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.”

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