Transnationalism and transculturalism as seen in Congolese music videograms

This study focuses on Congolese music videograms that are considered here as transnational and transcultural products with respect to the pathway they take through the production process, but also with respect to the interference within this process of patrons and sponsors who, in search of symbolic or economic power, show up unannounced in the content of these musical works (software) and/or the packaging of them as products (hardware). Although these works are made up of local ideas, they end up paraphrasing and re-mediatizing globalized scenarios such as an advertisement for Dior’s J’adore perfume, which appears on TV and on the Internet. In addition, certain video clips and music videos appear as advertising slots for the group of high-living bon vivant Congolese immigrants to Europe known as mikilistes, or the high fashion group known as sapeurs. The album covers and the content promote diamond merchants or cottage industries (small shops, hair salons and transport companies) that help immigrants to get by. Furthermore, these music videograms are very often produced in Europe, and yet they end up validating both a cultural melting pot and a symbolic gap by joining the rhetoric of local texts to the globalized rhetoric of the background scenery.