Dale

This chapter analyzes rapper-turned-pop star Pitbull’s signature affect and phrase dale (literally, give it, but colloquially, go for it) in the context of the 2007 financial crisis. The chapter reads dale as part of the artist’s larger affective strategy of performing joyful excess—appearing primarily as excess consumption and an excessive performance of masculinity. In tracing how Pitbull, ironically, uses excess to complicate capitalism’s focus on both productivity and reproductivity, the chapter examines the relationship between excess and neoliberal capitalism. It proposes that Pitbull’s dale both seizes the present moment in an age of neoliberal precarity, and demonstrates how the very communities most harmed by capitalism also remain indebted (literally) to it.