TEMI DOLLFACE in the video for PATA PATA
I wrote about why I’m obsessed with Temi DollFace’s video for her track Pata Pata. It’s visually delicious (retro fonts, playful + creative graphics, pastel palette) and conceptually seamless (structured around 50’s-style television advertising to housewives), but I love its substance too.
Temi combines a performance of tough/mean hyperfemininity with wide-eyed goofiness, in a way that reminds me a little of Beyoncé’s B.B. Homemaker. It also takes me back to that Jamaica Kincaid quote about her desire to be a woman that looks “proper, but not docile"…
There’s more detail in the post, but it’s great to see a black woman artist employing license with the retro thing. Mainstream treatments of the early-to-mid-1900s give the impression that only white women existed in glamorous spaces or pin-up culture (with white American nostalgia fed by shows like Man Men). Although spaces on tumblr like Black Vintage, VintageBlackGlamour and Nigeria Nostalgia Project do great work contesting that erasure, I love how this video brings the glamorous women pictured on those blogs to life for a contemporary audience.