Music Video – Letter to the Free is a product which possesses cultural and social significance. It will invite comparison with other music videos allowing for an analysis of the contexts in which they are produced and consumed.
Common is an Oscar and Grammy award winning hip/hop rap artist who wrote Letter to the Free as a soundtrack to The 13th which is a documentary.
His output is highly politicised, existing in the context of a variety of social and cultural movements aimed at raising awareness of racism and its effects in US society. For example Black Lives Matter.
• Representation of ethnicity, with focus on how Common is a black man exploring black culture-specific issues.
• Use of specific historical and contemporary experience to construct a political narrative and argument
• How representations invoke discourses and ideologies and position audiences
• Representation of gender within the video and in the context of wider representations of women in the music industry
• Representation of place
• Common as celebrity persona
Postcolonialism
The arguments around postcolonial critical thought ‘constituted a fundamentally important political act’ (MacLoed, 200: 16)
Postcolonial critical thought emerged as a distinct category in the 1990’s, with an aim to undermine the universalist claims that ‘great literature has a timeless and universal significance [which] thereby demotes or disregards cultural, social, regional, and nations differences in experience and outlook’ (Barry, 2017: 194).
postcolonial criticism challenges the assumption of a universal claim towards what constitutes ‘good reading’ and ‘good literature’;
The Link between culture, imperial power & colonialism….
the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialismEdward Said Culture and Imperialism, 1993: xiii
‘In this view, the outlying regions of the world have no life, history or culture to speak of, no independence or integrity worth representing without the West.‘ (Said, 1993: xxi)
orientalism
How people with power can change the way the general public view certain things like religions and race.
Jacques Lacan- The “other”
Lacan is a type of philosopher. You never actually see yourself you only ever see a reflection of yourself, so how do you know who you are?
In his book Orientalism, Edward Said, points out that ‘the Orient has helped to define Europe (Or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. most crucial for postcolonial critical thinking, it is possible to identify a process whereby REPRESENTATIONS of – the East /the Orient / the ‘Other’ – are CONSTRUCTED through the lens of WESTERN COLONIAL POWER
The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.
Edward Said & Jacques Lacan
Said explained that people with power influences the way we thing and Lacan said that we don’t actually know who were are as we’ve only ever seen the reflection of ourselves.