Hip Hop and Monumentality: Lupe Fiasco’s Re-Narrativization of the Lorraine Motel

Abstract

This paper employs Mario Gooden’s diagnoses of African American museums, Henri Lefebvre’s critique of monumental architecture, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s notion of Signifyin(g) toward the examination of American rap artist Lupe Fiasco’s re-narrativization of architectural space, specifically the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. The Lorraine Motel has since been transformed into the Civil Rights Museum, and poses an architectural and aesthetic problem according to Gooden, who is critical of the spatial strategies implemented at the site, using the museum as an example of what he refers to as the “problem with African American museums,” calling for a re-imagination of monumental spaces paying tribute to the Civil Rights movement and black identity. Fiasco’s lyrical constructions in his songs Brave Heart and Audubon Ballroom, refer generally to architectural space, and particularly to the Lorraine Motel, emphasizing the materiality of the signifier while modulating the meaning of these spaces through metaphor and chiasmus, which Gates Jr. identifies as the unique proclivity belonging to black vernacular. This paper concludes that Fiasco’s lyrical narrative of the Lorraine Motel demonstrates the potential of Signifyin(g) to modulate perception of the static architecture of the site which keeps black identity mired to the past.