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Abstract
The male protagonists that dominate the films of Spike Lee are often the targets or agents of brutal, debilitating, and sometimes fatal violence. Inextricably linked to these characters' subject position in cultural space, this violence is part of a larger "blues ideology." Simply defined, blues ideology refers to the processes of abjection and given person's creative, expressive response to that abjection. Central to this formulation of the blues, is the body as a primary site of mediation that is, as the place where power relations are negotiated.
The moments when bodily violence erupts in tandem with creative and performative expression can best be described as "beating songs." They are meta-narratives within the larger texts that make explicit the ways in which violence informs the cultural order. While certainly akin to what many have recognized as blues ideology and methodology in the African American literary tradition, I argue that this filmic manifestation of the blues is different because of the medium's unique ability to display bodily violence. By forcing the viewer into identification with the blues subject and his abjection, the beating song presents a theoretical framework for conceptualizing the blues as one of the most powerful ways of being.
To be clear, this specific case study of selected films from Lee's diverse body of work is by no means an attempt to engage still on-going debates about blues music and its appropriation (or misappropriation). Rather, it should be seen as a way of re-imagining blues culture beyond the strict boundaries of race, class, and regional identity markers. What the "beating song" suggests is that a person's connection to the blues is determined by subject position and in this instance, his response to what are frequently liminal, paradoxical, or contradictory circumstances.