Disney rap
Controlling the Creative Output
One of the often heard critiques of modern
times is that the information we receive is highly influenced and dominated by ‘the
media’: they not only decide which messages we receive, but also which sides of
the stories we see and how identities of the personalities that are broadcast
by these corporations are represented. The critical point we would like to
raise in this essay, is that the media industries – by which we mean the corporations
that own the media – tend to control the creative output and images that we as
both deliberate and accidental consumers perceive. It is interesting to imagine
what would happen if a certain risqué cultural element would be usurped by a
corporation that from then on would decide the presentation of the former
risqué element. For instance, we could imagine a record label that produces the
Parental Advisory: Explicit Content-sticker approved music of a
gangster-rapper. Then, the record label gets bought by Walt Disney, one of the
big five media conglomerates and becomes a subdivision that has to produce
music in accordance with the Walt Disney seal of approval. As a consequence,
one expects that identity and cultural expression will become compromised. Or
as cultural scholars Havens, Lotz and Tunic put it, media are ‘both a site of
artistic and social expression as well as a business concerned with the
maximization of markets and profits.’[1]
Fenton puts it even more eloquently:
Having
power in or control over media is argued to impact upon the capacity to
determine or influence the contents of the media products and meaning carried
by them. This has grown out of a strictly Marxist perspective which states that
the class which has the means of material production at its disposal has
control, at the same time, over the means of mental production.[2]
Even though material production subsequently
controls and maybe even erodes mental production or capacity, the important
thing to point out here is that, on account of Hesmondalgh, the political
economy is not monolithic; subgenres exist within.[3]
The question remains if these subgenres all cater to one overruling norm issued
by behemoth corporations or that they do actually have some form of
independency. An interesting example is the career of actor and musician Will
Smith. Smith started out as a rapper, mainly in collaboration with DJ Jazzy
Jeff, then gained worldwide fame with the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
(NBC, 1990-1996). The peculiar thing about Smith is that, within the hip-hop
discourse, he has been and remains practically the only hip-hop artist (of that
magnitude) that has a reputation that is not based on what most hip-hop
reputations are based on: violence, profanity, sex, drugs, living life on the
edge, living in the projects et cetera. On his first solo record, Big Willie
Style (1997), not one curse word is uttered; instead the album contains
radio-friendly hits such as ‘Gettin’ Jiggy wit It’, ‘Miami’, ‘Men in Black’ and
a couple of love songs that hinge on R&B. Very safe, one might say. When we
look at Smith’s filmography, there is not one film that even seems to go
slightly beyond stereotypical American pop culture entertainment. The films
that may contain some risqué elements like Bad Boys (1995) or Independence
Day (1996) have a dominant comedic tone or they feature Smith as a world
savior. He only seems to show morally dubious behavior as the adulterous
Muhammad Ali in Ali (2001), but that behavior is excused by virtue of
the fact that Ali is often cited as the greatest boxer of all time. In a
culture where most stars seem to want to get rid of a certain Disney quality or
Disney past (Miley Cyrus for instance), Smith has always seem to be okay with
his family-friendly image.
One
might even say that Smith, with his rap music that doesn’t conform to today’s
standards or to any hip-hop norms from any age in particular, is an outsider
within a certain rigid cultural structure, and is therefore an interesting case
study. In Fenton’s words: ‘to focus largely or exclusively on the structure and
content of media messages and attempt to read off the impact of these messages
cannot possibly interrogate the consequences of mediated culture.’[4]
Within every structure, there are dissonants. The hip-hop hegemony of rugged
lyrics, explicit content gets, in a way, violated by Smith, something the
rapper Eminem reprimanded him for, in a lyrically explicit way, thereby
consciously or unconsciously punctuating the function of mass media within a
‘larger sociological perspective of culture, social structure and social
groups.’[5]
Dialectics come into fruition when Eminem raps in ‘The Real Slim Shady’: ‘Will
Smith don't gotta cuss in his raps to sell records, well I do, so (expletive)
him and (expletive) you too.’[6]
The different way in which Smith and the corporations that he is a part of
organize their cultural production, has a traceable consequence (in this case
in the form of a dialectics that implicitly questions the essence or norms of
hip-hop) for the discourse and representation in the public domain and what
listeners (choose to) consume: the so-called ‘hardcore’ hip-hop of a rapper
like Eminem or the ‘Disneyfied’ hip-hop of Smith.[7]
Sterne underscores this when he writes that:
For
scholars interested in music as a media industries issue, our first analytical
step must be a simple subtraction. When we go looking for unity inside a music
industry, we should instead assume a polymorphous set of relations among
radically different industries and concerns, especially when we analyze
economic activity around or through music.[8]
So, in conclusion, one could say, hardened
cultural structures soften or erode (or harden again, since 2005 was the last
release of a Will Smith album) and culture-creating practices are fluid; within
the hip-hop spectrum two almost opposite poles can exist; or they go in
dialogue with each other via their respective cultural artifacts, thereby
establishing at least an illusion of a critical political economy, uncovering
what cultural scholars Krämer and Bredekamp call ‘silent processes of
knowledge’, which we have tried to exemplify in this article.[9]
Proposition
The Disneyfication of certain segments of
cultural production launches new modes of cultural production and is therefore
desirable.
A. vd B., V. M., J. P.
Bibliography
Timothy Havens, Aamanda D. Lotz & Serra
Tinic (2009), ‘Critical Media Industry Studies: A Research Approach’, in: Communication,
Culture & Critique 2, pp. 234-253.
Sybille Krämer & Horst Bredekamp (2013),
‘Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques – Moving Beyond Text’, in: Theory,
Culture & Society 30 (6), pp. 20-29.
Natalie Fenton (2007), ‘Bridging the Mythical
Divide: Political Economy and Cultural Studies Approaches to the Analysis of
the Media', in: Eoin Devereux (ed.), Media Studies: Key Issues and Debates.
London: SAGE, pp. 7-31.
Jonathan Sterne (2014), ‘There Is No Music
Industry’, in: Media Industries Journal 1 (1), pp. 50-55.
Discography
‘The Real Slim Shady’. Eminem (Marshall
Mathers). The Marshall Mathers LP.
Santa Monica, New York: Aftermath, Interscope, Shady, Goliath. 2000.
Will Smith. Big
Willie Style. New York: Columbia. 1997.
