Libro

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 cross- culturally. 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.
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