The Life of Pablo: Examining the gangster as artist in the field of cultural production

• In Event: Towards a Bourdieusian Criminology: Theorising Inequality and Injustice

Abstract

Kanye West's newest album, The Life of Pablo, plays with the association between the painter Picasso and the drug lord Escobar. From the beginning, hip-hop artists have used similar references to align themselves with both infamous gangsters and renowned artists. In this paper, I use Kanye's latest work to explore the connection rappers continue to make between the habitus of an artist and that of a gangster. Using Bourdieu's notion of the field of cultural production, I argue that the gangster, like the artist, represents a seemingly autonomous agent capable of transcending the social structures imposed on him, while, simultaneously reproducing the field he seems to flout. An admirer of Flaubert and Manet, Bourdieu elaborated the concept of the field "to understand both the genesis of social structures...and the genesis of the dispositions of the habitus of the agents who are involved in these structures." Bourdieu argued that both artists challenged the established rules of literature and painting and, in doing so, gained the cultural capital that allowed them to thrive in their fields. I suggest that the gangster holds many of the same properties, which have allowed him to become a prominent figure in the hip-hop field.

Author

• Chris Richardson, Young Harris College