Fox’s breakout hit, Empire, is a TV tour-de-force. Starring Taraji P. Henson, Terrence Howard and an all-star supporting cast members, the show functions as both melodrama and musical. Empire’s skeleton is Shakespeare’s King Lear with a dash of Dynasty. Its flesh and teeth, however, takes narrative cues from old drug money record label come-up stories (think: Death Row Records) and 2010s hip-hop trends. It’s too soon to say there’s a black TV renaissance, but with shows like Empire, Blackish, How to Get Away with Murder and Scandal, it’s safe to say this is the blackest TV’s looked in a minute. Here to discuss the show’s music and more, are culture writers Doreen St. Felix, Eric Zaworski and Pitchfork contributors Craig Jenkins and Safy-Hallan Farah.
Safy-Hallan Farah: Lets talk about Empire’s music. I think Hakeem has bars in "No Apologies", the song he sang with Jamal (Jussie Smollet) at the opening of Leviticus. I can't say the same for most of the other songs, especially "Dat Ish Right There" and "Armani, Armani, Armani". Do you guys think there's room for some of Empire’s songs to actually be read as parody?
Craig Jenkins:Empire had me hooked from the first performance, although I noticed a lot of grumps in my Twitter circle complaining about “watching a musical”. The performances are convincing even if Tiana (Serayah) is obviously based on Rihanna and Hakeem (Bryshere Y. Gray) is clearly supposed to be a Tyga/Breezy figure. We're definitely meant to dislike Hakeem and the notion that he's too entangled in the party life, which is played out hilariously in the shows songs.
Doreen St. Felix: I read the obvious badness of Hakeem's songs as satire.
Eric Zaworski: Oh, definitely. Hakeem's lyrics are pretty archetypal. In quick succession he raps about how "tonight gon’ be a movie," lists off Ciroc, Rozay and Grey Goose, and mentions red bottoms.
DSF: I like the idea of Empire being a funhouse mirror to the state of pop and rap music.
SHF: I think Cookie needs to drop a song called "Pay the Pakistani". The album art would be her in a hijab and a mini skirt with some Nation of Islam bodyguards.
DSF: Cookie is definitely going to sing for us soon. I think Empire's trying to take on The State of Music debate. Hitmakers versus bleeding heart artists. DJ Mustard is like a specter hanging over the studio scenes.
CJ: Can't wait til Jamal drops his "Living for the City" next week.
DSF: I collapsed at that scene.
CJ: The scene where he runs out, smacking the chains, reminded me of the scene in New Jack City with the homeless barbershop quartet singing around the fire.
DSF: One thing that tickles me about the table scenes are the white boys waxing like anthropologists about black artists' marketability.
SHF: What do you guys think of the singer in the pilot episode, Tiana, etc.? How does their music fit into the show? Is Tiana supposed to be "Pon de Replay" Rihanna?
DSF: Tiana's music sounds like 2006 all the time to me.
CJ: Pon de Replay Riri.
DSF: Fake Tupac's "Hustle Hard" is a banger. It was very nostalgic to listen to Timbaland sound on that song. It's metallic. Lyrically on point, too.
CJ: Let’s talk about how they actually got a Prince song to use last week.
EZ: Prince usually doesn't let anyone have his music, either!
DSF: I speculate, based on the teasers, that Jennifer Hudson is going to play a character. I'd be really surprised if they bring Mary J. Blige on and she doesn't play herself.
CJ: This is Mary's speed too. I just saw her in that Black Nativity. Same kinda concept. It's bad but I loved it. Jennifer Hudson sang the spirit out of my body.
EZ: I like the show Nashville for the light it shines on the country music industry and Empire pulls the same sort of focus for the hip-hop music industry.
CJ: The Nashville comparison is great. Both are a little better at the music and the acting than we had any reason to expect, and though things cut a few hairs shy of unbelievable on the regular, I'm willing to follow it where it goes. The characters are robust, the laughs are godlike, Cookie's wardrobe—I'm hooked. Quality black television has been in free fall for years and kooky as Empire is, it's exposure. If they could've pulled this off without snaking some of the Black-ish audience I'd be even happier. Baby steps.
DSF: Baby steps. I'm hoping Empire will continue to escape the burden of representation. I thought people would be upset at Cookie for being kind of ratchet, but I feel relieved they're not reducing her and the other characters in that way.
SHF: It's inappropriate how Black-ish had all my attention and now it doesn't. The marketing strategy seems to be divide and conquer.
DSF: Crabs in a bucket, girl. Black-ish had a pretty awful MLK JR episode. And LOL at the requirement of the MLK special episode.
CJ:Black-ish is so promising. I feel guilty for being incapable of watching both shows at the same time.
DSF: I think Lee Daniels suggested DVR-ing one and watching the other in real time so the ratings still get counted. You might want to fact check me on that.
CJ: This is a good idea but also sounds like an off the top workaround.
DSF: Yeah. I thought it was good that he was supporting a renaissance of black TV, though, which is what we are in. Reality TV in the early aughts really killed black sitcoms but now the TV schedules looking black like the '90s again.
SHF: Let’s get some theories/predictions out of the way.
DSF: 1) Hakeem isn't Lucius' son, 2) Cookie and Boo Boo Kitty might build an alliance against Lucius. That would be a few seasons ahead, of course.
SHF: I think Andre is going to get a gun and kill somebody. Also, I think Gabourey Sidibe's character is Lucius' daughter. Their relationship seems too close, too tender, for there not to be something else there. But this is just wild speculation.
CJ: Kitty is not loyal and she's either sticking for the money or she's waiting for the right moment to pull the jux.
DSF: The bib will come back.
EZ: Cookie and Lucius will bone like old times.
SHD: Cookie is this complicated, larger-than-life matriarch. She’s a Producer/Hitmaker/Manager. She’s busting into boardroom meetings like it's nothing. As a character, I feel like she's the most developed (besides Lucius).
CJ: To me it seems like the show is Cookie's journey. We start with her getting out of prison, we follow her through the attempts to reconstruct her family life and her business life... as much as Empire could be said to be about any one thing, it's Cookie as wife, mother, breadwinner, and instrument of revenge. It's refreshing because there's the urge to make a show about rap revolve around the dudes, as most every other piece of rap TV ephemera has up to date. I was pleasantly moved by that.
DSF: Cookie is also an artist. In fact, she's the artist. I was especially taken by the scene where she crouches over the piano and immediately a song pours out of her. She's almost like an automaton when it comes to making music and sniffing out talent. That's a pretty remarkable representation for this black show, a black woman who is not muse, but maker.
SHF: The most compelling part about Cookie is probably the fact that she takes risks. She's now taking a chance on Jamal, even though at best he sounds like a black David Archuleta.
DSF: I think she sees Jamal as a business opportunity primarily, which is a really delicious perversion of the motherhood trope. Part of what makes Cookie such a thick character to me, what makes the show different from the few other black melodramas that have been on television, is how it resists moralizing. To say Cookie accepts Jamal because she doesn't treat him like Lucius does is to enter into a moralizing bind the writing wants us to resist.
CJ: Cookie's got some work left to do on the PFLAG front, but it's cool to see someone on the show who at least sees Jamal's sexuality as normal. Everywhere else it's an abomination or a liability. He's getting thrown in trash cans by his father (a real Lee Daniels life anecdote, I'm told?) and told that being true to himself will destroy his career, but Cookie sees his truth as something unique and (groan) marketable. I don't know if this show is meant to exist in a post-Frank Ocean music industry or not but that's very new.
DSF: I think the black music industry has always been queer, so that might complicate an understanding of a post-Frank Ocean attitude therein. And I mean queerness in performance.
EZ: Doreen's right in that the show is a good watch because of the frequent moral side steps it takes, but I still see Cookie treating Jamal like a normal person as acceptance. She calls him a f****t in Lucius' presence and refers to Jamal's boyfriend as a woman but she’s still there for him—even in that flashback as a child, acknowledging his difference and affirming him re: the "I got you" scene.
DSF:Empire announced within the first few minutes of the pilot that it was a melodrama, in the classical sense. Music and drama, right? Part of what distinguishes melodramas and soap opera genres is a constantly destabilizing of protagonist and antagonist. I like to think of Cookie as antagonist, sometimes. In that way, Cookie excites me because I know she can switch up anytime. Her "goodness" isn't a plot device like the way Lucius' illness is.
SHF: Lucius' illness is either going to have him burning Empire down to the ground or killing himself. He's crazy, duplicitous, power-hungry. Andre gets his crazy from him. Andre is the odd one out of the brothers. (Side note: Hakeem means just/fair and Jamal means beautiful in Arabic and Andre just means Andre. He’s sketched out to be very boring for a maniacal schemer.)
EZ: Lucius is a sociopath. His sociopathy is a pillar of his character. Something tells me he's going to prison before his ALS kills him, though.
SHF: The first time it really dawned on me that either the writers are brilliant at creating a heightened, unstable reality (they are) or Lucius is the personification of The 48 Laws of Power was when he was giving that rousing, hyperbolic speech about how the music fed him/kept him warm. In that speech, he somehow goes from using his personal narrative to sanitize the scandal of having been a drug dealer to a ranting about the Internet and then he makes this leap in logic to say all of that is why Empire is becoming a publicly traded company.
DSF: We barely get to see black men becoming ill on television or movies. Usually, their blackness is pathology enough. If they must die, they're murdered as retribution for their native criminality. They're shot. They can't languish. Writing a black male character who has the audacity to die slowly and naturally, from a stately, tragic disease named after a beloved white baseball player—it's a new exercise in pathos. Lucius' mourning of himself before he is dead will be luxurious and spacious, no doubt, when the time comes for him to begin mourning. This is a direct challenge to their overwhelmingly white and feminized genre of innocent cancer romance. I'm here for this. Makes me think of Virginia Woolf's essay "On Being Ill". In it, she laments that "illness has not taken its place next to love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature." Yes, I'm extending this to a TV show. While I wouldn't say Empire is setting itself up to be devoted to Lucius' illness, I'm anticipating that the show will take exciting liberties in depicting his agony.
CJ: The illness is a plot device that both humanizes Lucius, an otherwise unstoppable tank of a character, and also, I think, to force his hand. He's like Walter White. He's not freshly "breaking bad" cause they've been running perpendicular to the law for years, but it seems as though he's shirking good business sense in favor of revenge. His unfinished business, these few episodes in, revolves around people, and with the introduction of Judd Nelson's character, people who screwed him over who need one last slap in the face.
SHF: GUYS, DID THE NATION OF ISLAM REALLY KILL LUCIUS' DAD?
CJ: Yeah, that came up.
DSF: I think Lucius calls the NOI racist, too, which was rich.
CJ: I was waiting for blowback from that.
EZ: Lucius is treating his life story as a means to somehow thwart the masses with working Torrent clients and also throw disenfranchised youth who can rap a lifeline. However big Empire is, I'm not sure their business model lines up with their logic to being listed on NYSE, unless they're planning a whole lot more Leviticus franchises a la 40/40.
CJ: Leviticus IS the club name. Leviticus, I hope everyone knows, is the book of the Bible that speaks most explicitly and forbiddingly about homosexuality.
DSF: Pretty ironic a company called Empire is about to go public on the stock exchange. Did you hear Lee Daniels' talk about how a goal of his is to expose homophobia in the black community with the show?
EZ: I read about that this morning, what are all of your thoughts?
DSF: I always think it's a bad idea to write shows like they are PSAs. The show has a real vendetta against black men, in that sense. The weakest writing on the show is when its inflecting the "black men are so homophobic!" sentiment. Empire is black surreal, which is what makes it good. But Lucius' homophobic rants always read like they’re pandering to some white gaze about how black men are so culturally squeamish around gay men. His flamboyant homophobia would do better in a Tyler Perry movie.
CJ:Empire's homophobia always strikes me the way Spike Lee appearances in Spike Lee joints do. You know that whatever is being said is the hallowed moral of the story, and I never like for anything to be spelled out so cleanly as that. I understand Daniels' experience and how it informs his agenda, but this nonsensical idea that black community homophobia is worse than anyone else's is irritating. I wish I knew how we arrived at this a = b = c logic where the black community's closeness to the church sets it in opposition to homosexuality as a rule but more specifically, how these (exaggerated) relationships differ from any other slice of America.
DSF: Let’s talk about the significance of New York City on the show.
CJ: It would've been audacious to have it set somewhere other than New York
City but if these guys are heavy in the rap game, 17 years strong, it's going to be a New York enterprise. Just in terms of industry machinations, I’m not being all WE THE BEST about things.
DSF: Absolutely, New York because of Empire's subject matter. But if we consider the history of the relationship between blackness and geography on television, New York becomes a radical choice. New York finally becomes black, on Empire. We get so-called "hard cities" Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia on black TV shows—but almost never do we get New York. NYC's hardness always had to do with making it through genius, in a way that shut out the possibility of a visual representation of black people reaching that. In real life, New York's the canonical black city for black artistic production. In TV, it's almost always represented as a white place. Sex and the City, Friends, Frasier...
CJ: As a New Yorker, I've struggled to understand this magically white TV New York that isn't just full of incidental minority faces. The math is wrong.
DSF: It's the biggest conspiracy of representation on TV. I think it has to do with the weight of New York and its landmarks as the visual shorthand for relentless cultural ingenuity, and a real investment in keeping that symbolism white. Everyone's tacit acceptance of that conspiracy might have continued if black music hadn't officially unseated Woody Allen's neuroses as the city's most recognizable contribution to American creativity to date. In Empire, New York changes to signify every black city in the country that was instrumental to making hip hop. That's amazing. With rap, with how lucrative and mainstreamed it's become—it can build a black man an empire in the previously whitest city in television-world. Sometimes Lucius says dated things about Corporate America's so-called disdain for hip hop, so while I can't tell if the show's set in 2008 vs. 2015, it's clear Empire begins from the time when black music production is at its zenith.