"In relation to these unmediated artistic states in nature every artist is an 'imitator', and indeed either an Apolline dream-artist or a Dionysiac artist ofintoxication or finally - as, for example, in Greek tragedy - an artist ofboth dream and intoxication at once. This is how we must think of him as he sinks to the ground in Dionysiac drunkenness and mystical self-abandon, alone and apart from the enthusiastic choruses, at which point, under the Apolline influence of dream, his own condition, which is to say, his oneness with the innermost ground of the world, reveals itself to him in a symbolic (gleichnishaft) dream-image." (19)
The production (the instrumental part of the song which will be referred to as the beat) is the Apolline to Young Thug's Dionysus.
There's always a sense of performance, which is to say this is a production. The video here is obviously produced. Thugger even says in the chorus "If s/he standin next to young thugger/I train them to kill for the camera." The line is a double entendre, as it both refers to the act of murder which is the beast in the human and Young Thug's desire to look fashionable, as in "kill," in front of the camera. Young Thug's tropes of violence and sex serve as equal tropes of representation. As such, the song's production of the image, or the art object, or the musical piece in the case of only the song, reminds us of Nietzsche's description of the Apolline as a figure of images and semblances. This semblance is the oneness of the dream, the instrumental music to the poetry, the human as art.
This is mirrored by the beat's oscillation between the dramatic piano chords that border the song, which contains multiple DJ tags, young thug's silly/violent rhymes, and general play. The sense of play is the sense of music found in the beat, which is why the beat and the rapping flow together. This flowing together is not a mediation of one or the other but an already togetherness that matches Nietzsche's desire for a primordial oneness found in the two forces of Greek culture.
Yet, there is a theme here where Nietzsche confusedly rejects other culture's similarly Dionysian festivals, which probably would include this song, under the auspices of the supremacy of Greek culture.
"From all corners of the ancient world (leaving aside the modern one in this instance), from Rome to Babylon, we can demonstrate the existence of Dionysiac festivals of a type which, at best, stands in the same relation to the Greek festivals as the bearded satyr, whose name and attributes were borrowed from the goat, stands to Dionysos himself."(20)
It would be well to note that these other "festivals" likely represent the complex forms of culture developed by more well-established human civilizations than the Athenians. This project no doubt serves the psychic stability of the European artwork, eventually and arbitrarily represented by Wagner, as it still retains this intelligibility over all the other forms of ecstasy. This is a historical and analytic absurdity on Nietzsche's part, as the Greeks undoubtedly set in motion the destiny of Western philosophy, and thus are its historical and vernacular, or grammatical (philological), foundation. The themes of blackness in the Blanguage, itself inherently a reference to Young Thug's status as a Blood, enmeshed with sex and violence, are not neutral to us as listeners. They represent this cultural limit Nietzsche himself necessarily constructs in service of the Greek artwork, tragedy as derived from the spirit of music. They are the "repulsive witches' brew of sensuality and cruelty" meant to horrify the Greeks and fuse with the Apolline. (21) However, they are really just the arbitrary metaphysical other with which Nietzsche synthesizes the Greek sense of being.
My contention here is that Young Thug and Metro are most certainly playing, and as such represent a sense of tragedy represented in lyrics and production that achieves an equal sense of destiny. We have already seen how they give the listener a performance that is still evocative. Nietzsche's philosophy relies on a sense that the human, to be the work of art, must be dreaming, or at one with the world as a fundamental and vital illusion, We see this in the lyrics Young Thug offers, which are image-laden with money, jewelry, women, celebrities, drugs, and weapons in all sorts of tropological forms. This semblance inherent to the troping of the lyrical content means that Young Thug's rapping is in a sense undergoing the express of the symbolic dream-image of his psyche, making his rapping a performance of poetry, the human as the work of art.
The tragedy also comes from the central, and ultimate, message of the song - that "this is a parade," and it results in the death of a black person, an implied black man. The violence inherent to thugger and metro's sense of jubilation is turned on itself here in the ultimate act of semblance, the process of imagery in which the dream is like a parade, and yet also has the limit of black death. The blackness is where cultural uniqueness creeps up in the music, which does not change the injection of symbolism at the mention of death. Rapping about violence and then referencing the inevitable sense of death are the symbolic tragedy at play in the psychical structure of the rappers.
If you can't understand what thugger has to say, that's okay, you probably don't speak the blanguage. Nietzsche probably didn't.
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