Glocal riddim: cultural production and territorial identity in Caribbean music videos

Abstract

Over the past two decades, several musical genres have transcended their Caribbean origins to achieve global recognition and success. Among these are soca, dancehall and reggaeton, all forms that had been inextricably tied to native cultural expressions, but have become increasingly popular as global commodities, particularly as web-based streaming platforms (e.g. YouTube) enhance their global audiovisual mobility. Numerous artists within these genres have become internationally recognized superstars, and many of the most recent tracks reflect an increasing co-mingling with American ‘pop’ music, as record companies seek to invigorate mainstream sounds with these ‘exotic’, yet widely popular artists. This article explores representations of scalar territorial identity as articulated in music videos from within these genres so as to evaluate how identity intersects with profit-driven models applicable to the contemporary music industry. By evaluating imagery from a regionally representative sample of music videos, they identify the intimate relationship between identity, scale and cultural production. Ultimately, we interrogate how place-based identity is commodified in these representations and whether certain images are constructed more for transnational consumption than an articulation of a coherent local national, or regional identity.

Keywords

Caribbean music cultural production globalization representation territorial identity

Introduction

Over the past two decades, several musical genres have transcended their Caribbean origins to achieve global recognition and success (Alleyne, 2009; LeBrón, 2011; Negrón-Muntaner, 2004). It would not be unusual, for example, to hear dancehall sensation Beenie Man’s or Sean Paul’s songs played in Beijing, or Trinidadian soca artist Machel Montano’s tracks animating the nightclubs of Toronto and London. Daddy Yankee’s 2004 ‘Gasolina’ – which quickly ascended global charts – was responsible for changing the broader public’s familiarity with reggaeton as a genre (Rivera et al., 2009) as was 2017’s record-smashing ‘Despacito’. Numerous artists within these genres have become internationally acclaimed superstars, and many of the most recent tracks reflect an increasing co-mingling with US ‘pop’ music and other genres (e.g. Don Omar’s 2010 ‘Danza Kuduro’), as record companies have sought to invigorate mainstream sounds with these ‘exotic’ yet widely popular artists (Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000).

Though a growing international familiarity with these genres has paralleled an increasingly globalized music market more broadly (Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000; Connell and Gibson, 2004; Erlmann, 1996; Power and Hallencreutz, 2002), the process has been accelerated in the recent past by one relatively new technology – the digital streaming music video (Edmond, 2014). Instantly available streaming videos provide a platform for expression that allows mega-stars and DIY performers alike to project both audio and video content globally, and has radically altered and destabilized existing profit models to favour performers whose videos are widely streamed and ‘liked’. Although neither music videos nor online music are new phenomena, the visual dimension of streaming videos propagates the rapid spatial diffusion of non-mainstream genres at least as effectively as previous modes of distribution, as clearly demonstrated by the popularity of PSY’s Gangnam Style (which has been viewed online more than two billion times) in 2012–2013. This creates great potential for profits to be harvested from more nuanced musical forms, reinforced by the fact that music videos have undergone something of a renaissance (Vernallis, 2010) as evidenced by enhanced production budgets in the recent past (Sinha-Roy, 2012).

In this article, we argue that the content of contemporary music videos, particularly notions of place, is tied to the changing dynamics of cultural production, particularly the ‘glocal’ nature of production and consumption. By this, we mean that territorial identity in Caribbean music videos has been shaped largely by how cultural production has changed, particularly as both production and consumption are now defined by transnational exchange as much as they are by local factors such as culture, language and place.

The resurgence of the music video as a key component in the music distribution process opens up previously unexplored questions about how music is consumed, particularly given the financial implications of widespread online viewership (McDonald, 2009; Wasko and Erickson, 2009). Our explicit intention is to articulate how the visual elements contained within music videos are intertwined with the changing schemes of cultural production in the music industry. More specifically, we focus on analysing and interpreting the content of contemporary Caribbean music videos in order to understand how representations of territorial identity are expressed within the music industry. By analysing a representative suite of reggaeton, soca and dancehall videos, we seek to understand how these disparate genres have differentially adopted particular elements of global, pan-regional, national, local, or diasporic identities, and how those identity-based features in turn are tied to how music and music videos are produced and consumed. We ultimately aim to understand how place, space and visual content converge to help fuel a dynamic global industry.

Cultural Production and Scalar Territorial Identity in Music Videos

The content of music videos has been the subject of a considerable corpus of academic inquiry (Dibben, 2009; Saha, 2012b). This is particularly true in the era of YouTube (Vernallis, 2010), which has catalysed a revival of the music video as a medium, as ‘the natural home for the music videos has moved from the television to the internet’ (Edmond, 2014: 306). While Edmond contends that ‘“the days of the $600,000 video” might be gone’ (p. 305), the music industry has placed a renewed importance on the music video as novel profit models have greatly enhanced the revenue potential of even the most amateur video – music or otherwise (e.g. cats chasing laser pointers). And whereas television-based videos were effectively advertisements for in-store record purchases, videos themselves are now monetized by artists and producers, and ‘viral’ videos can bring in vast sums of money. In 2014, Taylor Swift’s VEVO channel (a commercial hosting service owned by major labels and deployed primarily on YouTube) earned an estimated $4 million (exact figures are not released), attributable entirely to advertising revenues from streaming views (Williamson, 2015). The implication of this is a trend toward enhanced production budgets for videos, whose profitability is reliant on alluring imagery, catchy themes and ‘shareability’ on social media platforms such as Facebook. For non-mainstream musical genres this is potentially a panacea, with potential for global visibility and popularity derived from little more equipment than a mobile phone camera and some amateur recording gear.

Although ‘Spanish Rap’ (the precursor to reggaeton) and other genres were popularized across the Caribbean and in mainland diasporic communities via MTV and other cable television programmes (Santos, 1997), the advent of the ‘YouTube Era’ (Weigel and Heikkinen, 2007) has more than ever enabled artists to be both heard and seen by the widest possible range of consumers. YouTube is now the world’s third most popular website (after Google and Facebook), and with the increasing adoption of a variety of digital devices (half of YouTube videos are now viewed via handheld mobile devices) (YouTube, 2015), it could be argued that music videos are more instrumental than ever to the spatial diffusion, and consequent consumption, of popular music (Uricchio, 2009). Music is the most popular video category on YouTube (Cheng et al., 2008). YouTube has more than 1 billion unique visitors each month and reaches more adults between the ages of 18 and 34 than any cable network (Pries and Dunnigan, 2015).

This ‘renaissance’ of the music video has led some to remark upon the commercial viability of the rapid diffusion of music videos (Susarla et al., 2012) and others to investigate how online media platforms affect commercial profit models (Preston and Rogers, 2011), and the interface between identity and commercial viability. Others have focused on the differential effects that videos have on viewers’ perceptions of race (Conrad et al., 2009; Turner, 2011), ethnicity (Saha, 2012b; Zhang et al., 2009), gender (Wallis, 2011), sexuality (Robillard, 2012) and violence (Thaller and Messing, 2014). As such, there has been considerable attention directed to discerning how music video content both influences, and is influenced by, normative constructions of identity.

This research takes inspiration from a growing corpus of literature connecting music and music videos to territorially articulated identity in particular (Balaji, 2010; Dibben, 2009; Sigler and Balaji, 2013). Given the globalizing power of the internet, territorially articulated identity can be expressed in new and nuanced ways, finding audiences in those whose interest in music videos may be more motivated by musical preference than regional taste. To this end, Liew’s (2014) work has shown how singer Teresa Teng’s videos have mobilized Chinese diasporic understandings of identity across sharp geopolitical boundaries, while Dibben (2009) has argued that the imagery projected within the videos of Icelandic artists Sigur Rós and Björk have elicited nationalist sentiment through representative landscapes, in addition to allegorizing the nation’s 20th-century industrialization and modernization. It is thus clear that the contemporary music video can be wielded as a semiotic-discursive tool by which to deploy narratives deeply tied to territorial identity, among other elements. As Connell and Gibson (2004: 343) have argued, vis-a-vis territorial expressions:

Musicians are situated in multiple cultural and economic networks – some seeking to reinvent or revive traditions, others creating opportunities in musical production to stir national political consciousness or contribute to transnational political movements, and some merely seeking to achieve commercial success.

This tie between cultural production and identity is captured by Saha (2012a: 433), who contends that the ‘distinctiveness of the cultural commodity is that its use value is based on novelty and difference’. As such, difference – in our case expressed as scalar territorial identity – is not only a creative formative element within media, but is inextricably tied to their production as commodities.

The cultural production approach we take acknowledges the role of power relations in cultural production, but takes into account how local forces shape the process. In this regard, we take our cues from scholars such as Hesmondhalgh (2007), Peterson (2005) and Robertson (1995), whose work on the cultural industries highlights how global pressures impact on local production and commodification. Cultural production is the process from which texts are created, both as a contested symbolic site and a physical one. The process of creating texts – and the subsequent distribution of these texts for consumption – is laden with intermediaries and competing interests, yet is also formatted in a way that seeks to maximize returns for cultural producers (Peterson, 2005; Power and Hallencreutz, 2002; Robertson, 1995). In this study, both place and territorial identity are represented as commodities, used primarily to advance the commercial viability of the artists, their genre and, consequently, the cultural producers’ profit margins. Moreover, as scholars such as Scott (2000) and Power and Hallencreutz (2002) argue, place becomes significant, both as a commodity and as a site where geography and cultural production regimes converge, coalesce and sometimes clash with one another. In this regard, the consumability of place and territorial identity is made visible by their representation in music video, but it is also important to understand the dynamics of their commodification.

Scalar territorial identity

The term ‘identity’ is inherently sticky and complex as it includes an intricate and often contradictory nexus of both endogenous and exogenous representational notions (Balaji, 2009; Railton and Watson, 2005). Territorial identity refers to a sense of self defined by some geographical dimension, with a particular focus on group or collective belonging. Nationalism is one permutation of territorial identity, as is ‘representing’ a neighbourhood or region (Sigler and Balaji, 2013). At the national or supra-national scale, ‘territorial identity’ as such has been extensively studied by scholars in geography (Aitken and Zonn, 1994) and political science, with a strong focus on European self-determination (Jensen and Richardson, 2003; Marks, 1999). At the local level, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and cultural studies scholars have emphasized the politics of place and space, often focusing on the notoriously hard-to-define concept of ‘community’ (Puddifoot, 1995; Roca and Oliveira-Roca, 2007).

The production of identities, as Born and Hesmondhalgh (2000) contend, is important when considering the politics of representation, specifically how identities are marketed within the music industry. In this regard, identities become sold on the global marketplace, creating an intense demand (or perceived demand) for certain types of representations, which in turn are replicated in music videos and social media. In the context of this article, our specific concern is territorial identity as presented at multiple scales, including global, national, pan-regional, local and diasporic. Although these are not mutually exclusive, we hypothesize that the scale at which territorial identity is expressed is indicative of the degree of integration with the ‘mainstream’ recording industry, which in music videos is mediated by its cultural production. Table 1 provides examples of representations of territorial identity drawn from a variety of Caribbean musical genres, past and present.

Table 1.

Representations of territorial identity within Caribbean music.

Scale	Example(s) from Caribbean Music
Global	‘Pa’l Mundo’ [For the World] (title of a Daddy Yankee album) and ‘Worldwide Riddim’ (title of a Konshens, Mr Vegas, and Mavado song)
Pan-regional	‘Sí Tu Eres Latino’ [If you are Latino] (title of a D.O.G. song) and ‘Reggaeton Latino’ (title of a Don Omar song)
National	‘Trini’ music (catchphrase for musical genres from Trinidad & Tobago) and ‘Welcome to Jamrock’ [Welcome to Jamaica] (title of a Damien Marley song)
Local	‘La Perla’ (title of a song about the eponymous barrio adjacent to Old San Juan by Calle 13) and ‘Trenchtown Rock’ (title of song about the eponymous neighbourhood by Bob Marley)
Diasporic	‘Allá en Puerto-Rico con Bacardi Limón [There in Puerto Rico with Bacardi Limón rum] … Ahh this all that … Cream cheese and bagel on it’ (homage to Latinos in New York in the lyrics of Nina Sky’s ‘Oye Mi Canto’) and ‘Jamaican ave di link to di link fi connect canadian- american- Indian … Mek sure seh when yuh deh a foreign an a hustle dem a visit Western Union’ (lyrics of Busy Signal’s ‘Jamaica Love’, referring to cash remittances from the Jamaican diaspora)

Territorial identity in music has always taken on a strong symbolic value (Pinnock, 2007; Subramanian, 1999), and we contend that particular elements contained within music videos are indicative of these territorial expressions at one scale or another (Saha, 2012b). Kat DeLuna’s 2007 video ‘Whine Up’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcMXZjYqIog is exemplary of how expressions of territorial identity also carry commercial implications (Saha, 2013). In the song, the Dominican-American singer collaborated with Jamaica’s Elephant Man and Moroccan-Swedish producer Red One to create a hybrid sound, with both Spanish and English-language lyrics, that draws upon a distinctly dancehall beat. The video features a flirtatious duet between seemingly rival ‘Dominican ladies’ and ‘Jamaican men’ on opposite rooftops, all matted against the streetscape of New York City.

In DeLuna’s video, the diasporic Latin@ is feminized while the diasporic Jamaican is decidedly masculine, drawing from the Rude Boy metanarrative, thereby simultaneously challenging and reinforcing dominant narratives of territorial, cultural and sexual identity. In a geographic sense, national identity (i.e. Jamaican and Dominican) collides with a diasporic one (i.e. New York City), with various Caribbean flags punctuating the video’s background. The song – which sold over half a million copies – ascended Billboard’s Latin, Dance/Club, Tropical and Hot 100 categories, holding broad appeal and marketability beyond any single genre. Although Kat DeLuna is ‘from’ somewhere (though this may be fuzzy), the territorial identities she represents are grounded in particularistic, albeit dynamic, geographical settings and scales.

Part of this can be explained by the fact that as ‘local’ artists are increasingly folded into a globalized consumptive model, the degree to which the US media industry has penetrated a particular local industry generally increases. As Power and Hallencreutz (2002: 1833) note, ‘it is not only the quality of the creative milieux that counts towards commercial success but also the links between the local production system and international circuits of capital, distribution and effective property rights.’ As such, transcending localized networks of consumption effectively becomes the end-goal for artists, which in turn impacts on the music video production process. The genesis of so-called ‘world music’ in the 1990s as a distinct cosmopolitan trope with commercial intentions is a case in point, drawing multiple scholars to theorize the significance of the territorially specific dimensions of musical genres with ‘local’ or otherwise less-than-global origins (Connell and Gibson, 2004; Frith, 1996). As Feld (1995: 97) has noted with regard to ‘world music’ and ‘world beat’, ‘transcultural record productions also tell site-specific stories about ownership and agency, and about the workings of capital, control, and compromise’.

Two decades later, similar questions emerge regarding how the globalization of music videos runs in complement to the globalization of music itself. As Tomlinson (1999) notes, to what degree does the globalization of culture throw into question the ostensible exoticism and otherness associated with ‘local’ cultural expression? In other words, does the homogenization of musical styles for global consumption strip away certain tropes meant for distinct and localized expressions, and do globalizing processes ‘flatten’ an otherwise variegated medium?

Caribbean Musical Genres in Context

Caribbean music has grown in international popularity in the past decade, partly due to an ever-expanding diasporic population, but also attributable to the integration of Caribbean artists into global production circuits (LeBrón, 2011). For example, Pan-Latino radio stations such as New York’s ‘La Mega’ and Los Angeles’ ‘La Raza’ have begun to deviate from their regionalized programming formats (i.e. salsa/merengue and norteño/ranchera/mariachi, respectively) in order to appeal to a broader spectrum of nationalities (Kattari, 2009; Navarro, 2003). The influence of reggaeton and other pan-Latin@ pop has been so influential, in fact, that media giant Clear Channel began branding stations across the US as ‘hurban’ in 2004, a combination of ‘Hispanic’ and ‘urban’. The format quickly spread to all major markets, and today it is quite commonplace to hear reggaeton alongside pop – both English and Spanish language – and hip-hop on mainstream radio stations.

For the purposes of this analysis, to categorize music as ‘Caribbean’, or to claim that genres have ‘regional’ geographical origins and/or melodic boundaries, comes with a clear set of territorial and socio-cultural complications. The Caribbean is at the same time a body of water, a tectonic plate and a cultural region, the latter of which is imprecise and subject to semiotic, political and discursive contention. However, despite the generalization inherent to our use of the term ‘Caribbean’, the genesis of certain genres is associated with territorial roots in a particular geographical region and mirrors the imprecision associated with pin-pointing the spatial dimensions of musical styles more broadly. Alleyne (2009), for instance, notes that 11 of the top 15 songs on the Billboard reggae charts in March 2005 were actually reggaeton. Furthermore, the growth and development of Caribbean genres follow a particularly complex trajectory – perhaps even more than most. Dancehall grew out of reggae and ska music from Jamaica, which were heavily influenced by American rhythm and blues (R&B), which have had a presence on the musical marketplace for nearly 50 years. Reggaeton is a derivative of dancehall that finds its origins among Afro-Panamanian rappers such as Renato, Kafu Banton, Nando Boom and El General, all of whom were early players in the ‘reggae en Español’ scene between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s. These incipient reggaeton artists blended largely Jamaican beats such as reggae and early versions of dancehall with Spanish lyrics that addressed the whimsical and/or quotidian experiences of young Panamanians. The popularization and subsequent ubiquity of Jamaican artist Shabba Ranks’s Dem Bow in 1991 cemented the linkage between Panama’s nascent genre, as local artists repeatedly incorporated Ranks’ novel beat into their tracks (Marshall, 2008). So prolific was Dem Bow that Marshall estimates that its loop has been incorporated into 80 percent of reggaeton tracks. However, though Panamanian reggaeton continued to gain popularity through the 1990s, by the early 2000s, the Puerto Rican music industry had appropriated the genre almost entirely, increasingly with the backing of mainland US labels.

In contrast to the bass-heavy dancehall and reggaeton genres, Trinidad & Tobago’s soca music draws upon the stylistic cues derived from its namesake – soul and calypso. Native to Trinidad, soca gained popularity throughout the Anglophone Caribbean beginning in the 1960s. In more recent years, soca has been intermittently combined with Trinidad’s chutney music, a style that traces its roots to the island’s large East Indian diasporic population. Neither soca nor chutney have established the presence of reggaeton and dancehall in the United States, but still maintain a strong regional presence.

Despite these complex histories, it is entirely fair to claim that the three genres we have chosen to investigate – reggaeton, dancehall, and soca – are all strongly rooted in the Caribbean, although as our analysis reveals, they exhibit varying degrees of engagement outside the region. Although a handful of major labels retain the majority of market share in the US recording industry (Sisario, 2011), only in Puerto Rico (which is formally a commonwealth of the United States) has the ‘local’ industry been effectively taken over by the US industry.

Context and Methodology

To examine how territorial identities are presented in these Caribbean music videos and how some of the representations converge into a commodified vision of place, we analysed a sample of 40 reggaeton, dancehall and soca music videos, 10 from each of the four countries: Jamaica, Panama, Puerto Rico and Trinidad & Tobago. A sample of 10 songs was derived for each country from a chart listing the most popular songs during the week of 16–22 January 2012. Songs were taken from local charts¹ and then cross-referenced to verify that each had a music video.² Songs without videos were omitted, as were songs featuring artists from another country or region.³

While there are clearly many more genres and countries to be explored, these were chosen so as to represent all four ‘quadrants’ of the Caribbean (with Jamaica in the northwest, Puerto Rico in the northeast, Trinidad & Tobago in the southeast and Panama in the southwest) as well as the two most prevalent languages in the region (English and Spanish). Finding a sample of 10 songs proved relatively straightforward in Panama, Puerto Rico and Jamaica, where the popularity of reggaeton and dancehall, respectively, leads to the abundant production of videos. Although songs from Trinidad & Tobago were easily located, videos were not, and the sample had to be constituted from what we considered a representative sample of videos ranging from 2009–2012. A complete list of videos and artists appears in Appendix A.

Once a representative sample was determined, the content of each video was coded for several elements. This methodology draws established music video content analysis techniques (Baxter et al., 1985; Conrad et al., 2009; Morgan et al., 2012; Sigler and Balaji, 2013; Sommers-Flanagan et al., 1993) as a means by which to determine the way in which indicative semiotic elements are used as signifiers of ‘place’. Elements indicating territorial identity as a scalar concept were of particular interest. Aesthetically, these could also include recognizable landmarks such as skyscrapers, cityscapes, or more overt signs such as street placards or flags. Each can be broken down into one of two types – symbolic and ordinary landscapes (Cosgrove, 1984). Symbolic landscapes contextualize a place, while ordinary landscapes decontextualize it. In a sense, one might think of this dichotomy as a dialectic between centrifugal and centripetal identities; the former embraces the local, as the latter represents the homogeneity ever present in globalization and other ‘up-scaling’ phenomena.

For instance, artists often use ‘traditional’ dress such as a guayabera shirt or a pollera dress (in the case of Panama) to ground the viewer geographically. Conversely, however, an artist may deliberately wipe the content for place-specific elements, a task easily accomplished with the use of a Chroma key composite (‘green screen’) background and a few canned images. One of our hypotheses, something that ultimately proved to be true, was that many contemporary videos exhibit a nebulous pan-regional identity, broadcasting bits and pieces of what the outside world perceives some amorphous ‘Caribbean’ or ‘Latin American’ identity to be.

Each of the 40 videos was coded for 23 different individual elements, 19 of which were binary-coded (i.e. either present or absent), and 4 of which were open-coded (e.g. which local elements featured in the video’s narrative?). Each was a sub-component of one of seven more general video elements: background landscape; geographic setting; narrative setting; dress; location; symbols; and the role of women in the video. Given that 33 of 36 artists were men, the degree to which women were objectified and/or relegated to subaltern positions within visual narratives was certainly expressive, if not outright revelatory, with regard to representation and identity. Table 2 lists elements for which we examined each video, generalizing where appropriate.

Table 2.

Representative landscape elements.

Video element	Symbolic	Ordinary
Background landscape	Hyperlocal setting	Studio/green screen
Geographic setting	Recognizable elements	Generic elements
Narrative setting	Plantation, slum, outdoor market, city street	Night club, house/home, high-rise building
Dress	Folkloric, vernacular	Cosmopolitan
Location	Local, Miami, etc.	Generic skyline or beach
Symbols	Flags	US sports apparel or imported cars
Role of women	Protagonists, family members, love interests	Dancers, objects of desire

One underlying assumption was that not every video ‘makes sense’, at least in the scholarly sense, and that videos made with limited resources often seek to include many of the perceived requisite video elements (expensive jewellery, dancing, fashionable clothing) without necessarily seeking to imply X or Y. However, regardless of the resource or creative constraints facing artists and their producers, we argue that scale and territorial identities are manifest in every case through embedded semiotic elements, often subconsciously. For instance, given that the majority of the artists are from (or at least live in) major cities within their respective countries, framing a video with a gritty streetscape from Kingston or Port-of-Spain is just as easily accomplished as wiping any discernible place-based identifier away.

Analysis

The content analysis of our sample of 40 music videos indicated a considerable degree of difference between both genres and geographical contexts as determinants of representations of territorial identity. Three primary findings emerged from categorical coding of variables:

1. Videos from Panama, Trinidad & Tobago and Jamaica were more ‘locally’ grounded than Puerto Rican reggaeton videos

Background elements in Panamanian, Trinidadian and Jamaican videos were found to be the most ‘localized’ vis-à-vis geographically grounding imagery, albeit in diverging ways. Several Panamanian videos feature the infamous El Chorrillo, a neighbourhood to which many of the artists have ties. Other Panamanian videos, such as Comando Tiburón & Mach and Daddy’s ‘Pasado Pisado’ and Eddie Lover’s ‘No Debiste Volver’ feature Panama City’s upmarket El Cangrejo and Punta Pacifica districts, respectively

This rich/poor contrast thus unfolds in disparate geographic settings, and Mr. Saik’s ‘Te Quiero Más’ takes its cues directly from the region’s popular telenovelas, with the protagonist entering a graffiti-ridden slum to win over his belle, who is depicted in a scene from the video.

Thus, ‘local’ in Panama is expressive of the significant social bifurcation within the country, and draws upon multiple localities within the republic as evidence.

Jamaican music videos also leveraged ‘hyperlocal’ landscape elements to elicit local rich/poor contrasts. In Mavado’s ‘Settle Down’, the female object of desire is walking alongside a city street beyond the limits of the high walls that delimit the spaces of privilege to which she is not privy, and Popcaan’s ‘Clean’ features a similar streetscape. Again, the ‘local’ is represented through discernible geographic settings, with the ‘streets’ juxtaposed against the hillside mansions overlooking Kingston, as in Popcaan’s ‘Only Man She Want’. This corroborates Huss’s (2000) observation that record album covers (prior to the days of streaming music videos) presenting ‘zinc fence’ backgrounds merely re-project hegemonic imagery feeding to ‘othering’ discursive understandings of socio-economic relations in Jamaica.

Trinidadian videos’ local-ness is highlighted by identifiable symbols, as well as visual emphasis on the community, evidenced by images of friends and family in a domestic setting. Trinidadian videos often feature national flags, indicative of an inclusive and multiethnic national identity. To this end, KES the Band’s ‘Wotless’ carries the feel of a multiethnic Gap commercial more so than a soca video, and the group’s ‘Stress Away’ video depicts a 21st-century Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, with the lead singer playing the Mad Hatter, determined to entertain umpteen houseguests with libations and dancing. Kerwin Du Bois’ ‘Bacchanalist’ features the Carnival motif, suggesting that the annual celebration plays a pivotal role in defining Trinidad’s multi-ethnic Caribbean identity.

Furthermore, in the sample of soca videos, there is only the occasional objectification of women (as opposed to its near ubiquity in other genres), suggesting that men and women as family members and friends represent the artists’ community, in both the social and the geographic/territorial sense. Even the bikini-clad women in Kerwin Du Bois’ video are counterbalanced by shirtless males wearing traditional Carnival costumes.

2. Puerto Rican Reggaeton videos project a more ‘globalized’ purview than other genres that appeal to the Latin American and Caribbean diasporas

With few exceptions, Puerto Rican reggaeton videos included in the sample are characterized by background imagery that decontextualizes territorial setting and/or suggests a ‘globalized’, yet poorly defined, Latin@/Caribbean territorial identity. Daddy Yankee’s ‘Lovumba’ features the iconic reggaeton singer against a backdrop of flashing lights, and includes the ubiquitous female dancers and nightclub entourage obsequious of his stage presence bedazzled by jewellery and larger-than-life stage presence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TeyuDnwyrw.

‘Puerto Rican’ videos were filmed in St Martin, Colombia, Chile, Miami, New York and in numerous placeless studios, eschewing representations of the island. Several videos feature Puerto Rican flags, but we argue that this is more as a function of the flag’s significance as a marker of Boricua, and therefore Latin@ identity in the United States and beyond. The Puerto Rican diaspora laid the foundation for generations of chain migration from Latin America to Florida, New York, and elsewhere three full decades before Dominican, Honduran and other Latin American populations followed in its footsteps in significant numbers. As such, the Puerto Rican flag is a temporal waypoint, heralding a deployment of Latin@ and Caribbean culture around the world.

Perhaps Puerto Rican reggaeton’s ‘placenessless’ is not surprising, however, given the commonwealth’s dominance in the world of reggaeton and its industry’s integration with continental US markets. In contrast to the other countries sampled, all the Puerto Rican videos in this analysis except Franco El Gorilla’s ‘Aprovechame’ were produced by major US labels; this is reflected in a range of elements from the variety of backgrounds per video to the video quality. The result is a focus on a generic Latin@/Caribbean identity in Puerto Rican reggaeton that is simultaneously global and diasporic, but has lost any semblance of an industry with ‘local’, or insular, roots. We would argue that this reflects Puerto Rican reggaeton’s integration into global circuits of capital, and foreshadows an industry in transition elsewhere in the region.

3. Although elements of ‘Caribbean’ and ‘Latin@’ regional identities are identifiable, they are nebulous and there is no single binding meta-narrative

A few cultural identifiers were used as devices to indicate territorial specificity. Rayo y Toby’s ‘Movimiento de Cadera’ exploits several regional elements simultaneously, paying homage to the Caribbean’s African heritage while lampooning ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ at a beachside soirée. Other videos have stylistically Caribbean elements, such as the palm-lined beaches and turquoise water in videos from throughout the region.

Despite both political and economic efforts to bring the region together (e.g. CARICOM), however, pan-Caribbean and/or pan-Latin@ identity as such is largely absent within the sample of soca, reggaeton and dancehall videos, except for indirect references vis-à-vis diasporic communities. While there are general stylistic differences, videos from the three genres all exhibited similar thematic elements, particularly with regard to conspicuous consumption in the form of cars, yachts, motorcycles and gold chains. While this may be the result of innocuous formulaic production norms, we contend that this represents a backlash against the hegemonic power structures that have dominated regional political and economic narratives in the recent past. Material objects delineate a desire to break from the subalterity of the past.

Aside from commonalities drawn on economic lines, however, it is only through diasporic identities that either broad Caribbean and/or Latin@ regional representations emerge in any significant manner. This suggests that internal diversity and heterogeneity among localized industries is in fact much stronger than umbrella categories would imply.

Discussion

Jamaican dancehall, Trinidadian soca, Puerto Rican and Panamanian reggaeton all represent distinct styles reflecting the cultural influences and histories of each nation. In the global commodification process, place and territorial identity have been transformed from accessories into key articulations. Still, as our analysis shows, place and territorial identity can be expressed aesthetically in these musical forms, which cannot be discounted even in the market-oriented logics of globalization. Moreover, such expressions of identity underscore Hesmondhalgh’s (2007) observation that commodified cultural texts such as music videos can have enormous cultural value. This also affirms that taking macro and micro approaches to understanding musical forms such as the ones studied in this article can yield rich – if not contradictory – data that supports both the influence of global capitalism as well as the importance of identity within the aforementioned cultural and national contexts.

We argue that place, territorial identity and commodification intersect within the music industry in such a way that they become intertwined. Each becomes a factor in facilitating the other, though the dynamics for each genre vary by their degree of commercial distribution. The territorial identities observed are however articulated at a variety of scales. With regard to reggaeton, LeBrón (2011: 220) astutely observes that:

While cultural nationalists have attempted to construct a master narrative about the kinds of sonic forces that converged in Puerto Rico during the 1990s to create the sounds that would eventually coalesce in the form of reggaeton, the prevailing story of the genre’s origins tends to overlook the fact that it was shaped by the interactions of people of color in diasporic contact zones often mediated by legacies of forced migration, colonial and postcolonial labor demands, and the flows of global capital.

As such, territorial identity in reggaeton and other genres is fundamentally rooted in local cultural and economic histories, and in turn reflects both a complex social fabric as well as increasingly globally oriented meta-narratives underlying representation.

The music industries themselves, as Williamson and Cloonan (2007) note, have already undergone a massive transformation that has accelerated the de-spatialization and de-contextualization of Caribbean musical styles. This has been necessitated by economic factors such as the rapid decline of CD sales, the elimination of talent and scouting (A&R) budgets, and the rise of social media as an alternative to the ‘traditional’ pathways to cultivating production and consumption (Williamson and Cloonan, 2007). Though Caribbean music initially intersected with the mainstream US industry in 1912 (Alleyne, 2009) it could be stated that the latest wave (reggaeton/dancehall) has been impelled by diminishing returns in the US domestic industry, changing demographics, an increasing incorporation of alternative genres into mainstream musical choices, and of course the fully digital, streaming music video, which generates novel commercial possibilities altogether. Furthermore, genres such as dancehall have limited protections internationally, allowing the domestic creativity in countries such as Jamaica to be exploited (Power and Hallencreutz, 2002).

As a result of a globalizing music market, we are now seeing an increasing consolidation and fusion of distinctive Caribbean musical forms and identities, so much so that collaborations between Sean Paul (Jamaican dancehall) and Daddy Yankee (Puerto Rican reggaeton), Machel Montano (Trinidadian soca) and Busy Signal (Jamaican dancehall) or El Roockie (Panamanian reggaeton) and Anthony B. (Jamaican reggae) are becoming more the rule than the exception. The consolidation of identity through this type of fusion is also reflected in the aesthetics of the musical forms, as our analysis showed. The advent of digital music videos is likely to further compound this, with territorial identity as one trait that distinguishes coalescing rhythms from one another.

Conclusion

What are the implications of this fusion of genres, and what does this mean for localized territorial identities within the context of hyper-globalization and transnational consumption? While we allow for the fact that territorial identities are showcased in the Caribbean musical forms we analysed, there seems to be more of a concerted effort to ‘internationalize’ such cultural texts for transnational consumption. The local audiences, while important to the producers of these musical forms, are assumed while the international audiences are what sustain the countries’ various cultural industries. Consequently, representations of territorial identity in these musical forms reflect the rapid changes in global and national popular cultures brought on by the inextricable interconnectedness of economies and the global marketplace through new technologies, as well as the need to cultivate new consumptive markets.

As fundamental to the circulation of an increasingly globalized commodity, territorial identities have been transformed, amalgamated, exploited and/or bastardized through musical forms for global consumption, reflecting the changes in transnational music production and distribution. We would argue that territorial identity and its representations in popular culture, like other representations of identity, are seated within highly globalized paradigms (Moran, 2000). The global-ness identified in Puerto Rican reggaeton videos alongside a more general nebulous regional identity reflects this, particularly when contrasted against the locally grounded identities apparent in music industries less globally connected.

Even within the commodified and consolidated nature of global cultural production, musical forms with their own cultural and social histories have space to articulate both place and territorial identities. The samples we analysed demonstrated some of the paradoxes of globalization and the cultural production of identity. Articulations of scalar territorial identity range from highly localized to globalized and diasporic, and although certain tropes draw together regional commonalities, national social and cultural attributes emerge through territorially specific elements.

Footnotes

Appendix

Appendix A.

List of music videos included in analysis.

PANAMA		PUERTO RICO
Song title	Artist(s)	Song title	Artist(s)
Movimiento de Cadera	Rayo y Toby*	Energia REMIX	Alexis y Fido
Plena del Emono	Latin Fresh	Lovumba	Daddy Yankee
No Debiste Volver	Eddie Lover	Te Siento	Wisin Y Yandel
Si Decides Regresar	Match&Daddy, Nigga, Roockie	Si Tu No Estás	Cosculluela
Amor de Bandido	Dubosky	Na Na Na Na	Baby Rasta y Gringo
Ra Pa Pam	Joe D & U9	Junto Al Amanecer	J Alvarez
Te quiero más	Mr Saik	Nobody Like You	Franco El Gorila
Pasado Pisado	Comando Tiburón, Mach and Daddy	Danza Kuduro	Don Omar
Perdoname	La Factoria	Aprovechame	Franco El Gorilla
Hit Maker	Dangerman	Perreame	Jowell y Randy
JAMAICA		TRINIDAD & TOBAGO
Song title	Artist(s)	Song title	Artist(s)
Got To Luv U	Sean Paul	Bacchanalist	Kerwin Du Bois
Only Man She Want	Popcaan	Vibes Cyah Done	Machel Montano
Settle Down	Mavado	Tempa Wine	Patrice Roberts
Bad Pickney	Aidonia	Hott	Destra Garcia
Imma Need Security	Supa Hype, Munga, Chi Ching Ching	Wotless	KES the Band
Tun Up Di Ting	Khago	Controlling Meh	Triniboi Joocie
Party Shot	Popcaan	Take Chook	Kenman & Chico
Clean	Popcaan	Trouble	Shal Marshall
Wine	Baby Chan	Stress Away	KES the Band
Caribbean Girls	Aidonia	Mr. Fete	Machel Montano

See note 3.

Acknowledgements

Thomas Sigler would like to acknowledge Glyne Griffith, Ryan Romany, Love Yiel del Puerto and the Gustavus Adolphus College Department of Geography for their assistance.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors and there is no conflict of interest.

Notes

Biographical Notes

MURALI BALAJI is Director of Education and Curriculum Reform, Hindu American Foundation, Washington, DC. His research focuses on cultural production and the representation of national, racial and political identities. His work has been widely published in journals such as Critical Studies in Media Communication, Culture, Communication, and Critique, and the Asian Journal of Communication.

Address: Hindu American Foundation, 910 17th St NW #1180, Washington, DC 20006, USA. [email: murali.balaji@gmail.com]

THOMAS SIGLER is a Lecturer in Human Geography, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. He is a human geographer with expertise in the economy of cities. His work focuses on geographical networks, and how these are formed through inter- and intra-firm connections, both within urban space (intra-urban) and between cities (inter-urban). His work has been published widely in journals such as Geoforum, Urban Studies, IJURR, Regional Studies, and Environment and Planning A, and he is on the editorial board of Urban Geography.

Address: School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia. [email: t.sigler@uq.edu.au]

References

Aitken

S.C.

Zonn

L.E.

(eds) (1994) Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Alleyne

(2009) Globalisation and commercialisation of Caribbean music. In: Pietila

. (ed.) World Music Roots and Routes. Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 76–101.

Balaji

(2010) Vixen Resistin’: Redefining Black womanhood in hip-hop music videos. Journal of Black Studies 41(1): 5–20.

Balaji

. (2009) Owning Black masculinity: The intersection of cultural commodification and self-construction in rap music videos. Communication, Culture and Critique 2(1): 21–38.

Baxter

R.L.

et al . (1985) A content analysis of music videos. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 29(3): 333–340.

Bonett

(2011) Director, Mr. Saik Te Quiero Mas. Video Official [sic]. Direccion Toño Bonett. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcQzAfG8Kgk (accessed 11 August 2017).

Born

Hesmondhalgh

(2000) On difference, representation and appropriation in Western music. In: Born

Hesmondhalgh

(eds) Western Music and Its Others. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1–53.

Cheng

Dale

Liu

(2008) Statistics and social network of YouTube videos. In: 16th International Workshop on Quality of Service. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE, 229–238.

Connell

Gibson

(2004) World music: Deterritorializing place and identity. Progress in Human Geography 28(3): 342–361.

10.

Conrad

Dixon

T.L.

Zhang

(2009) Controversial rap themes, gender portrayals and skin tone distortion: A content analysis of rap music videos. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 53(1): 134–156.

11.

Cosgrove

(1984) Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

12.

DaddyYankeeVEVO (2012). Daddy Yankee - Lovumba. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TeyuDnwyrw (accessed 11 August 2017).

13.

DeLuna

(2009) Whine Up ft. Elephant Man. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcMXZjYqIog (accessed 11 August 2017).

14.

Dibben

(2009) Nature and nation: National identity and environmentalism in Icelandic popular music video and music documentary. Ethnomusicology Form 18(1): 131–151.

15.

Du Bois

(2011) Kerwin Du Bois ‘Bacchanalist’. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU3qhoP9_X8 (accessed 11 August 2017).

16.

Edmond

(2014) Here we go again: Music videos after YouTube. Television and New Media 15(4): 305–320.

17.

Erlmann

(1996) The aesthetics of the global imagination: Reflections on world music in the 1990s. Public Culture 8: 467–487.

18.

Feld

(1995) From schizophonia and schismogenesis: The discourses and practices of world music and world beat. In: Marcus

Myers

(eds) The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 96–126.

19.

Frith

(1996) Popular music policy and the articulation of regional identities. In: Rutten

(ed.) Music, Culture and Society in Europe. Brussels: Europe Music Office, 98–103.

20.

Hesmondhalgh

(2007) The Cultural Industries. London: Sage.

21.

Huss

(2000) The ‘Zinc-Fence Thing’: When will reggae album covers be allowed out of the ghetto? Black Music Research Journal 20(2): 181–194.

22.

Jensen

O.B.

Richardson

(2003) Making European Space: Mobility, power and territorial identity. London: Routledge.

23.

Kattari

(2009) Building pan-Latino unity in the United States through music: An exploration of commonalities between salsa and reggaeton. Musicological Explorations 10: 105–136.

24.

LeBrón

(2011) ‘Con un Flow Natural’: Sonic affinities and reggaeton nationalism. Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 21(2): 219–233.

25.

Liew

K.K.

(2014) Rewind and recollect: Activating dormant memories and politics in Teresa Teng’s music videos uploaded on YouTube. International Journal of Cultural Studies 17(5).

26.

Marks

(1999) Territorial identities in the European Union. Regional integration and democracy: expanding on the European experience. In: Anderson

J.J.

(ed.) Regional Integration and Democracy: Expanding on the European Experience. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 69–91.

27.

Marshall

. (2008) Dem Bow, Dembow, Dembo: Translation and transnation in reggaeton. Song and Popular Culture 53: 132–151.

28.

McDonald

(2009).Digital discords in the online media economy: Advertising versus content versus copyright. In: Snickars

Vonderau

. (eds) The YouTube Reader. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 387–405.

29.

Moran

(2000) Uneasy images: Contested representations of gender, modernity and nationalism in pre-war Liberia. In: Mayer

(ed.) Sexing the Nation: Gender Ironies of Nationalism. New York: Routledge, 113–138.

30.

Morgan

T.N.

et al . (2012) Sacred symbols with a secular beat? A content analysis of religious and sexual imagery in modern rock, hip hop, Christian, and country music videos. Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 24(3): 432–448.

31.

Navarro

(2003) The friendly bogeyman of Los Angeles radio. The Los Angeles Times. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/arts/television-radio-the-friendly-bogeyman-of-los-angeles-radio.html (accessed 20 November 2013).

32.

Negrón-Muntaner

(2004) Boricua pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture. New York: NYU Press.

33.

Peterson

R.A.

(2005) In search of authenticity. Journal of Management Studies 42(5): 1083–1098.

34.

Pinnock

A.M.N.

(2007) ‘Ghetto education is basic’: (Jamaican) dancehall masculinities as counter-culture. Journal of Pan African Studies 1: 47–84.

35.

Power

Hallencreutz

. (2002) Profiting from creativity? The music industry in Kingston, Jamaica and Stockholm, Sweden. Environment and Planning 34(10): 1833–1854.

36.

Preston

Rogers

(2011) Social networks, legal innovations and the ‘new’ music industry. info 13(6): 8–19.

37.

Pries

K.H.

Dunnigan

(2015) Big Data Analytics: A Practical Guide for Managers. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

38.

Puddifoot

J.E.

(1995) Dimensions of community identity. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 5(5): 357–370.

39.

Railton

Watson

(2005). NAUGHTY GIRLS AND RED BLOODED WOMEN: Representations of female heterosexuality in music video. Feminist Media Studies 5(1): 51–63.

40.

Rivera

R.Z

Marshall

Hernandez

D.P.

(eds) (2009). Reggaeton. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

41.

Robertson

(1995) Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneity–heterogeneity. In: Featherstone

et al . (eds) Global Modernities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 25–44.

42.

Robillard

(2012) Music videos and sexual risk in African American adolescent girls: Gender, power and the need for media literacy. American Journal of Health Education 43(2): 93–103.

43.

Roca

Oliveira-Roca

MDN.

(2007) Affirmation of territorial identity: A development policy issue. Land Use Policy 24(2): 434–442.

44.

Saha

(2013) ‘Curry tales’: The production of race and ethnicity in the cultural industries. Ethnicities 13(6): 818–837.

45.

Saha

. (2012a) ‘Beards, scarves, halal meat, terrorists, forced marriage’: Television industries and the production of ‘race’. Media, Culture & Society 34(4): 424–438.

46.

Saha

(2012b) Locating MIA: ‘Race’, commodification and the politics of production. European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(6): 736–752.

47.

Santos

(1997) Geografía en Decibeles. Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana 23: 351–363.

48.

Scott

A.J.

(2000) The Cultural Economies of Cities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

49.

Sigler

Balaji

(2013) Regional identity in contemporary hip-hop music:(Re)Presenting the notion of place. Communication, Culture and Critique 6(2): 336–352.

50.

Sinha-Roy

(2012) A-list actors get edgy in indie music videos. The Chicago Tribune, 5 July. Available at: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-07-05/entertainment/sns-rt-us-actors-videosbre8640y6-20120705_1_music-videos-video-art-video-websites (accessed 1 November 2013).

51.

Sisario

. (2011) Spotify close to a deal with EMI. The New York Times. Available at: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/spotify-close-to-a-deal-with-emi/ (accessed 9 March 2012).

52.

Sommers-Flanagan

Davis

(1993) What’s happening on music television? A gender role content analysis. Sex Roles 28(11/12): 745–753.

53.

Spada

(2011) Director, Comando Tiburon & Match [sic] and Daddy ‘Pasado Pisado’ . Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICqAku1jMtk (accessed 11 August 2017).

54.

Subramanian

(1999) The reinvention of a tradition: Nationalism, Carnatic music and the Madras music academy, 1900–1947. Indian Economic and Social History Review 36: 131–163.

55.

Susarla

J.H.

Tan

. (2012) Social networks and the diffusion of user-generated content: Evidence from YouTube. Information Systems Research 23(1): 23–41.

56.

Thaller

Messing

J.T.

(2014) (Mis)Perceptions around intimate partner violence in the music video and lyrics for ‘Love the Way You Lie’. Feminist Media Studies 14(4): 1–17.

57.

Tomlinson

(1999) Globalization and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

58.

Turner

J.S

. (2011) Sex and the spectacle of music videos: An examination of the portrayal of race and sexuality in music videos. Sex Roles 64(3/4): 173–191.

59.

Uricchio

(2009) The future of a medium once known as television. In: Snickars

Vonderau

(eds) The YouTube Reader. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 24–37.

60.

Vernallis

(2010) Music video and YouTube: New aesthetics and generic transformations. In: Keazor

Wübbena

(eds) Rewind–Play–Fast Forward: The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 233–261.

61.

Wallis

(2011) Performing gender: A content analysis of gender display in music videos. Sex Roles 64(3/4): 160–172.

62.

Wasko

Erickson

(2009) The Political Economy of YouTube. In: Snickars

Vonderau

(eds) The YouTube Reader. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 372–386.

63.

Weigel

Heikkinen

(2007) Developing minds with digital media: Habits of mind in the YouTube era. In: Gardner

(ed.) GoodWork^Ⓡ Project Report Series 51. Available at: http://www.thegoodproject.org/pdf/No-51-Developing-Minds-with-Digital-Media.pdf (accessed 18 November 2013).

64.

Williamson

. (2015) YouTube’s 10 most profitable channels of 2014 revealed: Report. MusicWeek. Available at: http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/youtube-s-10-most-profitable-channels-of-2014-revealed/060455 (accessed 9 January 2015).

65.

Williamson

Cloonan

(2007) Rethinking the music industry. Popular Music 26(2): 305–322.

66.

YouTube (2015) Statistics. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html (accessed 6 August 2015).

67.

Zhang

Dixon

T.L.

Conrad

(2009) Rap music videos and African American women’s body image: The moderating role of ethnic identity. Journal of Communication 59(2): 262–278.