Aww, Skeet, Skeet, Skeet: Baudrillard, Lil' Jon, and the Rhetorical Challenge to the Hyperreal

Ryan Masaaki Omizo, English

In the hyperreal of Baudrillard, reality as we experience it has relinquished its material substance in favor of a proliferating chain of copies or simulacra that wholly replace the original referrant.  For Baudrillard the mode of operation in this hyperreality is pornography, where pornography refers not to the depiction of sexual acts but the attempt to dissolve the barriers that divide the voyeur and the simulation by focusing on the extremes of the performance (for instance, the close-up of the genital regions or the arrangement of sexual positions conducive to the camera but awkward physically).  In this paper I will apply Baudrillard’s concept of pornography and hyperreality to the song “Get Low” by Lil’ Jon and the Eastside Boyz.  More specifically I will examine how the lyrical treatment of the term skeet (slang for the act of ejaculating on a woman at the conclusion of the sex act) formally accords with Baudrillard’!  s premises while at the same time eluding neat consignment to the realm of the ersatz realm of the hyperreal due to its growing rhetorical significance in the exchange between the dominant white and urban African-American cultures.  Commenting directly upon “Get Low”, comic Dave Chapelle states: “You know what’s so dope about skeet?  White people don’t know what it means yet.  When they find out, they’re going to be like, my god, what have we done?”  In this paper I will argue that the rhetorical excesses of the word skeet, as they impose themselves on the socio-political dynamism of American popular culture through mediums such as hip-hop webrings and The Chapelle Show, complicate Baudrillard’s theories of simulacra and the hyperreal, and obliges it to reconsider the rhetorical vicissitudes of sign production.