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MEDIA LITERACY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE 1.1 Analysing Empire State of Mind Strategies, Debates and Good Practices The music video Empire State of Mind by Jay- Z and Alicia Keys was directed by Harold “Hype” Williams and released on October 30 th 2009. The song was rated by MTV one of the best songs of 2009 and gained commercial success worldwide. In this section of the paper we look closely at the signs and signifying practices in our case study and the role they play in intercultural communications. The purpose for interrogating what is being shown by the media and the entertainment industry is that in media culture nothing is casual. Careful decisions, scripts and rules legitimize who is allowed to exercise power and who is not, who may speak and who must be silenced, which codes of behavior are validated or invalidated. To proceed with our scrupulous interrogation, the questions kept in mind throughout the media literacy analysis were the following: What is the role of media messages? Who paid for the media? Whose interests are promoted? Which storytelling techniques are used? In which context is the media message produced? Is the media message trustworthy? Are media representations harmful? What are their social effects? How do they influence audience reception? Whose stories are being told? Who gets to speak? Who is the media representing? Who is being targeted? Who is spoken? Before tracing the links between east and west, one must acknowledge that this music video is already in itself a product of intercultural communication. The hip hop song merges multiple music genres, electro pop and orchestral pop, Jay- Z raps in African American vernacular English, welcomes people to the “melting pot”, refers to the “Dominicanos” (Dominicans), intersects multiple literary styles and brings the past into the present by referring to icons such as Africa Bambaataa (known as the godfather of hip hop and founding member of the Muslim- influenced youth music organization Zulu Nation in the United States during the 70s), Bob Marley, Italian American filmmaker Robert De Niro, and 45
MEDIA LITERACY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE Strategies, Debates and Good Practices alluding to Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” famous verse “If I can make it here/ I can make it anywhere” (with the difference that “since Jay-Z made it here/ he can make it anywhere). This visual autobiography is intercultural in its text, music genre and cultural references, but also because of its fame, wide international distribution and outreach. After closely analyzing the video in its totality, we extracted cultural codes considered problematic and investigated the implications of exporting and sharing them crossculturally. Our analysis has then shifted to Thai people’s understanding and appropriation of western cultural codes and their subversion and integration of the latter within eastern culture. The music video Empire State of Mind opens with black and white picture shots of iconic places in New York that follow the music beat. The illustrations are the foreground of Jay- Z’s life and his experience of growing up in Brooklyn (“Yeah, Imma up at Brooklyn”) and making it big in the city where all dreams can come true (“now I live on Billboard”). Signs ingrained in our collective imaginaries such as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, skyscrapers, Broadway, Manhattan, the Memorial World Trade Center, Harlem, the Statue of Liberty, the New York Yankees, commercial culture, McDonalds and Coca-Cola advertisements bring us back (despite we are not Americans) to our shared cultural codes of what USA “is” and how the American dream has been assembled, packed and exported worldwide. Media culture and celebrities are powerful ambassadors of nations’ cultures and values. In this case, Jay- Z transforms New York into the symbol for United States, modernity, western civilization and progress. The emotional transfers used, the glamour and hype of the city, celebrities, being macho, tough, hypermasculine, rich, “cool”, sexy, stylish and so on, must not be taken for granted, rather, as relevant cultural references, they must be analyzed to understand their impact on people and the wider social order. It is not the purpose of this paper to investigate in depth the politics of gender, sexuality, racism and identity in hip-hop culture; however, the work of Patricia Hill Collins (2004), Jason Kratz, Sut Jhally, Byron Hurt (2008) and those who investigated the relationship between gender, media, culture and identity were relevant to our analysis. As Elaine Richardson (2007) maintains, Commercial rap videos provide a dissemination of hegemonic images of black youth culture throughout the world. These images are decontextualized from their roots in slavery and its legacy of racial rule, and are repackaged by mass media and pop culture, helping to reproduce the hegemonic ideologies and replicate social inequality. (p.790) In this media literacy project we investigated the extent to which Thai rappers wear the brand of black masculinity and adapt images, styles and poses of black youth culture in Thailand through hip hop music videos. We acknowledge that such performances shape culture and identity and support a white capitalist patriarchal order that fosters social inequalities and is indeed problematic crossculturally. 46
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