Sounding the “6ix”: Drake, Cultural Appropriation, and Embodied Caribbeanization

Abstract

In ethnomusicological and popular music studies, scholarly accounts of cultural appropriation enacted by musicians have largely focused on white/black and settler/indigenous power imbalances. In this article, I turn to performances of intra-racial appropriation by Canadian rapper Drake. I argue that my conceptualization of “embodied Caribbeanization” provides a necessary framework to interrogate the distinct processes, mechanisms, methodologies, and negotiations by which Drake accesses Caribbeanness as a resource to perform his Torontonian diasporic subjectivity or “6ixhood,” albeit often at the cost of exploiting and rendering invisible salient embodied knowledges located within the archive of Caribbean music, dance, language, and vocality.

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