Looking at life narratives, and all the different forms they may take, whether it be counter-narrative, memoir, autobiogrpahy, or biography, similar elements and abstractions seem to be influential across the board. When Professor McNeill, our professor in ASTU, gave us the idea of writing this blog post about musicians, and the life narratives they produce, I thought it would be interesting to think about and look into not just the actual books and stories they write themselves, but songs they produce that in turn have a life narrative aspect to them, and relate to the abstractions we have studies in class.

When looking at songs produced by many of the popular artists of today, I see similar ideas to what we have been studying in class arise. Some examples of these are mis/representation, community, and silence. To see how these abstractions fit into the music scene, and in particular, the rap scene, I inspected two specific artists: Joey BADA$$, Kendrick Lamar.

Looking at the subjects and focal points of songs by Joey BADA$$ and Kendrick Lamar, talk about misrepresentation of African-American individuals and their mistreatment is uncovered. Here are some lyrics from the song “Like Me” by Joey BADA$$ that serve to illustrate these issues,

Cause every time I make a move they be sweating me
They want another black man in penitentiary

It’s even hard for that man standing next to me
Cause he could catch a bullet that was really meant for me

It’s like every step bring me close to destiny
And every breath I get closer to the death of me

I’m just tryna carry out my own legacy
But the place I call home ain’t letting me

Here, Joey attempts to uncover silences and display misrepresentations of black people in America, by bringing light to police brutality within his own life and community. Watching the music video (WARNING, explicit, clean version here), a part displays Joey being shot and killed by police officers, but then coming back to life. When he rises, he begins to walk the streets of New York City and sees all those that have been killed due to police shootings, bringing them back to life as he passes by. This song shares similarities to what Kendrick Lamar does in the first few lines of his hit song “Alright” (WARNING, explicit, clean version here),

Uh, and when I wake up
I recognize you’re lookin’ at me for the pay cut

But homicide be lookin’ at you from the face down

What Mac-11 even boom with the bass down

Here, Lamar references people looking at him for the “pay cut”, referencing the industry and its obsession with cash but not care, only caring about Lamar because of the money he returns to them due to what Schaffer and Smith would arguably describe as the commodification of his life (11). In the second two lines, he references police brutality and killings in America, speaking for the black community who is at more risk than any other racial group to be a victim of gun violence. Here, Lamar attempts to uncover what Carter would describe as a “forced silence” (Carter 218), which is created due to the presence of institutional racism in the US, or what Jennifer García and Mienah Sharif would describe in their article, ““Black Lives Matter: A Commentary on Racism and Public Health”, as “salient structural racism” (1). This forced silence is also a direct relation to the pressing issue of media representations and their dominant frames of focus (Jiwani & Young 902), which seem to still exclude, or portray black people in worse ways then white people, as seen in this article. What I find extremely interesting is Lamar’s acknowledgement of this silence, as he makes a reference to a Mac-11, a type of firearm, which is silenced. I believe the silence of the gun serves to reference the fact that black people in the states are in a state of silence.

These two songs serve as examples of the ability of artists to use music, lyrics, and film as a forms of life narrative, describing their own lives, while also those of a more general community. Other examples lie in an abundance of works, including more personal ones, such as King Krule’s Rock Bottom, Ceiling, and Cementality, which describe a multitude of internal struggles with his own mind (worth a listen), or in Bob Marley’s Crazy Baldhead, where he speaks more generally of his family’s history in America, and the slave trade.

Works Cited:

García, Jennifer Jee-Lyn, and Mienah Zulfacar Sharif. “Black Lives Matter: A Commentary on Racism and Public Health.” American Journal of Public Health 105.8 (2015): E27-30. ProQuest. Web. 29 Feb. 2016.

Jiwani, Yasmin, and Mary Lynn Young. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.4 (2006): 895-917. ProQuest. Web. 29 Feb. 2016.

Schaffer, Kay and Sidonie Smith. “Conjunctions: Life Narratives in the Field of Human Rights.” Biography 27.1 (2004): 1-24. JSTOR. Web. 2 Oct. 2015.

Following the presentations our classes produced, I was very impressed. I think the mediums in which the groups created their projects were very effective, each format gave me a great insight into the finished project. I found a particular interest in the infographic produced by Emily, Anna, Mishal, and Emma. It seemed that every element of the project was symbolic of, and greatly connected to the topic of which they studied, The Chung Collection. The Chung Collection was created to provide a background for Canadians into Chinese immigration, so they can better understand the “struggles and joys of those who have come before them” (The Chung Collection). I think that the infographic, displaying a railroad linked to a series of important events related to Chinese immigration, was extremely effective. Along with their work, I think the rest of the projects did a great job of displaying a gap they had uncovered within the archives.

For this week, I have decided to look at the skewed frame of focus of which media outlets consistently harness in order to place stories of marginalized peoples further in the margins, and evaluate how these frames seem to further isolate these groups from joining into a mainstream thought. After looking at the article, “When The Media Treats White Suspects And Killers Better Than Black Victims”, I was astounded by the ways in which media seems to portray white people who have committed, or are suspects of committing horrible atrocities, as better than black victims. I found that the prevalence of this phenomena relates into Jennifer England’s ideas of hyper-visibility and invisibility of which are discussed in Yasmin Jiwani and Mary Lynn Young’s article, “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse”. In this article, the idea of hyper-visibility is correlated with “deviant bodies” and invisibility is correlated with “victims of violence” (899). As seen in “When The Media Treats White Suspects And Killers Better Than Black Victims”, the ideas of hyper-visibility and invisibility can be taken to a new level, with invisibility being able to be linked to white suspects and killers, and hyper-visibility being able to be linked to black victims. In the cases seen in the article, even though black individuals were being displayed in the media not because of a crime they committed, but rather because they were victims, deviance was still in some way tied into the situation, making faults from their past hyper-visible. At the same time, the individual who was at fault for the crime, or murder in most cases, was often seen as invisible. In the case of the article about the shooting of Sgt. Manuel Loggins Jr., the thoughts of the police officer who shot him were displayed, but only in positive light. Sgt. Manuel Loggins Jr. received little acknowledgement, and what he did receive in the article was mostly thoughts from the police officer who thought he was going to steal two young girls, who were actually his daughters. Just the thoughts of the officer display how prejudice is present in our society, as prejudgment of Loggins was obviously present. Rather than any negative light being shed on the officer, he was swiftly moved past, as if invisible. If the officer were black, and the suspect were white, how would the situation have been displayed? Another example lies in the article about Julius B. Vaughn, who was found slain in his car at the age of 19. The article makes his past hyper-visible, displaying him as a deviant body, while investigations into who killed him are totally left out, invisible.

In these cases, even past acts by victims of violent crimes are displayed as hyper-visible, leading into their further marginalization, while white suspects and killers are in a way viewed as invisible, further leading to the marginalization of the black victims of many of these crimes, due to the medias negative focus on them. The presence of this issue in the media causes me to wonder how and in what way we will be able to make a change to the way marginalized groups are displayed in media. It seems that institutionalized racism is very much present and a real threat, but I’m hopeful that soon, hopefully with our generation, many of the issues of racism can be settled fixed.

Jiwani, Yasmin, and Mary Lynn Young. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.4 (2006): 895-917. ProQuest. Web. 10 Feb. 2016.

“The Chung Collection.” The Chung Collection. Web. 10 Feb. 2016. <http://chung.library.ubc.ca/node>.

Wing, Nick. “When The Media Treats White Suspects And Killers Better Than Black Victims.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 14 Aug. 2014. Web. 10 Feb. 2016.