There are many kinds of freedom, executed and stilled, acknowledged or otherwise. Just as Audre Lorde retorts Black feminism is not white feminism in blackface, so too must we distinguish between liberation as capitalist inclusion and liberation as structural refusal: Black liberation is not Western liberal freedom in blackface. The distinction is not cosmetic but structural. Western liberal freedom seeks entry; Black liberation seeks undoing. 

I think what I mean to say is that abolitionist Black traditions imagine freedom to be a refusal of capitalism as it is an apparatus of our systemic undoing whereas Western liberalism conceives freedom as success within that system, giving rise to the familiar archetype of the persevering white protagonist whose moral fortitude is proven by mastering the system; the widely beloved ‘white man with hubris’ movie trope, the capitalism bildungsroman (kindly see: Marty Supreme). In essence, Western liberal freedom imagines capitalism as an arena to be conquered rather than a pulverising stomach, an apparatus whose acid succinctly breaks us all down.

This article stages a conflict between these two visions of freedom: Tricia Hersey’s vision of rest as resistance to racial capitalism against Pharrell Williams’ Grammys speech during which he calls upon his audience, effectively broader humankind, to “never stop working.” Once considered together, I believe they reveal how hegemony operates through aspiration by elevating exception rather than denying access.

Enter: Pharrell

“We are born knowing how to rest and listen to what our bodies need. It’s second nature and an inner knowing.” 

Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance

The Grammys are not just an awards show, they are a ritual; pedagogical. They teach us how to understand success. This desire to understand success unravels as naturally as puberty, manifestly as a rite to becoming a person. Hersey interrogates the theatre of aspiration in ‘Rest is Resistance,’ positing if we have been consistently exposed and brainwashed by the violence of grind culture since birth, do we really know what rest feels like? I suppose in this way, the very idea of the grind challenges our homeostatic inner knowing, the second nature that tells us “when to quit” and fundamentally makes us human. 

We return to the Grammys as a ritual, its stage ritualising meritocracy by dramatising the fantasy of access with a curious arithmetic: talent plus discipline equals transcendence from your lowly and plebeian existence. Visibility performs the proof of one’s working: it’s the scrap paper of Addison Rae’s carefully architected Hype House fame into superstardom flailing from the side of a truck in the Grammys parking lot; it’s the margin scrawl of KATSEYE’s high intensity K-pop-style training into performing upon one of the most visible institutional stages in entertainment. And so when a Black billionaire stands under that light and says “never stop working,” the message is not coercive, it is widely understood as aspirational because the stage articulates it as so. 

Hegemony, in this context, details the subtle cultural process by which capitalist values become indistinguishable from common sense. The wider reconfiguring of Pharrell’s speech as a site of symbolic labour is how hegemony works, through cultural agreement; through consent.

Are You A Human?

“Release the shame you feel when resting. It does not belong to you.” 

Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance

I did not know what Pharrell Williams looked like up until I took my very first solo trip to New York at 20 years old. My itinerary had led me to the Brooklyn Museum’s “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” featuring Black diasporic artists of the couple’s curation. At the time I had been obsessed with Basquiat and made the mistake of purchasing a necklace of his effect for my then-best friend turned-homoerotic situationship turned-sworn enemy from the Brooklyn Museum gift shop. Ironically enough, Pharrell Williams did not actually feature within this collection, neither as a contributor nor in the Giants exhibition book. He did however grace my timeline whilst in attendance of the exhibition, as the trailer for Williams’ LEGO movie, Piece by Piece had recently dropped. I wondered briefly why he had not contributed, and what this meant; but the thought abruptly and then apologetically withdrew upon searching him up only to discover my knowledge surrounding the source of his fame had been woefully limited to ‘Happy’ and the Despicable Me soundtrack. 

Fame reduces and inflates simultaneously. In truth, you do not need to know what he looks like; the name is enough. The body becomes both larger than life as well as abstracted and thence in embodying this oxymoron, symbolic. Yet Pharrell begins his speech by shrinking himself: “What’s up guys! It’s always awkward for me to sit through these [like] montages. [It’s like] I don’t know how y’all feel, some of y’all feel, but like for me, it’s like listening to your voicemail over like a loudspeaker.” He reminisces about waking up at five in the morning to catch MTV. He calls Q-Tip “Teacher.” In a not at all incidental rhetorical structure, Pharrell locates himself within African American culture, constellated with ‘awkward’ verbal softeners and a self-flagellating humour that wears the cunning of cAptcha screen: proving his humanity to us if only so we might in return forfeit our own to his instruction. It is only after codifying his Blackness and relatability that he offers the command: “And listen, never stop working. Stop […] doing anything else but working. Work, man. Because […] I’m 52, I get to do this everyday. I love what I do.”

Against Hersey’s exhortation to release the shame you feel when resting, Pharrell’s speech challenges us to reclaim that shame. Not by condemning rest outright, or even mentioning the very concept of rest, but by reframing tirelessness as virtue. This schema is deliberately tricky. If rest is refusal, what does it mean when success stories reaffirm tireless labour devotion, dusk till dawn ethic, as liberation? Williams provides us an answer where he reframes grind as opportunity in his speech: “If you do what you love every day you get paid for free.” Here, endless labour becomes moral heroism, fiscal opportunity and even love. Here, in the chiasmus that situates rhetorical stress upon “paid for free”, labour and pleasure are collapsed, and profit and love inextricably commingled; we are invited to dream up capitalism with a seamless alignment between desire and compensation.

Unfortunately, the truth is that Pharrell’s speech works because it resonates. Because we already believe it. Success is enticing and, further to that, we want to be the exception. Capitalism does not invent that impulse; it amplifies and monetises it.