James Brown, Living in America, 1985
This 1985 track by James Brown is an obvious choice to represent
eighties American culture through music videos. The song certainly appears to
be a celebration of all that America was at that time, as indicated by the very
first image we see in the music video – a full three seconds of huge fireworks
designed to show us that living in America appears to be one big celebration.
At the start of the song Brown references the notion that America is a
place where anything is possible, the place where dreams can come true,
‘there’s no destination too far’, he sings metaphorically about the
superhighways, and the place where self-discovery is possible, almost without
even trying, ‘somewhere on the way you might find out who you are.’ Whilst hearing these lyrics we see a
selection of images that are clearly chosen to represent America’s greatness;
the first image is the New York skyline with the WTC buildings standing tall in
the centre of the screen. Next we see an
extensive farmland with two shiny grain silos, cleverly offering an agrarian
reflection of the NYC skyline and its two tall shiny towers. The video then
shows a series of images which are cut into each other at super-speed, giving a
real sense of life whizzing by. These images include day and night stills of American
cities, and the depiction of the busy-ness of everyday life. To really emphasise the intensity and speed,
Brown uses sped-up films of people going about their everyday lives, for
example, using the subway, eating in diners and driving on super-highways. In amongst these shots are intermittent cuts
to Brown’s band and dancers, and because the song featured in the movie, Rocky IV, the video also includes cuts
to scenes from the movie.
As this video progresses, the sped-up scenes begin to include increasingly
repetitive aspects of daily life such as people clocking into and out of a factory,
a massive IT suite with very many white collar workers, several production
lines and workers in the stock market, again all broken up by images of very
shiny American cities.
The movie, Rocky IV is a deeply patriotic tale of boxer Rocky Balboa’s
heroic finding of himself through his love of America and disdain for USSR and
Brown’s lyrics and video certainly walk us through a whistle-stop tour of all
that is great about the super shiny ‘Promised Land’. However, underneath the
glitzy veneer is a country where, to use Brown’s own lyrics, ‘you might have to
walk a fine line’ because ‘everybody’s working overtime’. The suggestion here is that America may not
be the Promised Land that it appears on the surface. Brown even alludes to the eighties trend of
using drugs to manage the long working hours and heavy demands of eighties
culture, referring to ‘the hard roll’ and ‘the hard line’. The super-fast speed of the video is perhaps
also designed to invoke a sense of the effect of drug use.
It is interesting that the vast majority of Brown’s performers are black.
Somehow this only serves to make the erroneous nature of this representation of
America even more apparent, and it would seem that this has been deliberate on
Brown’s part as throughout the whole video, only one of the scenes depicting
daily life features a single black person. Given the history of blacks in
America and the systemic racism that exists even now, and which was entirely
more overt in the 1980s, it could be presumed that Brown was making a statement
about the colour line through this depiction of ‘white’ America which is
ultimately linked to progression and the growth of industry and the city,
versus ‘black’ America, which has music in its soul and is therefore somehow
more real and truthful, indeed, more soulful.
The live performance by James Brown which forms the last part of the
video in particular, is a spectacularly glitzy and patriotic show of American
greatness that is clearly designed (as indicated by the presence of a boxing
ring complete with Russian boxer) to speak to the Rocky movie. Every inch of the massive stage is covered
either by red, white and blue, or by gold, and the Star Spangled Banner is
draped across a backdrop of gold lights that form the presidential seal. Vast numbers of dancers in flag-based costumes
adorn the stage and the overall effect is really one big party.
In spite of the seemingly celebratory nature of this song, Brown is
really making some wounding comments about America, which are beautifully reflected
by the use of the 1980s image of New York. Somehow, the fact that the twin
towers have been used in this video to illustrate America’s greatness truly
highlights the degree to which this is a distorted representation of what
America was during the 1980s. Watching
the video post 9/11 the audience is acutely aware that the beautiful NYC
skyline can be brought crumbling to its knees in less than an hour, showing
just how vulnerable America really is, and that with little penetration beyond
the initial veneer, the notions and ideas we might have about America’s
greatness will literally collapse.
Beyonce,
Formation, 2016
Systemic
racism in western culture is so deeply embedded in the foundations of our
existence that I believe it is highly unlikely that it will have been even
fully addressed let alone eradicated by 2046.
When a student of 2046 is asked to identify a video which represents
American life thirty years ago, it is likely that Beyonce’s Formation video
will be used as a depiction of how, in 2016, celebrity was working hard to take
a stand against institutionalised racism and police brutality.
Indeed,
despite the very contemporary style of her video, Beyonce is drawing on many
historical influences including the female Black Panthers, a group which
exitsted throughout the 1970s and early 1980s to take a stand against police
brutality and promote black liberation, and the female sex workers of
Storyville, a district of New Orleans that legalised prostitution during the
early 1900s and where women of all races were employed. Both of these influences are clearly apparent
through Beyonce’s choice of costumes for herself and her dancers.
The video
begins with Beyonce standing on the roof of a police vehicle which is slowly
being submerged under water during severe floods, while the lyrics tell us that
this action is happening in New Orleans.
And while Beyonce celebrates her black heritage with lyrics which might
be described as both assertive and proud, she also calls upon her fellow black
women to ‘get in formation’ and presumably to follow her as she ‘slays’ white
supremacy. Meanwhile, as she dances on
the police car roof, the vehicle sinks under the water, and one would hope,
taking institutionalised racism and police brutality with it.
I would
expect that the student of the future will also want to consider the
implications of Beyonce releasing this video on Superbowl weekend 2016, and her
performance of the song during half time, and to debate whether in performing
her song at such an event, a song that so clearly addresses other women, was an
implied statement to women to take a stand against sexism also. There are other significant discussions to be
had around Beyonce’s choice of release for this song. Known for her support of a social justice group
called Black Lives Matter, Beyonce performance also coincided with what would
have been the 21st birthday of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager who
was fatally shot by George Zimmerman in 2012.
The killer was acquitted in 2013.
I hope
that thirty years from now this video represents the idea that ‘the past as
foreign country, they do things differently there.’
Finally, to enjoy a serious point being made in a comedic way, the future student might like to watch this...
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