globalmediaindustries-blog

[globalmediaindustries-blog]

More Life, More Convergence.

Blog entry #1 Global Media Industries

On March 18 2017, Canadian rapper Drake released More Life. Drake described More Life not as an album but rather as a playlist, dubbing it More Life: A Playlist By October Firm. Within its 22 tracks, More Life explores a myriad of different genres and sees the artist collaborate with a wide ranging cast of musicians, such as the London rappers Skepta and Giggs, the Jamaican singer Popcaan, and the South African producer Black Coffee. Drake has always been subject to criticism, but More Life only added fuel to the fire. In the wake of its release, the American online music magazine Pitchfork published an essay titled Mapping Drake’s International Wave-Riding on More Life, explaining how Drake was using the popularity of different artist from around the globe for his own good. In this short essay, I would like to explore these allegations in relation to the concept of media convergence, as explained by Henry Jenkins in Pop Cosmopolitanism: Mapping Cultural Flows in an Age of Media Convergence (2006).

In order to do so, we need to define the term (media) convergence, which not as easy to do. Michael Latzer explains how the term’s definition is mostly an ambiguous one, stating that: “The strength and at the same time the weakness of convergence is its fuzziness and its multipurpose character, which it shares with other successful and widely used terms that bridge disciplinary discourses and research.” (Latzer, 2013, p. 124.) Jenkins agrees, explaining that we should see media convergence as “not an endpoint; rather, it is an ongoing process occurring at various intersections between media technologies, industries, content, and audiences.” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 154.) In his text, Jenkins gives multiple examples of how media convergence works in popular culture, for instance how the American motion picture The Matrix included the work of Japanese manga artists and martial art choreographers from Hong Kong, creating “an absorption of Japanese pop culture influences into the American mainstream.” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 168.) In a way, media convergence is the process of how technological shifts enable cultural cross-overs to create new, global markets for culture, or even influences of a culture, that before were only consumed locally.

This idea is very much present on More Life. According to Sheldon Pearce, the author of the aforementioned Pitchfork piece, More Life “scans like 80 minutes of club music from Canada, American, the UK, the West Indies, and Africa on shuffle. (…) One minute he’s using riddims ascribed to the clan name of Nelson Mandela, the next he’s arm-in-arm with UK rapper Giggs kissing his teeth.” (Pearce, 2017.) What is clear here, is that through More Life Drake takes different musical genres from around the world, and appropriates them for his own global market. Pearce points out that this type of appropriation has at least something to do with Drake’s own place in the world, Canada. Most of the music, maybe even all of the music, that is present on More Life is a form of so-called ‘black music’, be it Reggae, House, Hip-Hop or R&B. And “despite some subtle recoding in sound and slang by region”, says Pearce, “All black culture and music in the wake of the African diaspora shares some similar DNA. (…) Through immigrants, the music and its mannerisms reached Canada, where it has seeped into the very fabric of Drake’s home country.” (Pearce, 2017)

Pearce goes on to explain that Toronto, the Canadian city which Drake is originally from, is a melting pot of Caribbean culture. But to Pearce Drake is nonetheless an outsider to this culture: he explains that Drake has no direct lineage to Caribbean immigrants, and therefore “it would be misrepresentation to call it [West Indian culture] his own.” (Pearce, 2017.) His main allegation throughout the piece is that Drake is ‘wave-riding’, meaning that the music he appropriates has already been made popular locally, and Drake, through his use of misrepresentation, is the one taking credit for it. Clearly, Pearce view of Drake’s way of creating cultural and musical cross-overs is a negative one. In one particular paragraph Pearce writes that:

[Drake is] a swag vampire, a sound poacher, and an identity thief. It’s hard to believe his work as a global ambassador isn’t also mostly self-serving, or at least in service of building his wider OVO brand. In a bit of irony, Drake, who is constantly rapping about people using him for their gain, does exactly that to everyone else. (Pearce, 2017.)

Another musical example of this type of ‘self-serving’ would be Madonna and her use of Indian music. Jenkins writes about Madonna and her use of Bhangra that “as these trends continue, major American media companies seek new models of collaboration with international artists.” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 167.) This type of collaboration, which is at the core of More Life, is something Jenkins dubs ‘corporate hybridity’. According to Jenkins, hybridity is a corporate strategy, “one that comes from a position of strength rather than vulnerability or marginality.” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 167.)

Pearce says that Drake is not an ambassador of the multitude global genres he appropriates, but he only uses them to build his own OVO brand. But the question remains if we can really qualify More Life as a form of corporate hybridity. For an entrepreneur like Drake, business is always around the corner, but maybe he aptly titled More Life not an album, but a playlist – something that doesn’t come from one artist, but is curated, and is inherent to the use of featured artists. As Jenkins points out media convergence is an ongoing process, and also something that, business moves aside, can be the beginning of a more global perspective, maybe even when it's misrepresented.