Music Artists: Creators or Commodities?

While I am here on campus working on my thesis, I read an interesting article that relates to this course. My thesis is on hip-hop music and I recently read the article "Who(se) Am I? The Identity and Image of Women in Hip Hop" by Imani Perry. While the majority of the article is about feminist lyrics, the objectification of women in Hip Hop, and female stars that are the exception to the objectification, there was an interesting section about the music industry and the authorship of the music.

I wanted to write about the corporate creations of music artists. Especially with Hip Hop music there is a standard image that sells well and that the corporations want their artists to be in order to sell records. In the beginning, Hip Hop was a form of honest self-expression. Before it became an extreme commodity, it was a way for a group of marginalized people to speak out against their oppression. Perry's article describes how the 'realness' of contemporary Hip Hop artists is completely created by the corporation. Teams of people go into creating the image of an artist.

These days many artists don't write the lyrics or the music for their songs. Like the film industry, should we define authorship as a large group of people that all contribute to the work? or like the director, should the artist get all credit for authorship? Is it the producer in the studio who is the author? Since the large corporations create the image of mnay of the artists, it's hard to define the music artist as the author of their own music, especially when they are being censored by the companies. If the artist doesn't write their own music, are they still an author? I don't think so. Their politic views and personal opinions have to be neutralized to please the company. Basically, the mass media companies take away the authorship from the artists.

Anyway, it's an interesting article. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!