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T.J. b/w Meka Jean With a new visual LP, Meka and the maestro behind her, T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, both get their say. By Genevieve Trainor
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here’s a setting used in some of the ambient noise interstitial scenes between videos in Meka Jean’s “visual long play,” Still (a) Life, released at the end of January. It first appears between tracks two and three, “Distortion” and “Too Good for You.” It’s within the abandoned frame of a building, likely in Alabama, where most of those short scenes were filmed. There is a foundation, but no roof. The sun shines hot on Meka Jean as she exercises to the cues of an off-camera personal trainer (who makes a couple of appearances later in the piece). On the wall, there is distinct graffiti in white of doorways—all angles and lines and perspective. It catches the eye even more often than Meka Jean herself, despite her extraordinary presence. The doorways demand conversation. They seem to be saying, “Some doors just can’t open, and that’s OK,” but also, simultaneously, “I’ll make a door any-damn-where I please.” Much of Still (a) Life weaves in and out of similar themes of wayfinding, both the kind that we grasp for ourselves and the kind that comes from letting go. Track four, “Fly,” is rife with this (and it begins following a several-second camera linger on one of those doorways). “Honey, can’t you see that you’re killing yourself slowly,” it opens. “Stop walkin’ around here with your eyes closed and your mouth open, yeah—or you’re never gonna see who you’re supposed to be.” Visually, it ping-pongs between scenes of Meka Jean riding a motorcycle around Cedar Rapids, vestiges of derecho damage lining the streets, browned and withered but not yet picked up, and the recurring imagery of her lying down, spattered in glitter, opening her body as a doorway, a conversation.
Meka Jean is the performance persona of T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, an artist and a professor in the art department at the University of Iowa. Or it might be the other way around, or they might just be two personas crafted on the same scaffolding. “The whole point is that there are all these partitions of identity, and it can be whatever,” Dedeaux-Norris said in a recent interview. “In the context of the nature of the content, me being a professor is important, right? The fact that I need to build Meka Jean as an identity to talk
“TRUTH BE TOLD, I CAN NEVER HIDE MY BLACKNESS IN REAL TIME AND SPACE. ... I AM BLACK AND PROUD. I AM. I REALLY AM. AND BLACKNESS IS MANY THINGS. BLACKNESS IS MORE AMERICAN THAN FUCKING AMERICA IS.”
about some of this stuff is the point, too. Professor T.J. Dedeaux-Norris maybe doesn’t have permission to twerk in a protest environment. … Meka Jean is the persona that can do that stuff.” Meka Jean and Dedeaux-Norris move through the doorways of one another fluidly when we speak, although their roles and realities are distinct. Meka Jean internalized the stereotypes she experienced in youth, she internalized rap music and portrayals of Black and brown women in media. She both embraces and engages the problematic.
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But, says Dedeaux-Norris, “We can mold ourselves into anything— all of it’s drag.” “T.J. as a professor shows up in rectangles and triangles, doesn’t wear anything that reveals anything, really tries to be asexual … whereas Meka is all about it—and needs the controlled environment of the music video to feel safe, even, or the actual stage. The only way I can embody that language, that persona, that flirtiness is if I feel wholly safe … or to say some of the things that are being said politically or about feminism.” Meka Jean, Dedeaux-Norris said, “knows how to get the point fucking home.” “Rap as a medium is its own fucking crazy thing: It’s braggadocio, it’s hardcore. You gotta come with it.” But Dedeaux-Norris knows the world that they live in, too: As a fine artist and gallery darling, they knows that they need to contextualize their work—the visual LP was released in tandem with a press release doing so explicitly, with references to Meka Jean’s earlier work and the current political moment, calling it “a powerful response to the actual and perceived limitations of Black identity in the United States today.” That’s all true, of course. And as a piece of art, it accomplishes that. But it’s also a success inside its medium. Meka Jean and DedeauxNorris are on either side of a swinging door that they are constructing between mediums, between registers, between personas, between academia and art. “It’s not an either/or,” DedeauxNorris said. “I do a lot of the same things in my painting, but it just presents itself in a different way. I can’t make a painting that says, ‘fuck you’ to white feminism. I don’t know how to do that. I guess
I could, but I don’t even want to do that with my paintings. I want my paintings to be relieved of that responsibility,” they said. Meka Jean dives deep into that space that Dedeaux-Norris opens up for her. She does, indeed, say “fuck you” to white feminism, especially in tracks like “Ivy League Ratchet” and closer “EZ Does It,” but truly in her whole being. She embodies a feminism that is distinctly gendered, but also distinctly Black, throwing up every perceived wall that a certain class of white feminists often finds off-putting about Black women—a different kind of aggressive self-possession, that braggadocio of rap layered onto a female body that owns the space it inhabits without apology. “Black women, we’re out here, we gotta be our own mamas, our own daddies … It’s something that I feel strongly about, that I negotiate. I’m under five feet tall! I don’t give a fuck what kind of fantasy people have in their mind about the strength of Black women. Fuck you; I’m tired! And I want to not feel critiqued for being tired. … I had to create T.J. because when I go into the university environment, I don’t want to portray any level of weakness or femininity or something like that,” Dedeaux-Norris said. “It’s fucking exhausting,” Dedeaux-Norris says of existing both as T.J. and as Meka Jean “but it is the only mode of survival. Nobody gave us a fucking handbook when we showed up in this bitch. Nobody. … In that way, I feel like I am doing the most resourceful thing I can do in these times to survive in a world that requires me literally to be a lot of things at once.” Still (a) Life balances that strength and those perceptions of strength as well. There’s the interstitials where Meka Jean engages
