Black Neomedievalisms in Late and Post-Covid Music Videos
By Maggie Hawkins
The world of man was ending, rapidly, or so it seemed to me as I sat in my lonely New Jersey apartment in late Spring of 2020. Looking out at the skyline of the city I loved, I watched my friends flee, leaving their bohemian apartments empty. As body bags filled New York City streets, I thought back to another plague, technically centuries in the past, but now, not so far away. Facing Northeast, I imagined myself opposite a Londoner from the past, experiencing the first wave of the Black Death in 1348. One account of the arrival of the plague in London states, ‘[t]he pestilence, which first began in the land inhabited by the Saracens, grew so strong that. . . it visited every place in all the kingdoms stretching from that land northwards. . . striking down the greater part of the people with the blows of sudden death’ (my emphasis).[1] ‘Saracen’ was a bigoted, catch-all term used during the high to late Middle Ages for ‘a panorama of diverse peoples and populations [essentialized] into a single demographic entity defined by their adherence to the Islamic religion,’ as well as to refer to people of African origin.[2] Many European nations believed the lack of Christian faith amongst immigrant populations—‘Saracens’ and Jews—either caused the disease or led to a higher chance of death. This is uncomfortably similar to the anti-Asian conspiracies and anti-Black racism that were widely shared and championed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.[3] This racism obscured the terrible truth that in 2020, Black Americans were more than twice as likely to die of COVID-19 than White Americans due in large part to systemic racism within healthcare. A recent study of the 1348 pandemic found that ‘at least for females, individuals with estimated African affiliation [living in London] faced higher hazards of dying of plague compared to individuals of estimated White European affiliations of similar ages.’ Thus, in more ways than one, the ills of the past were also the ills of the present.
The lack of known contemporary accounts of Black Europeans’ experiences during the Black Death is a ‘silence in the archive,’ which deserves recognition.[4] I humbly suggest that one of the methods scholars can use to explore this silence is through a form of critical fabulation, an approach suggested by Saidiya Hartman, which attempts to use the limited information available in the archive to recreate plausible narratives about lives lost to history and the archive’s silence.[5] Hartman exemplifies this practice by asking her reader to imagine two young girls aboard a slave ship, whose only record in the archive mentions their vicious murder by the ship’s captain: ‘Picture them: one cradling the other, plundered innocents; a sailor caught sight of them and later said they were friends. Two world-less girls found a country in each other’s arms. Beside the defeat and the terror, there would be this too: the glimpse of beauty, the instant of possibility.’[6]
Image of the Plague Plaque at Weymouth (England)
As a non-Black medievalist, these are not my stories to create or tell, so I offer instead an exploratory analysis of stories told by Black American musical artists themselves, stories which bring the past into the present. These artists portray what Matthew Vernon calls ‘surrogated kinship[s],’ or identity connections to the past placed in ‘opposition to the seemingly literal kinship that undergirds many discussions of the Middle Ages and Whiteness.’[7] I take inspiration from the growing body of scholarship that engages with the largely positive modern medievalisms utilized by BIPOC artists and thinkers throughout US history. Both Vernon’s The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages (2018) and Jonathan Hsy’s Antiracist Medievalisms: From ‘Yellow Peril’ to Black Lives Matter (2021) are formative works on this subject, providing extensive evidence of American BIPOC medievalisms since before the Civil War. Echoing Hartman, it is easy for us to bitterly settle for the evidence we do have and hate the dominant voices that refused to speak of marginalized experiences; but, the Black music artists I foreground here, take on—whether knowingly or not—the difficult task of acknowledging as their (actual or cultural) inheritance a history which they ‘were never meant to survive.’[8]
The BIPOC medievalisms I have chosen to highlight are: Lil Nas X’s ‘Montero (Call Me By Your Name)’ (2021), Future and Drake’s ‘Wait for U’ (2022), and hemlocke springs’ ‘sever the blight’ (2023). Each of these music videos—stories—was published during or just following the deadliest years of the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that the Black neomedievalisms in these videos can be read as commentary on the New Black Death: COVID-19, the witnessing of continual murder of Black Americans during this time, and the entropy of American sociocultural and political institutions. I’ve chosen music videos specifically because the combination of audio and visual narrative in music videos allows the audience to be fully immersed in scenes of Black English medieval existence that were never recorded. Perhaps these are some of the stories Black English victims of the 14th-century Black Death would have wanted to tell, had they experienced the freedom to do so.
Displaying a more recent method of medieval referencing, neomedievalisms, these music videos strike a balance between playful curiosity for the past and demands for a better future. Neomedievalisms jettison doomed attempts at accuracy, and the often-toxic nostalgia of more usual contemporary references to the medieval, opting instead for the ‘denial of history, . . . anachronisms, distortions, and fragmentation,’ which Amy Kaufman calls ‘the manifestations of trauma.’[9] I argue that the neomedievalisms in these music videos are not only a manifestation of past trauma, but also a method of confronting and coping with the trauma of recent Black death. Through neomedievalisms of this kind, Black artists do the work of ‘disidentifying’ themselves with the English Middle Ages, or reading ‘oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to “connect” with the disidentifying subject.’[10] As I will show, these Black artists create ‘a history of the present [that] strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past,’ by placing themselves in medieval-esque scenes of self-actualization, betrayal, and interpersonal strife, all while in the midst of a modern global plague.[11] By design, their neomedievalisms are anachronistic, conflated, and inexact, which means my analysis must be speculative in nature. While I suggest an assortment of possible medieval English sources through which to analyze their music video stories, I am not arguing for a ‘correct’ interpretation.
‘Montero (Call Me By Your Name)’ by Lil Nas X
As of my writing this, only one of the music videos I’ve chosen has been written about by a medievalist. Elan Pavlinich provides a queer reading of Lil Nas X’s ‘Montero,’ which depicts the artist as different characters in various pre-modern fantasy settings: as a musician and a snake in a fallen-Garden of Eden landscape replete with Roman ruins; and as a Roman prisoner, guards, and members of a judicia publica within a colosseum. Pavlinich suggests the ruins of ‘Roman architecture coupled with the complete absence of industrialization temporally situates Montero within the Middle Ages.’[12] The Roman ruins at the start of the video—perhaps of the once illustrious Londinium, or Roman London—parallel the physical and cultural ruin of businesses, towns, institutions, and long-held beliefs about those institutions during the scourge of COVID-19. Two unfortunate exceptions to this nearly full-scale dilapidation of ‘normal’ life were the sustained power of White supremacy and anti-LGBTQIA+ hate, the latter of which seemed to experience a historic fever-pitch in 2021 and 2022 in the form of public rhetoric and legislation, including anti-drag queen panic. Thus, the appearance of a gay, Black man dressed in gender-nonconforming costumes, utilizing both biblical and medieval references to express himself among the ruins of empire, not only ‘challenges problematic representations of fantasy medievalisms,’ but defiantly refuses to leave these antiquarianisms in the hands of those that seek exclusionary traditionalism.[13] The ‘Montero’ music video demands that these post-modernisms can instead be used in the championing of BIPOC and queer worldviews.
First depicting Lil Nas X kissing himself as a tempting serpent, the video cuts to a colosseum, in which Lil Nas X is chained, facing judgment—perhaps a flashback to a time before the fall of the Roman empire. Revealingly, onlooking spectators are entirely made of stone, which intimates the inhumanity of bigotry and the unfeeling nature of groupthink. Lil Nas X then descends, via a stripper pole, into what can most accurately be described as a Lord of the Rings-themed underworld. He confidently struts toward the Devil’s castle, depicted as a tower topped with a dragon, structurally similar to the filmic depiction of Minas Morgul, the fortification taken over by the primary antagonist, Sauron, in Tolkien’s trilogy. Lil Nas X seduces the Devil with a lap dance before snapping his neck, removing the Devil’s horns and placing them on his own head. Lil Nas X’s successful assassination and dethroning of the Devil thus symbolizes the important efforts of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ peoples to take control of narratives that work to demonize them.
‘Wait for U’ by Future ft. Drake
Future’s ‘Wait for U’ music video begins with a book opened to an animated illustration of an interracial royal couple in front of armored knights, decorated with ornate marginalia. While the narrator humorously states at the start (in a stereotypically ‘white’ Received British Pronunciation) that this is a tale of a ‘toxic king,’ the music video also portrays Drake and other Black knights as heroes who save women from brutality and deceit. A match dissolve reveals a live action of this scene, with a total of twelve knights looking on as a King (Future) says goodbye to his queen before going to war. This particular Arthurian reference has become so ubiquitous in the modern imagination about the English Middle Ages, that it need not be accompanied by any other to register as such.
While his Queen sorrowfully awaits his return, the King consorts with other women during post-battle feasts. Another knight is seen observing Future’s ‘toxic’ behavior with disapproval; he returns to the castle to inform the Queen and subsequently delivers her letter to the King. This exemplifies the loyalty knights had for their queen, and the knight is killed by the King in a duel for his faithfulness towards her. In the second story line of the video, Drake portrays a knight-errant figure, who saves a damsel in distress from two men while on a journey to deliver the King’s response to the Queen. While the knight-errant successfully incapacitates one of the ruffians, the damsel ultimately saves her savior by stabbing the remaining attacker in the back. The trust created through their mutual handling of the situation, and subsequent romance appear in direct opposition to the King and Queen’s relationship. This, I believe, speaks to the importance of mutual respect, and responsibility between genders, which while found in actual medieval texts, is rarely championed by modern references to the English Middle Ages.[14] The damsel’s physical act that saves the knight-errant is neither glorified, nor downplayed; she is no Joan of Arc, just a woman taking action when the moment calls for it.
The customary and decorative choices of this video reveal a hodgepodge of medieval references, which also echo American militarism. Future’s all-black armor alludes to one of the most famous English plague-era princes, Edward the Black Prince, while his queen is dressed in a gown decorated with White roses, which would later be adopted as a heraldic symbol by Edward’s younger brother, Edmund, first duke of York. Drake’s breast plate is decorated with a laurel wreath surrounding three golden prongs attached at a point—which closely resembles the US Navy’s Command Ashore insignia, a laurel wreath surrounding a trident which was ‘established to recognize the responsibility placed on officers who are currently in command, or who have successfully commanded shore activities.’ The conflation of U.S. military insignia with Drake’s late-medieval, plate armor displays the lasting impact the medieval (as well as antiquity) has on modern perceptions of martial strength, and serves as a rejection of the White-supremacist tilt of U.S. military extremism. How can we forget President George W. Bush referring to the so-called war on terror as a ‘crusade’? At the close of the video, Drake, as knight-errant, successfully delivers the King’s letter to the Queen, who sits on her throne next to the King’s empty throne chair. She throws the letter away from her in disgust, suggesting she knows he has no intention of returning to her in the near future.
The story book, which opens at the start of the video appears again, with credits on the recto and an outline of an eagle on the verso. An eagle on the final pages of a story about love and war may remind the reader of various imperial powers throughout history, including Ancient Rome and the United States, as well as of Criseyde’s dream in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde:
. . . an egle, fethered whit as bon,
Under hire brest his longe clawes sette,
And out hire herte he rente, and that anon,
And dide his herte into hire brest to gon,
. . .
And forth he fleigh, with herte left for herte.[15]
[. . . an eagle, with feathers White as bone,
Stuck his long claws under her breast,
And rent out her heart, and at once,
And thrust his heart into her breast,
. . .
And away he flew, with heart left for heart] (my translation)
Despite the pain and bloodshed inherent in war, it has served as the backdrop for many great romances, simultaneously highlighting the human urge for violence and the brutality of the genre. Whereas Troilus is the one left behind in Chaucer’s epic, the medieval and contemporary stories both include the ephemerality of love, the requisite involvement of attendants in royal affairs, and the temperamental nature of patriarchal leaders. Ultimately, the self-aware introduction of the music video as ‘toxic’ sets the stage for a narrative that while primarily meant as entertainment, also provides a modern critique of Arthurian and Chaucerian chivalry, as well as the long history of Western imperialism.
‘sever the blight’ by hemlocke springs
Unlike the artists I discuss above, as well as their song and video titles, hemlocke springs’ stage name (styled in lowercase) and her song ‘sever the blight,’ utilize medievalisms to show Black women’s pain, struggle, strength, and solidarity. Hemlock is a poison that notably appears in Shakespeare’s premodern plays: King Lear wears hemlock around his head, Henry V has the proverbial weeds left to grow in Queen Isabella’s fallow womb, and Macbeth features hemlock as an ingredient in the three weird sisters’ poisonous brew. Thus, hemlock springing up conjures images of madness, neglect, and death, which simultaneously speaks to the general atmosphere of both the plagued late fourteenth-century and our years of COVID-19. ‘Sever the blight’ is a title that most obviously references our collective desire for the devastation of illness to end, but it also provides other semantic possibilities. ‘Sever’ may reference the disunification of a couple, but also it is a variant of a historical word, ‘sewer,’ meaning ‘[a]n attendant at a meal who superintended the arrangement of the table, the seating of the guests, and the tasting and serving of the dishes.’ Both of these latter meanings figure prominently in the music video.
At the start, hemlocke springs appears as a hooded maiden in a red gown, inside a castle dungeon, crying and telling a story of romantic betrayal. In a series of flashbacks, hemlocke springs portrays a male-presenting sovereign whose queen attempts to poison him and his dinner guests while she serves them. Smelling something off in the wine and watching his guests fall, he is made aware of the murder plot. The next scene shows him in chainmail, sword fighting with his queen, who ends the duel by stabbing him through the chest. She subsequently drops her sword and flees. The final moment shows the queen opening a door into the dungeon, where the maiden in red—who could be interpreted as either the queen’s inner self or heart—turns to face her.
While Hamlet is perhaps the most famous literary instance of regicide via poison, the supposed poisoning of king Beorhtric by his queen, Eadburh, daughter of the pagan king, Offa of Mercia, is more poignant for our purposes. The allegations of this poisoning can be found in Asser’s Vita Alfredi, which states that after poisoning her king’s best friend and then accidentally poisoning the king as well, Eadburh ‘sails overseas and lands at the court of Charlemagne [who sends her to a nunnery. Then she] is caught having sex with a man of her own people, expelled from the nunnery, and consigned to die a miserable death as an impoverished beggar on the streets of the Lombard capital, Pavia.’[16] While we are left wondering at the fate of the queen in ‘sever the blight,’ the video’s ending suggests her fate may be brighter than Eadburh’s. The queen opens the door and faces the part of her that was locked away and blighted in her relationship with the king. Whether the cloaked woman in the castle dungeon is indeed the Queen’s inner self or a previous victim of the late monarch, the meeting of these two Black women at the close of this tumultuous and painful tale spotlights the queen’s opportunity and freedom to build a life for herself, unencumbered by a controlling male power structure.
I began by discussing COVID-19 as the site of struggle for these contemporary Black medievalisms, but they join a long line of Black American interventions and fabulations into the European Middle Ages; thereby, reminding us that there has always been a Black medieval past that can be articulated in the present to champion Black life. While the 14th-century plague is popularly seen as the death knell of feudalism in medieval Europe, the United States maintains its feudal system in some shape or form to this day. In the nineteenth century, Black American writers including Frederick Douglass and W.E.B Du Bois rhetorically paralleled medieval feudalism with the U.S. chattel slavery system, seeking to dismantle the unquestioned link between White America and medieval England, and establishing a Black American connection to the medieval.[17] Now, in the twenty-first century, these videos tell Black medieval stories, and thus create ‘a history of an unrecoverable past . . . written with and against the archive’ that demands survival in the face of erasure and death.[18] The use of medievalisms in these music videos simultaneously highlights how slow humans are to improve, especially when it comes to our treatment of one another, and how much we need previously ignored voices and perspectives to reframe the past and remind us that there is a future. During COVID-19, the incompetence of the American government, a strained medical system, and on-going systemic racism were highlighted on a global scale; if for some reason, America was still held up as a beacon of light prior to 2020, its light was all but snuffed out by the death of over a million lives. Yet, as I have attempted to amplify for my reader, the voices and stories of Black Americans continue to brighten even the darkest of ages.
Author Bio:
Maggie Hawkins (they/them) is a 3rd year PhD student at The University of Texas at Austin. They would like to acknowledge that this article was written on the seized territory of the Comanche, Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos peoples. Their first article, "White Nationalist Identification With the Old English Exile: Or, Why Old English Poems Matter," is published in Literature Compass.
Notes:
[1] Rosemary Horrox. The Black Death / Translated and Edited by Rosemary Horrox (Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 64-9.
[2] Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 111. And Onyeka Nbia, “Blacks Britannica: Diversity in Medieval England,” Gresham College, 31 Mar. 2022, www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/Blacks-britannica.
[3] Rosemary Horrox., The Black Death, / Translated and Edited by Rosemary Horrox (Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 66-9.
[4] Saidiya Hartman, “‘Venus in Two Acts.’” Small Axe : A Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2, (2008): 3, https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.
[5] Hartman, ‘Venus,’ 12.
[6] Hartman, ‘Venus,’ 8.
[7] Matthew X. Vernon. The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018),: p. 29.
[8] Audre Lorde, ‘A Litany for Survival,’ (1978): line 24.
[9] Kaufman, Amy S. ‘Medieval Unmoored.’ Studies in Medievalism 19 (2010): 3.
[10] Jonathan Hsy. Antiracist Medievalisms: From ‘Yellow Peril’ to Black Lives Matter (Arc Humanities Press, 2021), p. 4, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781641893152.
[11] Hartman, ‘Venus,’ 4.
[12] Elan Pavlinich. ‘“Ass-ention of the Black Power Bottom in Lil Nas X’s “‘Montero'”,’ in Erotic Medievalisms (Taylor & Francis Group, 2023), p. 58.
[13] Pavlinich, ‘Black Power Bottom,’ p. 59.
[14] It is important to note that both Future and Drake have presented art which can reasonably be described as misogynist in nature; additionally, both men have separately been accused of abusive and womanizing behavior.
[15] Geoffrey Chaucer, et al. Troilus and Criseyde, in the The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, 3rd ed., (Houghton Mifflin, 1987), ll. 2.925-31.
[16] Stacy Klein. ‘Fictions of queenship in Asser’s Vita Alfredi.’ Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-Century England, ed. Rebecca Hardie (de Gruyter: 2023), p. 225, doi: 10.1515/9781501512421-009.
[17] Vernon, The Black Middle Ages, pp.: 9-75.
[18] Hartman, ‘Venus,’ Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe : A Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2, (2008): 12, https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.
