Lab #2 Critical Cultural Analysis - Analysis of 21 Savages 'A lot' ft. J Cole (Music Video)
Lab #2 Critical Cultural Analysis - Analysis of 21 Savages 'A lot' ft. J Cole (Music Video)
Binary Opposition
The term for pairing of opposites, one always has a more positive value and the other a more negative.
A lot of this contrast was used in the music video for example, Modern/backward, rational/ irrational, order/chaos, stability/ instability, purity and innocence/ impure or polluted, superior/inferior.
The video consistently had binary opposition with the ‘flashbacks’ from calm, elegant, grateful scenes too aggressive, sad, emotional scenes.
The use of semiotics related to the lyrics.
Binary opposition in music videos is used for dramatic effect and to represent the difference and main message of the video/scene.
Poverty - people working in kitchen and prepping food.
Abuse - the man walking out on the woman crying, woman abusing alcohol to cope with issues.
Violence - the gun to his cousins/brothers head, the man in jail.
Gender
How Rap/Hip-Hop have become a culturally accepted way for Black Men to express their emotion/opinion in the mainstream, birthed from the subculture.
21 Savage and the team of creatives - comprised largely by black men ( J. Cole, DJ Dahi, etc.) are using this artform as an outlet, both lyrically and visually
Black Womanhood - The representation of the inequities faced by those within this intersection of race and gender
Crenshaw’s work on Intersectionality and how the music video represents the realities faced by disproportionate amounts of Black women, stories often go untold due to the lack of humanity allotted by the judicial system to Black folks in the diaspora (coloniality).
Susan Bordo's argues we read others bodies and our own as cultural texts.
The concept of “throwing like a girl” and how women are seen as weaker is supported by the showcase/ presumed assumption of domestic violence in the film.
The video supports that the female gender is weaker based on the flashbacks from 21 Savage's cousin/niece/sister. She is flashed back to a man walking out of a room while she is crying and not doing well. It portrays the idea she needs the man, is reliant on him, and they have an abusive relationship.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/women/gender-stereotyping - women are seen as property of their men.
Capitalism
The music video supports the idea that to succeed and do well you are exploited and lose a lot to end up at the top. This perpetuates the idea that financial success does not come easily and there is a significant sacrifice made to get there.
Financial success, but at what cost? Important to consider that financial success does not always come from the sacrifice of the beneficiary. For example, due to the Trans-Alantic Slave Trade and its lasting impacts (coloniality), folks of the African enslaved peoples were exploited for the financial success of their enslavers. These power relations continue to stand today in many, if not all, American institutions.
Class: a system that groups or ranks individuals based on wealth, the idea that if you work hard you will succeed
Marx: saw capitalism as an exploitative system that formulates and maintains social class stratification, criticisms of this theory include: it focuses too much on labor, material production goods, and exploitation, rather than the political economy.
The lyrics “How much money you got?”- sets the tone for the whole song and how much 21 Savage has lost, sacrificed, and been through to get the amount of money he has
How African American people have historically been exploited for economic gain and how 21 Savage is placing himself as now free from class limitations, while understanding that his race relations and former class actively paradoxes the position he is in now.
Racism
Many African American stereotypes can be found in the music video, although there is the contract of a civilized family dinner, alongside the ‘flashbacks/forwards’ support these stereotypes.
Ties to Mark Dery’s Afrofuturism - The idea of exploring the “What if"
Though this music video does not fit under the traditional umbrella of Afrofuturism, I do think it tackles similar questions of the “What If”.
If one is to analyze this video as the “real world” in comparison to the “What if” we could read this video as a means of answering the question “What if colonialism had not happened?”
Roderick A. Ferguson: “race both accounts for the logistics by which institutions differentiate and classify, include and exclude, and names the processes by which people internalize those logics." (relation to ideology)
Ideology: a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.
Stuart Hall: Race is a language, not biology. “Discursive category” “floating signifier”, the meaning behind each race continues to change because they are positioned and represented differently. “There is always a certain sliding of meaning, always something left unsaid about race”
Main question: Are these stereotypes, social norms, and hegemonic ideals reinforced or resisted in the music video? Or both? What are the effects of this representation?
