long. Dressed in a leotard, a luscious fur coat, and a du rag—with lots of gold body glitter—Meka Jean is a sort of shaman here, conjuring up all the radical changes that follow throughout the album.
Meka Jean’s visual and sonic references are vast. She pulls from her own personal trajectory—from her childhood in southern Mississippi and life as an aspiring rapper in L.A. to being an “Ivy League ratchet” art student and Chelsea gallery darling. Shots from the visual LP channel equally the shaky-cam Cash Money music videos of the 1990s and the techniques of early video and performance art. Meka Jean’s outfits and appearance alter from shot to shot, mimicking the sexualized vixens of hip-hop and pop music videos at one moment and then Blair Stapp’s famous photo of Huey Newton holding a shotgun and a spear in a rattan throne in the next.
Throughout Still (a) Life, Meka Jean tackles the ways pop culture, politics, and academia have exploited, sold, and used up Black identity as a form of currency—often literally—throughout history. Her response is to find power and affirmation in never remaining static. In the album’s closing track “EZ Does It,” Meka Jean rails against white feminists’ profiting off their proximity to Blackness (“Lip injections and a Black boyfriend will only get you so far, bitch”) while claiming appropriation as a tool that is explicitly hers to use. Just as quickly as she builds up a persona, Meka Jean tears it down through acts of affirmation and self-preservation. In “Ivy League Ratchet,” the artist finds solace in her own disappearance: “Appropriating my body and try to wipe me out ya history / That’s why I don’t hang around like strange fruit / With blood on the leaves.” If she’s no longer there, her trauma can’t be weaponized against her.
But all this transformation doesn’t come easy. In the short interludes spliced between the album’s songs, the camera follows Meka Jean through sets of squats, boxing drills, and the back-and-forth movement of an ab roller. This body work is the individual manifestation of the labor it takes to be a person or a performer—and the effort that’s required to simply be a queer Black woman in America today. While code switching seemingly comes natural to Meka Jean, she reveals it here as a process as artificial and institutionalized as changing one’s name or jumping through legal hoops to remain in ownership of one’s own likeness.
Ultimately, Still (a) Life is a proclamation that in the face of so much death, Meka Jean is still here. In “Distortion,” the rapper commands, “Gotta keep ya head up honey / If ya gonna make it out alive”—a reminder to only go away on one’s own terms. And in the title track, Meka Jean puts it simply: “When enough is enough and I’m so tired / And I’m so strong / I’m all alone / And I’m always wrong / And I’m never right / While the bills pile high / I’m still all alone / But I’m still alive.” It’s still her life.
Meka Jean, Still (a) Life (2021)
Meka Jean wishes to thank each of the many individuals involved in the development, production, and release of this new visual LP.
Meka Jean is an artist, performer, and alter ego of T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History. Dedeaux-Norris’s work has been shown at venues across the world, including the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Prospect New Orleans; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among many others. The artist’s ongoing Meka Jean Project includes a feature-length film, video installations, live performances, musical recordings, and sculptural objects. Find more information about the artist at mekajean.com.
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Still (a) Life is Available to Stream Now on Vimeo and Youtube.
CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA, January 31, 2021— Following her popular 2016 Ivy League Ratchet EP, multimedia artist and shapeshifter Meka Jean drops her new visual LP, now available to watch on Vimeo. The release of this new album is timed in conjunction with the closing of T.J. Dedeaux-Norris’s “The Estate of Tameka Jenean Norris” at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa. In the context of public conversations around appropriation, the recent white-supremacist raid of the United States Capitol building, and the state-sanctioned murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and many others, Still (a) Life is a powerful response to the actual and perceived limitations of Black identity in the United States today.
Album opener “Thought I Told Ya” interpolates Meka Jean’s infamous song “Licker,” first recorded in 2008 at the University of California, Los Angeles. Accompanied by a new video, the track hints at both the creation and destruction of identity. The song serves as a sort of introduction to Meka Jean’s many worlds, from the trap house to the gates of Yale and trying to make it as a queer Black academic artist. The refrain (“I thought I told you / my name is not Shorty”) signals the fact that she won’t remain in one form for long. Dressed in a leotard, a luscious fur coat, and a du rag—with lots of gold body glitter—Meka Jean is a sort of shaman here, conjuring up all the radical changes that follow throughout the album.
Meka Jean’s visual and sonic references are vast. She pulls from her own personal trajectory—from her childhood in southern Mississippi and life as an aspiring rapper in L.A. to being an “Ivy League ratchet” art student and Chelsea gallery darling. Shots from the visual LP channel equally the shaky-cam Cash Money music videos of the 1990s and the techniques of early video and performance art. Meka Jean’s outfits and appearance alter from shot to shot, mimicking the sexualized vixens of hip-hop and pop music videos at one moment and then Blair Stapp’s famous photo of Huey Newton holding a shotgun and a spear in a rattan throne in the next.
Throughout Still (a) Life, Meka Jean tackles the ways pop culture, politics, and academia have exploited, sold, and used up Black identity as a form of currency—often literally—throughout history. Her response is to find power and affirmation in never remaining static. In the album’s closing track “EZ Does It,” Meka Jean rails against white feminists’ profiting off their proximity to Blackness (“Lip injections and a Black boyfriend will only get you so far, bitch”) while claiming appropriation as a tool that is explicitly hers to use. Just as quickly as she builds up a persona, Meka Jean tears it down through acts of affirmation and self-preservation. In “Ivy League Ratchet,” the artist finds solace in her own disappearance: “Appropriating my body and try to wipe me out ya history / That’s why I don’t hang around like strange fruit / With blood on the leaves.” If she’s no longer there, her trauma can’t be weaponized against her.
But all this transformation doesn’t come easy. In the short interludes spliced between the album’s songs, the camera follows Meka Jean through sets of squats, boxing drills, and the back-and-forth movement of an ab roller. This body work is the individual manifestation of the labor it takes to be a person or a performer—and the effort that’s required to simply be a queer Black woman in America today. While code switching seemingly comes natural to Meka Jean, she reveals it here as a process as artificial and institutionalized as changing one’s name or jumping through legal hoops to remain in ownership of one’s own likeness.
Ultimately, Still (a) Life is a proclamation that in the face of so much death, Meka Jean is still here. In “Distortion,” the rapper commands, “Gotta keep ya head up honey / If ya gonna make it out alive”—a reminder to only go away on one’s own terms. And in the title track, Meka Jean puts it simply: “When enough is enough and I’m so tired / And I’m so strong / I’m all alone / And I’m always wrong / And I’m never right / While the bills pile high / I’m still all alone / But I’m still alive.” It’s still her life.
Meka Jean, Still (a) Life (2021)
- Thought I Told Ya
- Distortion
- Too Good for You
- Fly
- OxyContin
- Still (a) Life
- Ivy League Ratchet
- EZ Does It
Meka Jean wishes to thank each of the many individuals involved in the development, production, and release of this new visual LP.
Meka Jean is an artist, performer, and alter ego of T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History. Dedeaux-Norris’s work has been shown at venues across the world, including the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Prospect New Orleans; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among many others. The artist’s ongoing Meka Jean Project includes a feature-length film, video installations, live performances, musical recordings, and sculptural objects. Find more information about the artist at mekajean.com.
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