That’s the nature of capitalism, which, based as it is on the notion of the virtue of competition, is (by definition) fuelled by the pursuit of inequality. Steve James’ brilliant documentary Hoop Dreams (1994) plays this out to devastating effect. The biography industry (in ways eerily similar to the self-help industry) elides the fact that for every Lebron James, there are 10,000 amazing basketballers who don’t get the opportunity to earn US$24 million a year, because of injury, or inadequate coaching, or simply a generally draining life-context. If you don’t “just do it,” it’s obviously because you didn’t have enough talent, or didn’t work hard enough. It celebrates at its core the ideology of the individual reigning triumphant over the social and relational.īiographies thus tend to serve the function of keeping downtrodden people – most people in the world in fact – falsely dreaming that they, too, can “make it.” As Nike – sneaker company, rather than Greek goddess – tells us: “Just do it.” Throw in a dash of cultural voyeurism, and you have a potent, intoxicating mix for a kid on the verge of puberty.įurthermore, biography, of course (including the biopic, its most formulaic incarnation), is always about great (or at least awe-some) people transcending an unpleasant or mediocre social reality. It offered an anti-authoritarian message that still seemed to be based around the rabid (and rabidly masculine) assertion of self. Anyone who knows anything about the history of LA rap (as a populist political medium) knows how quickly its subversive impulses were colonised by and connected to the machine against which it was putatively rallying.Īs an 11-year-old, middle-class white boy growing up in Sydney’s suburbs circa 1993, I was certainly attracted to the rap “fad” – the music of NWA was incredibly thrilling. It is as self-evident, under capitalism, as the associated notion of “selling out” that has been so popular in discourses about commercial “art” in general. Since Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci discussed it nearly a hundred years ago, the function of cultural hegemony has become so obvious that discussions of it appear rather banal.

Straight out of compton