Introduction

Abstract

On his 2008 album The 3rd World (2008), rap lyricist Immortal Technique creates a poetics of solidarity that responds to the conditions of global capitalism. The album’s lyrics are inspired by the rhetoric of Third World liberation movements. “That’s What It Is” is full of a seemingly hyperbolic, messianic rhetoric of rebellion and revolution: “The resurrection,/ ripping a ball through the record section/ Flight connection/ to the Chechen border for guerrilla lessons.” This poetics of rebellion, however, receives its full meaning only in the context of the song’s concluding sample, a dialogue snippet from the neo-noir film Deep Cover (1992). The song samples the film’s climactic scene in which David Jason, an American lawyer and drug dealer, advertises what he considers a promising new drug that will prove profitable since it knows “no international borders.” When Hector Guzman, a corrupt South American diplomat, responds that the global production of the synthetic drug comes at the cost of South and Central America’s profit from the drug trade (“You racist Americans. You just want to cut us poor Hispanics completely out of the market”), Jason retorts that Guzman misses the point: “I think you know that there’s no such thing as an American anymore. No Hispanics, no Japanese, no blacks, no whites, no nothing. It’s just rich people and poor people.”