The music video is a product which possesses cultural and social significance. It has a comparison with other music videos allowing for an analysis of the contexts in which they are produced and consumed.

Common which is the rapper and writer, was born March 13, 1972 (age 49 years), South Side, Chicago, Illinois, United States.
He has a net worth of £45 million and was the first rapper to win an academy award.

A subculture is a working-class youth culture, unified by shared tastes in style, music and ideology. It also has a solution to collectively experienced problems and finally a form of resistance to cultural hegemony.

– Hegemonic: dominant, ruling-class, power-holders
– Hegemonic culture: the dominant culture
– Cultural hegemony: power, rule, or domination maintained by ideological and cultural means.
– Ideology: worldview – beliefs, assumptions and values

Antonio Gramsci is a Italian philosopher writing in the 1930s

Cultural hegemony functions by framing the ideologies of the dominant social group as the only legitimate
ideology.

In the 1970s, a group of cultural theorists in Birmingham applied Gramsici’s theories to post-war
British working-class youth culture
● Looked at working class cultures like the teddy-boys, mods, skinheads, and punks – subcultures
unified by shared tastes in fashion, music and ideology.
● They argued argued that the formation of subcultures offered young working class people a solution
to the problems they were collectively experiencing in society.

Lyrics:

“We let go to free them so we can free us”

“They stop, search and arrest our souls”

“Instead of ‘nigga’ they use the word ‘criminal'”

Postcolonialism:
postcolonialism was thought as a distinct category in the 1990s with the target to undermine the universalist claims that literature has a timeless and universal significance.

The link between culture, imperial power and colonialism:
“the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism“

 Orientalism (1978) alongside Culture and imperialism  (1993) are key texts written by the respected academic.

Edward Said – known for the book “Orientalism” 1978, he was a critic of the cultural representations that are the bases of orientalism.
The conclusion of Edward Said’s theory was that Western writings depicted Orient as an irrational, weak, feminized ‘Other’.

Jacques Lacan, The ‘other‘
“we cannot actually see ourselves as whole, we use a reflection to understand who we are / who we are not.”
Lacan proposes that infancy this first recognition occurs when we see ourselves in a mirror.
representations of the east/ the orientation, the other are constructed through a lens of western colonial power.