Young Soul Rebels

With the recent grizzly and strikingly savage murder of a white British soldier by black Islamist terrorists, I decided it was about time I checkout homo negro auteur Isaac Julien’s racially-charged melodrama Young Soul Rebels (1991), a lurid interracial romance and murder mystery story set during the pre-Thatcher year 1977 about what happens when a butt-boy of a black DJ hooks up with an ethno-masochistic white punk in a chaotic multicultural setting full of neo-nazi skinheads, racist Rastafarians, West Indians, and racially ambitious ‘mystery meat’ of all sorts. A work directed by a faggy fellow who has created cinematic works on figures ranging from African Marxist/pseudo-scientist Frantz Fanon to British arthouse alpha-auteur Derek Jarman, Young Soul Rebels is a work that I expected would feature an extremist leftist slant, yet I had no clue that the film would be full of politically correct, cookie cutter caricatures where every indigenous Brit, aside from race-mixers and anarchistic fairies, is portrayed as positively pernicious, if not downright evil in the blackshirt Mosleyite sense. In short, Young Soul Rebels portrays everything that is traditionally and classically British as absolutely odious and outmoded, while portraying interracial Dorian love as the indisputable height of progressiveness and human perfection, thus being a celluloid work that—rather unfortunately—is more relevant today than when it was originally released over two decades ago. Winner of the coveted “Critic’s Award” at the Cannes Film Festival, Young Soul Rebels certainly has a ‘colorful’ aesthetic prowess of European high-camp meets hip-hop vulgarity, which was indubitably utilized by the filmmaker to disguise the surreally retarded sociopolitical bullocks that plagues the film. Part half-ass murder mystery, part pomo period piece, part racially risqué romance, and all agit prop, Young Soul Rebels is a curious celebration of “Anarchy in the U.K.,” but not like the sort of song of the same name by the Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten, but rather the radically racially apocalyptic sort that reminds one that colonizing a rather large segment of the nonwhite world was one of the now-dead British empire’s biggest mistakes, especially if a racial alien can cinematically defecate and culturally debase an adopted nation that has enabled him to get rather rotund and practice his sexual debauchery in safety as opposed to starving to death or being executed for sodomy in some sub-Saharan hellhole. Comparable to William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) in its depiction of a homicidal homo who has stricken fear in the fairy underground and Spike Lee's Summer of Sam (1999) in its libelous portrayal of the white devil and its decidedly degenerate disco soundtrack, Young Soul Rebels is a great example as to what happens when the colored world uses whitey’s art, technology, and kultur against him in what is undoubtedly cultural debasement. 

 The year is 1977 and during a rather dubious trip to a local park for a good old anonymous suck and fuck, a closeted gay black man with a ghetto-blaster boombox named TG (Shyro Chung) tries to get a blowjob from some cocksucking cracker but instead he is brutally murdered by the faceless cocktease of a homicidal homo honkey. Needless to say, TG’s childhood friends, the rather effete yet straight Chris (Valentine Nonyela) and the more masculine yet man-loving Caz (Mo Sesay), who run a pirate radio station together, are rather disheartened by the morbid mysterious murder but their minds soon go elsewhere because, like most young black men, they dream of getting rich and famous and they believe fiddling with vinyls and a turntable will be the way to get there. While Chris, who is a mulatto with a trashy British mudshark mother who smokes joints with her half-caste son, soon falls in love with a taller girl, high-yellow named Tracy (Sophie Okonedo, a woman of half-Nigerian/half-Ashkenazi-Jewish extraction) who works for a major music producer, pure melanin-rich black man Caz falls in love with a naughty and nihilistic white punk named Billibud (Shakespearean actor Jason Durr) who bares a striking resemblance to homosexual English musician Douglas P. (who was once in a Trotsykite punk group called Crisis) of the neofolk group Death In June. Being a poor black playa, Chris is hassled and questioned by blatantly fascistic cops in Gestapo-esque uniforms, the predictably hate-filled leader of whom even calls him a “coon” and makes fun of the fact he wears bright pink socks. Simply because they are sadistic bigots who strut around brazenly like martial leather-fags and brandish badges, at least according to director Issac Julien's logic, the cops attempt to convict Chris of the crime of TJ’s death, but, of course, it was really a weirdo white dude and he has a recording of the killing to prove. Of course, the beautiful black brothas’ are also hassled by nefarious neo-nazi skinheads and member of the ultra-nationalistic National Front because they be hating and discriminating on the beautiful black souls brother as soulless Nordic beasts with an intolerance for marijuana and jigaboo funk. Naturally, in the end, lavender love conquers all and the soul brothers keep strutting.  Clearly, Issac Julien's ideal for a UK utopia is a place where white and black twinks engage in miscegenation and drug-addicted British slag sluts produce bastard mulatto children with green eyes and without fathers.  Clearly, such a world would be highly preferable to a place where stoic white men in sharp uniforms walk around protect and serve.

 All style and no substance, Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels is a melodramatically mundane piece of pseudo-sociopolitical homophiliac afrocentricism that is even less sophisticated than American History X (1998) in its one dimensional depiction of culturally mongrelized race relations of the post-colonial variety, thus making it the celluloid prototype for multicultural-friendly films like This Is England (2006), a similar melodramatic mix of punk, skinheads, and rastas. Undoubtedly, the most interesting and curious aspect of Young Soul Rebels is director Isaac Julien’s rather dubious depiction of the white policemen who, although depicted as evil racists who calls young mulattos “coon,” are clearly eroticized and fetishized as some sick fag-bashing fantasy on the donut-puncher director’s part, sort of like how homocore auteur Bruce LaBruce depicts skinhead-negro relations in Skin Flick / Skin Gang (1999), albeit in a less honest fashion. Considering Julien's depiction of explicit white-on-black leather-faggotry of the Tom of Finland-esque persuasion in his sexually-charged sodomite surrealist short The Attendant (1993), I think it is safe to say that Young Soul Rebels also fetishizes evil whity in a sick sadomasochistic sort of way that makes the films loony leftist political message just seem like a pretext for depicting unattainable white male virility of the ostensibly Occidental white English variety. Undoubtedly someone who was influenced by English arthouse auteur Derek Jarman (War Requiem, The Angelic Conversations), hence why he directed the documentary Derek (2008) about the deceased arthouse superstar auteur, Isaac Julien assembled an 'aesthetist' work with Young Soul Rebels that is first and foremost a piece of racially confused ‘aesthetic fascism’ from the perspective of a Negro fairy than an honest and serious look at anarchic relations in the UK. The fact that Young Soul Rebels won the critics prize at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival is nothing short of cinematic affirmative action because, had a white man directed the same film, it would have not been so critically acclaimed, hence why the film has fallen into relative obscurity today. Indeed, Young Soul Rebels looks like it was directed by a flaming fashion designer, like a gay Spike Lee, who had more of an interest in getting close-ups of the bulge in a young man’s pleather red pants than telling a serious and sophisticated story cinematically.  Indeed, one can only wonder what kind of film Issac Julien would assemble if he made a cinematic work about the recent savage slaughter of Drummer Lee Rigby by two Negro Islamic terrorists, but I am sure it would featuring a coon copulating with a cracker and a butch British bitch with a brown baby.

-Ty E