Decoded: Exploring the Multimodal and Intercultural Identity

Decoded: Exploring the Multimodal and Intercultural Identity

Trent Wintermeier, University of Florida

In his memoir Decoded, Shawn Carter (Jay-Z) breaks down significant experiences in his background that are permanently engrained in his identity. Since most of these circumstances revolve around hustling and music—specifically Hip-Hop music—he is able to integrate his identity into songs and transform the platform into a medium for unmitigated communication with his audience. There are a multitude of reasons as to why his Hip-Hop music promotes a sufficient understanding of his identity, but the concept of multimodality is the most pragmatic explanation. The notion of multimodal listening posits a holistic and embodied approach to listening that encompasses all of the senses, instead of an ear-centric approach (Ceraso 105). As a result, Carter’s identity is understood to be a key player in the process of cross-cultural and intercultural communication with his listeners. This is because he used Hip-Hop music to connect the encoded experiences that formed his identity to audiences of other cultures.

Carter’s identity is manifested in a multifaceted set of experiences that are based in and around Marcy, the government-funded apartment complex that he lived in throughout his childhood. As he grew up in Marcy—located in Brooklyn, New York—Carter became a pawn in the crack epidemic and a major influencer in the Hip-Hop industry. Both of these influences made a significant impact on his identity and encouraged him to communicate his experiences through music. In this, he encoded his identity, beliefs, and culture in his songs for the sake of underrepresentation in his community.

“I finally had a story to tell,” Carter explains, “And I felt obligated, above all, to be honest about that experience”, referring to his hustling on the street (17, emphasis mine). Selling crack was a turning point in Carter’s life, he explains; this changed how he viewed the struggle of growing up in an underrepresented community in New York. The experiences in Marcy were intense enough to be engrained into his identity, and he wanted to tell his story to everyone who didn’t understand why he sold drugs. These circumstances that he illuminated are the stereotypical components that resonate in most rap songs: drugs, guns, swearing, and money; characteristics that are intrinsic to hustler culture. Yet, this is what causes the misconception of provocative lyrics in the first place. Beginning to understand the culture that formed his identity starts with a cultural-relativist view that acknowledges the integration of certain lyrics. Carter explains, “I love metaphors, and for me, hustling is the ultimate metaphor for the basic human struggles; the struggle to survive and resist, the struggle to win and to make sense of it all” (18). This vulgar language is nothing more than an accumulation of culturally-specific experiences, which, provocative or not, is a glimpse into his identity. Understanding that his identity is a product of his culture is an imperative step in examining the experiences that are a result of extenuating circumstances, such as dealing drugs and rapping to support his family.

When Carter was introduced to Hip-Hop, he treated it seriously; he would write down raps everywhere he went, finding music and harmonious beats in his surroundings. He decided to ignore the musicians that ruled the industry, and instead saw his own music as a form of art, like poetry, but a type of art that could relinquish the constraints that held him back from being successful. He used Hip-hop music as a way to make money, but more importantly, as a way for his voice to be heard. This voice can also be seen as a channel in which he constructs verses that recounted turning-points in his life and the principles that came with them. Carter breaks down one of his famous hits, “99 Problems”: “It’s about being stopped by cops with a trunk full of coke, but also about the larger presumption of guilt from the cradle that leads you to having the crack in your trunk in the first place” (57). He uses this discriminative occasion—whether it actually happened or not—as an allusion to the misunderstanding of his identity and Hip-Hop as a form of art. If examined superficially, the misconception of his lyrics would be obvious; however, Carter uses the misconception to his advantage by giving the audience exactly what they want. This is only one example of lyrics that are meant to provoke the faint-hearted in his struggle to survive amid a culture that to outsiders is unimaginable, yet frequently presumed. This complexity is the core of Carter’s purpose: to communicate his experiences and ideologies that make up his identity—presumed or not—that have developed during his career of hustling through the art of Hip-Hop music.

As Shawn Carter continued to use Hip-Hop as a platform for sharing the experiences that ended up forming his identity, he distinguished himself and his music. In 1995, Carter founded his recording label, Roc-A-Fella Records, which released his debut album, Reasonable Doubt, that next year (Carter 82). At this point, there was an undoubtable difference between Carter and his peers; he was encoding the experiences that composed his identity into his music and connecting with his audience. They were able to relate empathetically to these occurrences, not because they lived the same circumstances, but because they understand why he was in that circumstance, in the first place. Moreover, this is how he was able to use the concept of multimodal listening—the embodied event of listening (Ceraso 103)—to his advantage. Carter’s music became a “lived experience," a “multimodal event that involved the synesthetic convergence of sight, sound, and touch” (Ceraso 104). Through all of these modes, his experiences weren’t just heard, they were felt because he was encoding his identity into his lyrics in a technique that could be embodied by the audience. They rode-along with him on that drug deal, midnight subway ride, and police raid; all situations that were real to Carter became tangible to the listener.

Positing the notion of identity as a characteristic of sound in music expands on the idea of multimodal listening with an approach to sound and identity embodiment as a holistic process. The embodiment of sound—such as feeling sonic vibrations of Shawn Carter’s song in a club— is one key step in the multimodal listening process. The sheer strength of the vibration is so intense that it is inevitably felt throughout the listener’s entire body, through multiple modes. This is because, “listening experiences demonstrate that the initial encounter, the material point of contact, between the sound and the body is in part what makes multimodal listening possible” (Ceraso 108, my emphasis). The other step in the listening process is not only the sound, but the lyrics that make up the sound. To elaborate, in Carter’s circumstance, the sonic vibrations are only part of the embodiment and the other part is the lyrics that coincide with the sonic effect. In this case, Carter’s identity is purposefully included in his lyrics and the combination of sound and its characteristic make-up shapes the multimodal listening process. Carter explains, “While there’s something intensely personal about what I rap about, I also make choices in techniques and style to make sure that it can touch as many people as possible without losing its basic integrity” (129, my emphasis), as he examines how his song, “Empire State of Mind," gives listeners multiple layers of meaning. By doing this, he is able to communicate his identity while using the multimodal effects of both sound and lyrics to form an empathetic connection with his audience. His process appeals to any state of mind that the audience is in; whether it is the feeling of excitement in a club, or passion while crying alone; these feelings are beyond a sonic event and instead are consequences of his multimodal identity.

The collaboration of identity and sound in Carter’s song “99 Problems” guides the listener through an altercation with police after getting pulled over in New York:

“I got two choices y’all, pull over the car or bounce on the double put the pedal to the floor / now I ain’t trying to see no highway chase with Jake / Plus I got a few dollars I can fight the case / So I . . . pull over to the side of the road / And I heard “Son do you know why I’m stopping you for?” / “Cause I’m young and I’m black and my hats real low? / Do I look like a mind reader sir, I don’t know / Am I under arrest or should I guess some mo?” / “Well you was doing fifty-five in a fifty-four / License and registration and step out of the car / Are you carrying a weapon on you, I know a lot of you are” (Carter 60).

Based on a true exchange, through multimodal listening, the audience feels this experience that constructed part of his identity. Carter admits, “But in the song I left the outcome ambiguous— does he get away or not?” (61). He accounts for the tangible aspect of his music, the cliff- hanging moment that leaves the listener holding their breath with an accelerated heart rate, maybe even sweating. This embodied, multimodal sensation that exists outside of just sonic vibrations is the result of experiences that molded Carter’s identity, which is now tangible to the listener.

As Shawn Carter was reaching the pinnacle of his career, he discovered the ability to use his status as an instrument for cultural promotion and international communication. His influential lyrics were able to connect with thousands of audience members, Carter says, “by closely looking at the world around them and describing it in a clever, artful way” (203). In this, he was able to use lyrics as a multimodal form of discourse that linked both his and the audiences’ cultures, forming a relationship between the two. This process is described as cross- cultural communication; however, while cross-cultural is the comparison of cultures, Carter promotes a facet of this process that is more along the lines of intercultural communication.

“Intercultural communication is commonly defined in terms of two central concepts, culture and communication," Yun Kim says, “it is broadly defined as the communication process in which individual participants of different cultural or subcultural backgrounds come into direct contact with one another” (2). Therefore, as Carter became an iconic figure of the Hip-Hop industry, he was able to promote intercultural communication with the multimodality of his music.

During the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama recognized the impact that Shawn Carter had on his audience and the explicit messages he was able to convey to his listeners. During the tour for American Gangster— his newly released album—Carter promoted the election of Obama with a picture of him during his song, “Minority Report” (Carter 168). Later in the election process, Obama formally asked Carter for help by performing free concerts around the country. Carter explains, “I wanted Barack to win, so those kids could see themselves differently, could see their futures differently than I did” (170). The same messages that he is promoting in regard to his own culture were forming an understanding—a type of communication—between his culture and the audiences’ culture. This is a skill that Obama honed for his own election to inspire minorities around the entire country to vote. To this degree, his lyrical influence was used to promote the election of Barack Obama because they overpowered intercultural limitations. The listeners were able to empathetically embody the cultural aspects of his music; Kim explains: “individuals cross the boundaries of group differences and engage each other in communication activities”, which “…maximize intercultural effectiveness” (8). Consequently, the integration of culture in Carter’s music was an unprecedented tool in the endorsement of intercultural communication during this election and beyond.

Another one of Shawn Carter’s songs, “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)," uses a track from the Broadway musical, Annie. This track brings together two different cultures—one lived by Annie and the other lived by Carter—by connecting the similarities that encompass both of their lives. Carter explains, “Annie’s story was mine, and mine was hers, and the song was the place where our experiences weren’t contradictions, just different dimensions of the same reality” (240). Using provocative lyrics and allusions over the melodious voices of young kids, Carter brings together the seemingly different worlds. He compares the unparalleled cultures and uses them as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of every culture, no matter how different they might be. “Rhymes can make sense of the world in a way that regular speech can’t," Carter says, “rhymes are just reminding you that everything’s connected” (243). An understanding of Carter’s identity is formed in this process and is used to promote not only a better interpretation of his identity, but how it is connected and communicated interculturally.

As Carter guides the listener through his journey from crack-dealer to renowned fame as a leading Hip-Hop artist in the music industry, the encoding of his culture is lyrically bound in every song. During his experiences in the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn, New York, Carter endures unbelievable circumstances that inspires him to not only share them with the public, but rap about them. The accumulation of intensely unimaginable events produced an empathetic understanding of why he used Hip-Hop as a platform for communicating his identity. Whether it be lyrics about poverty, dugs, or law enforcement, he wants to promote the interconnectedness of cultures around the world. Also, through his multimodal identity, this evolution of his struggle is transformed into a tangible experience in the embodiment of his music. All of these characteristics are the fundamental stepping-stones that promote the bigger picture: intercultural understanding. Through this communication, Carter’s audience is able to synthesize his identity and use it to promote the welfare of society through Hip-Hop music, but, overall, to understand his story. Shawn Carter, now known by most as Jay-Z, explains, “My songs are my stories, but they take on their own life in the minds of people listening. The connection that creates is sometimes overwhelming” (297).

Works Cited

Ceraso, Steph. “(Re)Educating the Senses: Multimodal Listening, Bodily Learning, and the Composition of Sonic Experiences.” College English, vol. 77, no. 2, Nov. 2014, pp. 102– 122.

Jay-Z. Decoded.

Spiegel & Grau, 2011. Kim, Young Yun. “Intercultural Communication.” The Handbook of Communication Science, 2010, pp. 453–470. SAGE Publications.

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Trent Wintermeier is in his junior year at the University of Florida. He is interested in pursuing concentrations in Cultural Studies, Rhetoric, and New Media. Today, he is presenting on the multimodal and intercultural identity of Shawn Carter in his memoir, Decoded.