The album Dirty Gold by Angel Haze aims at producing a very common effect. “My Identity is the music, everything you need to know about me is in the music: my home, its where I originate, its where I fall apart, its where I come to life‰Û, to quote the opening lines to the track “A Tribe Called Red,” inaugurates the most general and abstract landscape Haze seeks to secure us into. The album follows and unfolds from this common trajectory: By drawing on notions of self-empowerment, dis-sanctification with consumerism, greed penetrating into all altitudes of familial relationships and one‰’s relationship with God, Dirty Gold tries to explain both classical and contemporary ailments in the context of people who focus too closely on abstracted relationships hidden behind veils of technology and empty commitments. This album includes detailed and exhaustive meditations on youth growing up in in-authentic relationships, a profoundly existential misunderstanding of what God is, and how greed seemingly owns and controls most of social reality ‰ÛÓ primarily in relation to friendships and romance. This album also aims to persuade us otherwise; that significant relationships and authentic experiences may be found in simply re-interpreting how we understand ourselves and the world we live in.

How are we to approach this notion of rejection and reconciliation that is presented in Dirty Gold? Let us risk departing from the common rhetoric concerning her early release and subsequent challenge against her record label, and instead risk a far more interesting account.

In a pure post-modern fashion, the theoretical shift from the stale and arid zones of modernity (of consumerism, of product advertisement, and a profound desire to desire) towards a certain affirmation of contingencies (of the double affirmation of anti-materialism and materialism, authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism, and spirituality and atheism) is what is occurring under the surface of Dirty Gold. In this respect, the crucial track is “Echelon (It‰’s My Way),” becoming the sublime object of reflection for us in this album: “And I don‰’t need no friends bitch/I‰’m better off with my money/Just alert the fucking masses/Let‰’em know that it‰’s coming, like/I was wearing it first/I‰’m on that “Fuck what you say/Its my way‰Û/Fashion Week, I‰’m out here slaying/Dressed in, like, all the latest.‰” A closer look at this track confronts us with a very different message found elsewhere in the album, one with an almost uncanny persistence. In “Dirty Gold”, Haze, reflecting upon her own reflection, sings, “I used to cut myself open just to feel like I was living/But when living is just dying then there‰’s no longer a difference/There‰’s no longer existence, and there‰’s no longer persistence/And there‰’s no longer a drive there existing only a division/And I thought, if nobody ever loved me/This vacancy inside me must be really called a bloodstream.‰” Haze, in spite of the noble performance others have seen in her acts against her record label, is actually (and profoundly) producing a kind of uneasiness and contradiction that actually makes sense us. It is as if she is saying “I understand materialism corrupts‰” and yet “for who I am, accept and affirm this corruption.‰” (Again, in the track “Dirty Gold,” we are reminded of this further: “Then I looked into the world and saw a million people like me/Probably never know your stories, but you‰’re the reason I‰’m fighting/You‰’re the reason I‰’m writing, music.‰Û)

Haze‰’s entire album is based upon the discordance between the social reality she wishes to reject or change, and the reality she wishes to have. This album‰’s procedure of sketching out this difference consists in moving between an extreme moment of hating the “industry‰” (In Crown, we hear “Fuck a label, and the blog‰Û), and then, at another extreme moment, we experience the utter intensity (and admiration) she feels towards the power of the “masses‰” in the “industry‰Û‰ÛÓ in short, affirming the contradiction. Suffice is to recall her track “New York.” After invoking Nas, Little Kim, and Cassie, those that, in a certain sense, epitomize one aspect of the “industry‰Û, she proclaims “I run New York.‰” We encounter this sense of uneasiness in all moments of the album. It is most acutely felt in the transition between each track, the encounters with more aggressive rejections of materialism that are followed up by much affirmation of materialism. Haze‰’s relationship to this album and to the identity she sketches out within the margins of this album stand for a radically uncanny message: the double affirmation of rejecting and affirming contemporary society. And thus, we are brought back into our own familiar constellation of meaning.

What we encounter in Haze‰’s album is a certain split or doubled position. Each moment of culture, we know, provides us with a certain looking glass into how culture is both assembling and unfolding unto itself. Haze‰’s Dirty Gold, true to this thesis, offers us such a position ‰ÛÒ sweeping across the whimsical lyrics of social decay, the drive towards unfulfilling dreams, and the affirmation of gaining recognition ‰ÛÒ in sum, the uncanny and yet even more profoundly felt satisfaction with affirming yourself. This album sets one into a social matrix that we, in all of its contradictions, affirm since, this is indeed, how we also experience ourselves.