Black Bart Simpson Meets Obama

If there is a more music-savvy clothing line than Mishka, we haven’t heard about it. We’ve already blogged here about the Brooklyn-based streetwear company’s excellent Kraftwerk- and Wire-inspired knits. In the time since, they released an online exclusive tee-shirt celebrating Barack Obama’s inauguration — perhaps the best piece of Obama merch out there.

Why is it so good? Because of its oddball hodgepodge of a cartoon Young Jeezy, blue Lamborghini, Obama...and Black Bart Simpson.



The first three elements nod, of course, to Jeezy’s “My President is Black.” But Black Bart Simpson? Inspired! If you lived in or near an urban area in the ‘90s, you no doubt saw the black version of Bart emblazoned on all sorts of bootleg gear. (Related: hip-hopified, backwards-jeans-wearing Looney Tunes characters and leather, Jamaican flag-adorned Batman medallions – readers with images of said items, please holler!)

Was Black Bart a cynical marketing ploy on the part of black-market hustlers — something like those McDonald’s ads that say ‘holler at a Big Mac, baby — you gotta hit dat’? Was he a brilliantly strange example of PoMo appropriation and symbolic diffusion? Did he often edge uncomfortably close to racial caricature? All three. Here, a brief, Google-Image-Search-aided tour of Black Bart’s greatest hits.