Baking Bread and Burning Rainbows

Abstract

On her 2014 debut album, Społeczeństwo jest niemiłe (Society is Mean), Polish author Dorota Masłowska introduced audiences to Mister D., an alter ego who brought Masłowska’s trademark cutting social critique to an eclectic mix of hip-hop and pop musical tracks and videos. Analyzing the music video for “Chleb” (Bread) and the accompanying album art, as well as the stand-alone single “Tęcza” (Rainbow), this article demonstrates how Masłowska’s sampling of familiar hip-hop tropes and nationalist narratives exposes the component parts of our everyday and reveals how quotidian performances of gender, sexuality, and nationality combine in the perception of authenticity. This analysis is framed within discourses on sampling, parody, and humor in hip-hop to highlight the critical potential of her play with recognizable types and the subversive potential of “playing the part.” In her visual and verbal collage, Masłowska employs the logics of hip-hop sampling to piece together elements of extant culture and conventions alongside original material to produce a text that speaks to the present while drawing on the past. In so doing, Masłowska’s critical and recombinant performance destabilizes the very idea of the authentic, revealing its artifice and insisting on an art and nation that is open to innovation and recognizes its own construction.