"Mój ziom się powiesił w Sylwestra"
"My homie hanged himself on the New Year’s Eve"

Self-destruction of the young upper classes in the work of Mata and the birth of patointelligentsia

Author(s): Maciej Grzenkowicz
Subject(s): Cultural history, Studies of Literature, Sociology, Film / Cinema / Cinematography, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: rap; popular culture; suicide; social inequalities; Michał Matczak
Summary/Abstract: Mata is one of the most popular rappers in Poland and a voice of young Polish upper classes. This article describes his history and characterizes his work, analyzing his songs in order to find the main self-destructive behaviours and reasons for them in Mata’s discourse. The author lists two main types of behaviour – suicide ideation with suicide attempts and extensive use of psychoactive substances – and two main reasons, which are the family relations and the hegemonic pressure to be productive. He also interprets Mata’s works as a proposal to form of a social class alternative to the contemporary intelligentsia, that is: patointelligentsia, which, by its critical approach towards contemporary cultural-political hegemony would be able to lead to the dialogue and improvement of the situation of the youth.

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