Benjamin Franklin’s smiling face even provides slippery carpeting for Gotti’s throne room and the red, windowless, oddly well-lit rake-room that Gotti seems to have somewhere in his house.Įven more evocatively, especially because the video seems to feature universally black actors, the undisputed connection that Gotti makes between the added accumulation of free capital and homeownership must be situated within its American racial context-a context in which blacks currently have lower homeownership rates than average due to a variety of factors (among them, historical discrimination). They litter what is ostensibly his back yard, float on top of his swimming pool, and hang from his trees. Note how free capital is consistently connected to the setting of the home throughout “Rake It Up.” Hundreds line Gotti’s front lawn. First, in Gotti’s formulation, one must have access to the outcome of the American dream (here, represented by homeownership-lawns, fences, homes) second, and only after the achievement of the American dream, one may access easy American capital (the subtle motif of those Benjamins). What is the message here? What is the weight of Gotti’s artistic vision? What Gotti is doing here is subtly ingenious: Juxtaposing images of America-specifically imagery of the American dream-with money that grows on trees and, in a reformulation of that ancient idiom, money that grows from grass, produces a highly specific vision of the way that capital is accumulated in America. Lining the meticulously manicured lawns and modest front lawn trees are hundred-dollar bills-strewn haphazardly, and as the video develops, raked ineffectively. However, Gotti is reformulating the average through the careful composition of his scene. The video opens innocuously enough-on an average American street, with average identical American homes, average American white fences, average American front lawns, and slightly oversized (read: average) American rakes. The high intellectual thought, the unencumbered attention to detail, lovingly wrenched from Gotti’s artistic soul and poured into the composition of the song’s visual accompaniment, is nothing short of true inspiration for every ambitious American artist.
Or perhaps, as Gotti implores us to think, the two are not mutually exclusive. Yo Gotti’s “Rake It Up”-despite seemingly being a paean to lazily refusing to pick up your money in a strip club-is a representation of the American dream.
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