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Letter to the Free, Moving Image, Music Video, Postcolonialism

Letter to the free

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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.

This is a targeted CSP and needs to be studied with reference to two elements of the Theoretical Framework (Media Language and Media Representation) and all relevant contexts

Common is an Oscar and Grammy award winning hip/hop rap artist who wrote Letter to the Free as a soundtrack to The 13th – a documentary by Ava DuVernay named after the American 13th amendment (the abolition of slavery). 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 (e.g.: Black Lives Matter). The product can also be considered in an economic context through the consideration of if and how music videos make money (through, for example, advertising on YouTube).

What needs to be studied? Key Questions and Issues

Media Language

Detailed study of Letter to the Free should help students to develop an understanding of how music video can serve a range of functions while communicating multiple meanings.
Analysis should include:
• Mise-en-scene analysis
• Cinematography
• Semiotics: how images signify cultural meanings
• Aesthetics

Narrative

• How does Letter to the Free appeal to its target audience?
• How is the narrative being constructed by the song lyrics reinforced?
• How does the narrative position the audience?
• How can the narrative invite a range of responses?
• What pleasures does the narrative offer the audience?
• How is the narrative incorporating views and ideologies?
• What is the role of Common in the narrative?

Genre

• Identification of the conventions of the Performative music video.
• How music videos serve the needs of media producers
• How music videos meet the expectations of audiences
• Genre theory including Neale


Media Representations

Letter to the Free explicitly focuses on the history and contemporary experience of African Americans and allows for an exploration of the effect of social, cultural and political context on representations of ethnicity.
• 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

Theories

  • The idea of culture as a site of political struggle (re: Jodie’s presentation for Ghost Town see below)
  • The the theory of hegemony – Gramsci
  • Theories of representation including Hall
  • Drawing on theories of Postcolonialism (Gilroy)
  • Theory of the Public Sphere – Habermas

Key Concepts:
● Cultural resistance
● Cultural hegemony
● Subcultural theory

The Idea of Resistance and Political Protest:
● When we first think about political protest, what comes to mind?
○ Attempts to change to laws or legislation
○ Organised political movements
○ Public protests
○ Petitions, marches
● However, we can look at political protest in terms of:
○ Cultural resistance
○ Everyday people
● Why look at cultural resistance?
○ Overt political protest is uncommon. When it occurs, it often results in a backlash.
○ Even if overt political protest does results in changes in legislation, it won’t necessarily change public
opinion.
○ Culture is what influences people’s hearts, minds and opinions. This is the site of popular change.
Key idea: the political, personal and cultural are always intertwined

Common LYRICS

Pages: 1 2
Ghost Town, Letter to the Free, Postcolonialism, Representation, Theory

postcolonialism

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An overview:

This post is for students (and teachers) who would like some resources – videos, quotes, theorists, key texts, key words etc to help them think about the topic of POSTCOLONIALISM, which may appear in a range of creative, media, culture, communications, English, History and other courses.

Overall, this is a topic that concerns IDENTITY and REPRESENTATION. In other words, where does our identity come from? How is our identity formed? How do we understand our own identity and how is our identity represented in the local, national and global media? You can look at another post that looks at identity, representation and the self. But here it is specifically looking at identity and representation through the lens of Empire and Colonialism.

The Shadow of Slavery

Reaction and Reform?

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Notes, Postcolonialism, Representation, Theory

Paul Gilroy – Post cOLONIAL THEORY

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Brought race into the societal divide and changes in the 1980s through his book ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’ ; he highlighted how black youth cultures represented cultural solutions to collectively experienced problems of racism and poverty

Racial Otherness

  • His book highlights the anxieties of regarding immigrant behaviour in the post war period.
  • He suggests the that the public’s association of the immigrants which the living conditions produced a series of racial representations.
  • `Media Stories began associating the black community with assaults, muggings, and violence during the 1980s and 70s
  • Such representations stigmatised the immigrant black community – constructing them as a racial ‘other’ in the predominantly white world of 1950s Britain

Legacy of the British Empire and Identity

We live in ‘morbid culture of a once-imperial nation that has not been able to accept its inevitable loss of prestige’ – After Empire, 2004 – Gilroy

  • Gilroy argues that the British are undergoing a national identity crisis as a result of the fall of the British Empire
  • The immigrant population has become a symbol that constantly reminds the UK of its loss of global power – they are a visual representation of what Britain once was and once had
Postcolonialism, Representation

Paul Gilroy- POST COLONIAL THEORY

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Racial Otherness:

  • underlying presence within print media during 1970s-80s arguing that criminalised reputations of black males often stigmatised the black community.
  • wrote the book ” There ain’t no black in the union jack”
  • anxieties regarding immigrant behaviour in the UK after WW2 in which post-war wave of immigration from the West Indies.
  • draws attention to “Lurid newspaper reports of black pimps living off immoral earnings of white women”
  • produced racial representations that were “fixed in a matrix between the imagery of squalor and that of sordid sexuality”

Post Colonial melancholia- the deep rooted shame felt as a result of the loss of the British empire. In media the loss is deflected through nostalgia and anxieties surrounding British identity.

The story of UK race relations post W.W. 2- talks about the worries of immigrant behaviour in the post-war wave of immigration from the West Indies. Public associated these immigrants with the substandard living conditions.

Legacy of the empire- Gilroy suggests we live in “morbid culture of a once-imperial nation that has not been able to accept it’s inevitable loss of prestige”. British are undergoing a crisis of national identity. Empire immigrants and their descendants, is argued to be a visible representation of British power as it once was.

The Search for Albion – Albion England is nothing more than a distracting fantasy that disguises the reality of what Britain is really like – crippled by regional poverty and an ever-widening economic social divide.