Microphone Czech, Keepin' It Real: Politics of Creative Strategy in Cross-Cultural Music Production

Abstract

In 2010, African American artist “Hypno” from the US hip-hop group Spooks collaborated with Debbi Kahl, an up-and-coming Czech singer, to produce a pop song for the Czech music market. This study explores how racial and ethnic codes/categories were implicated in this collaboration and the profound organizing impact these had on several stages of the production process. This study examines several dimensions of this process involving the interplay of incentives, assumptions, and anxieties collectively referred to as the politics of creative strategy. Examining this collaboration as a series of contingent social exchanges provides a frame for understanding how efforts to interpret the meaning and representation of race marked the collaborative process from its informal outset to the production of the video for “Možná se mi zdáš.”

Notes

¹The term race herein is deployed as one component within the broader category of ethnicity, functioning as a phenotype to discursively position the contextual categorization of bodies.

²C. Michael Elavsky, co-author of this article.

³Spooks' style was perceived as more “musical,” “global,” and less “risky” than other types of hip-hop.

⁴The origins of this rewrite of the “Battle of Hymn of the Republic” are unknown. Its first appearance seems to have been in the 1998 film American History X.

⁵The anger, sadness, and powerlessness that I felt was mostly directed inward. I was surprised at my own vulnerability to this crude presentation, contemplating the extent to which I had allowed beer and conceptions of Europe as a more culturally progressive space seduce me out of the protective critical vigilance that I maintain in the United States.

⁶In his description of world beat music, Feld (1994) notes a similar formulation suggesting that for Western listeners the pleasures of this genre are wrapped up with ideas that it is “others who have rhythm, make music of and for the body, music for dance, for bodily pleasure” (p. 296).

⁷And yet ultimately Martin would excise this idea. It was never discussed, rather it was simply absent from the next version of the song he submitted.

⁸ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQcuw1_S1hs

⁹In some African-American communities, this is perceived as both a practice of status claiming through whitening, and a rejection of African American women (hooks, 2001), points Spooks were politically sensitive to.

¹⁰However, this process is actually more complicated; see Elavsky (2011).