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.
Released in 2016. The genre is hip-hop/rap
Letter to the free’ is in black and white as the marches were a non-violent protest to demonstrate the desire of black Americans to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
Common
Common is an American hip-hop artist, actor, and activist who became a mainstream success in the early 21st century.
He is known for intelligent and positive lyrics that were performed in a spoken-word style.
A Grammy winner, Common has also turned to acting, as seen with roles in projects. For the latter film, he and vocalist/musician John Legend have won a Golden Globe and an Oscar for the song “Glory.”
Common made his album debut with Can I Borrow a Dollar? An artist known for often thoughtful, verbose lyricism and exploring varied sounds
Lyrics from letter to the free:
‘Freedom (Freedom)
Freedom come (Freedom come)
Hold on (Hold on)
Won’t be long (Won’t be long)’
:Shows that black people will come together to fight for equal rights and work hard to get it as soon as they can.
‘Instead of ‘n****’ they use the word ‘criminal’ ‘
:He’s saying that a lot of white Americans believe that people of colour are instantly criminals due top their skin colour.
‘The same hate they say will make America great again’
:White people think that to ‘make America great again’ white people should be superior to black people
‘Investing in injustice, fear and long suffering’
:American’s are paying to make ‘America great again’ at the cost of Black people suffering.
Postcolonialism
postcolonial criticism challenges the assumption of a universal claim towards what constitutes ‘good reading’ and ‘good literature’; questioning the notion of a recognised and overarching canon of important cultural texts – book, poems, plays, films etc – much of which is institutionalised into academic syllabi.
ORIENTALISM:
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 imperialism
Edward Said Culture and Imperialism, 1993: xiii
As a cultural critic, Said is known for the book Orientalism (1978), a critique 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’.