Sting's 1987 solo hit, "Englishman in New York," from the album "Nothing Like the Sun," which was written about and inspired by British socialite Quentin Crisp, combines jazz and smooth pop elements with a steady, mellow rhythm and a saxophone that lends it an elegant, streetwise vibe. As it depicts an Englishman who meticulously exercises manners and civility to navigate a cosmopolitan New York while maintaining a sense of self from home, the song delves into themes of cultural identity, belonging, and expatriate life.

The song is still a touchstone in conversations about immigration, transnational identity, and the mobility of cultural capital because of its catchy chorus and well-executed arrangement, which helped establish Sting's reputation as a witty, perceptive outsider in the middle to late 1980s. I can include a brief biography of Quentin Crisp or use a line from a song to highlight the themes if you'd like.

First-person, formal, and restrained, the Englishman acts appropriately and politely in a multicultural city.

Cultural identity as performance: 

Rituals (dress, tea, and manners) that indicate a sense of belonging overseas are ways that Englishness is demonstrated.
Highlighted values include professionalism, self-control, civility, and dignity in a multicultural urban environment.

Social issues and urban life: Examines migration, belonging, and how cultural cues produce connection or distance in a global metropolis.
Important strategies include a calm, steady cadence, elegant language, and the use of tea and coffee imagery as cultural markers.

Potential readings:
Britishness overseas: exoticization versus humanization
Globalization and cultural capital that is portable
In a multicultural setting, masculine performance and gaze.

London is defined by global encounters: true to itself, open to learning from diversity.Contributing their culture and identity to a globalized world, where anyone who hears Englishman people immediately thinks of a polite, organized, and well-mannered person. This is called cultural identity.

Examples: London culture in motion: politeness and restraint are projected into another context, revealing that identity is dynamic and reconfigured in the face of foreignness. Intercultural dialogue as a laboratory: Travel involves interpreting and translating the other into the British context, enriching one's own culture. Courtesy in a different environment: serenity offers a vision of multicultural coexistence without losing focus.

Music has long been a powerful tool for cultural expression, resistance, and social commentary. We can better understand how these musical narratives construct, contest, and reclaim cultural identity.The songs give voice to the pain of systemic racism while simultaneously expressing hope for a more just future. In lines such as “I go to the movie and I go downtown / Somebody keep telling me ‘Don’t hang around,’” Cooke evokes the harsh realities of racial segregation, referencing the everyday limitations placed on African Americans in public life. The formal, poetic tone and soul-infused melody evoke both sorrow and resilience. From Riley’s perspective, Cooke’s lyrics represent not only a personal narrative but a communicative identity—an amalgam of who he is, how society perceives him, and how he resists being defined by oppression. His voice becomes a medium through which an entire community’s struggle and hope are articulated.

The songs and its accompanying video highlight the contradictions in American culture use colloquial language, slang, and rhythmic chanting to reflect a modern Black urban identity. As Da Silva Sinha et al. note, identity is not only verbal but also embodied through signs, gestures, and performance. In the video, Gambino’s expressive movements, sudden violence, and symbolic references to American history (e.g., Jim Crow imagery, mass shootings) act as powerful “signs of life” that communicate the complexity of Black identity in a spectacle-driven culture.

The songs engage with cultural identity as performance, using ritual, language, and sonic texture to express collective experience. This performance is not only artistic but deeply political, exposing how identity is negotiated under surveillance and stereotype. These differences reflect shifts in tone, genre, and cultural response across generations, but the core struggle remains the same.

Critically reflecting on these narratives, the artists demonstrate that language and culture are inseparable from identity, they represent values, group belonging, and power relations. In both songs, identity is not static; it is constructed, performed, and constantly negotiated through the pressures of society, history, and representation showing how artistic expression can carry the weight of history and hope, and how identity, when expressed through music, becomes a powerful force for visibility, solidarity, and change.

From this perspective, music is one of the most powerful ways to express cultural identity and social issues because it communicates emotions and truths that words alone sometimes cannot. Across time and place, songs have given a voice to communities that are often silenced or misrepresented. I believe that music is not just entertainment it’s a form of resistance, memory, and collective storytelling. When artists use music to reflect their culture and experiences, they create a space where others can connect, reflect, and feel seen. This is especially important for marginalized groups, as music becomes a way to reclaim identity, challenge injustice, and pass on cultural heritage.

It’s important to recognize how music creates awareness and builds empathy. Even if someone has never personally experienced discrimination or exclusion, songs like these open the door to understanding the emotions and realities of others. Music can cross linguistic, cultural, and social boundaries, making it a global language for social change. where we come from, but also about how we live, resist, and hope together. These songs and many others like them show how culture and language are not just about the past, but about shaping the future we want to live in.

Selection of the Narrative

The song “This Is America” by Donald Glover (Childish Gambino), along with its music video.

Cultural Context

Released in 2018, a period of heightened awareness and public debate around police brutality, racial inequality, mass shootings, and systemic racism in the USA.

Also, part of ongoing conversation about how popular culture, especially Black culture, is consumed and commodified.

Analysis in terms of Language, Culture, Identity

I use theoretical notions from:

Riley, Language, Culture and Identity: An Ethnolinguistic Perspective (2007), which emphasizes how language both reflects and constructs identity and the ways in which language use is tied to values, group membership, and power.

Da Silva Sinha, Moreno‑Núñez, Tian, Language, Culture and Identity – Signs of Life (2020), which further discusses how linguistic choices, genre, performance and cross‑cultural circulation mediate identity, and how signs of life (language, gestures, symbols) enact identity.

Language

Code, register, style: The song uses informal, vernacular registers typical of African‑American English, slang, trap music rhythm, call‑and‑response elements, cry‑yells, etc. These are not sanitized or formal; they carry social significance. This aligns with how identity is enacted through everyday language.

Contrasts in mode and tone: The song/video shifts between jubilant, almost celebratory gospel choir voices or melodic/hymn‑like singing, then abruptly shifts to gritty trap beats, violence, gunshots. The contrast in linguistic register and in sonic texture (gospel hymn vs rap/trap) accentuates tension in American culture. The juxtaposition of the sacred and secular, momentary calm and sudden violence. 

Culture

The song is embedded in Black American culture: its historical, social, musical traditions (gospel, choir, trap/rap, Southern hip hop). The forms it uses are culturally specific.

It reflects cultural values and conflicts: e.g., value of life vs violence; value of freedom vs systemic oppression; notion of being distracted (by entertainment, pop culture) versus forced awareness of suffering.

The video critiques how American culture sometimes glosses over or commodifies the pain of Black people. The culture of spectacle, of entertainment, can distract from or even sanitize violence.

It also reflects historical identity: references to lynching, to Jim Crow imagery, to church shootings (for example, the choir being shot in the video recalling Charleston AME church shooting). Thus, culture is historical, with a legacy

Identity

The identity of Black Americans (or more broadly, people of color in America) is at the center. The song asserts that identity is shaped by both external oppression and internal struggle.

There is the dual identity: the one visible to public / dominant culture (often stereotyped, entertainment, commodified) vs lived experience (violence, danger, injustice). The artist navigates performing both.

The individual identity of Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) is also performed: he positions himself as both entertainer and witness / critic. He uses his platform to show contradictions, to refuse a wholly celebratory narrative.

Reflection through Theoretical Lens

From Riley’s ethnolinguistic perspective: The song shows how language practices (lyrics, speech acts, stylistic choices) play a role in protecting, contesting or reshaping identity. The vernacular, the slang, the metaphor, the performance can resist dominant norms and assert group identity. The tension in “This Is America” between dominant narratives of America (freedom, progress) and minority experience shows how identity is contested via language.

From Da Silva Sinha et al. 's “Signs of Life”: The signs in the video, the performance, the non‑verbal cues (dance, silence, images) are crucial. Identity is not just claimed verbally but lived and embodied. Also, the hybridity: mixing gospel, trap, dance, choreographed performance, grotesque imagery, humor, horror. These intersecting signs show that identity is complex, fluid, and contradictory.

Social Issues Reflected

The song brings out several social issues:

Racial inequality systemic racism, especially in relation to policing and violence.

Gun violence and its normalization.

Media distraction commodification: the idea that pop culture, dance, entertainment can mask or distract from social injustice.

Dehumanization, identity reduction (“you just a barcode”).

Discrimination; oppression; inequality; racism, are some examples of these struggles, and in order to face this many hardships, social movements have raised their voices with the aim of transform harm political structures, norms or systems, that have affected people’s dignity, rights, and life, and one example of this is the song “A Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke, released in 1964.

This specific song is a cultural expression used as a protesting tool that reflects and voices the injustice lived by that time, exposing the racial segregation, disenfranchisement, and systemic violence against African Americans. The song came out by the time the Civil Rights Movement was collectively acting toward greater fairness, inclusion, and dignity.

This reflects the social contexts that were being experienced, the reality of war and discrimination, and how it can affect people’s lives, and how harmful ideologies, behaviors, thoughts, rules, norms, politics, etc, can be. Meaning a huge problem and promotes discrimination, segregation, individualism, rights violation, and definitely, too much pain, suffering, and resentment.

From a cultural and linguistic perspective, music has been used throughout the years as a massive and powerful means of expression. Songs are so often a way to give voice to minorities, problems, injustices, and social struggles, giving visibility to realities and points of view in a heart-touching way.

this is the representation of how communicative tools have allowed the human being to connect trough verbal language, embracing not only their identity, but also their culture, and defending who they are, by not accepting those inhuman treats, rather on the contrary, openly showing the rejection and struggle to assert their civil rights, voice, value, cultural identity, and the respect that everyone deserves.

The lyrics of the song “A Change Is Gonna Come” reflect the difficult situations that were being experienced during those decades of racial exclusion, an example of this is found in the line “I go to the movie and I go downtown / Somebody keep telling me ‘Don’t hang around” which emphasizes the daily situation of social barriers that African American people faced in the public life, where they were not able to participate actively, not even having access to spaces such as public transport, schools, restaurants, etc.

The visuals for the musical video are a clear use of non-verbal language, employed as a tool of effective communication to convey what is also said, where it’s possible to understand the literal meaning and the interpretations that are open to listeners, here in this video we can observe multimedia fragments that are full of a social context, the fight of Civil Rights Movement, and all the difficult situations that these communities had to live while they experienced several kinds of violence, which made them live hard times under poor conditions, fear, injustice, prejudice, exclusion, segregation, oppression, marginalization, sexism, and more, and this was normalized for many years.

In “I go to the movie and I go downtown / Somebody keep tellin’ me ‘Don’t hang around’”, Cooke makes a reference to the social codes that were imposed to promote segregation and racism by not allowing black people to share the same public spaces as the other people, and this is something they had to deal with through their daily life and everyday interactions.

On the other hand, when Cooke says ““It’s been a long, a long time coming, but I know a change gon’ come, oh yes it will” he emphasizes the continuous and exhausting struggle against all the aspects I have mentioned before, but that are possible to summarize into a racial discrimination and an absurd hate for people’s identities, differences, cultures and skin color, but at the same time, it shows the hope in the future and the belief that all these unfair and painful situations could change in order to live with dignity and proud of their cultural identities within the society, and this is reflected all along the song, despite the difficult of the situation, there is always a light that illuminates the path, and this is the power of artistic expressions as music is.

Definitely, language is key when it comes to communication, and there are many ways of expression, we have the chance to communicate something not only by speaking, but also through speeches, videos, songs, movies, plays, dances, etc. There is a whole artistic movement behind this, which also works as a tool to give voice to social situations and embrace cultural aspects. Riley (2007) mentions and describes in the article “Language, Culture and Identity: An Ethnolinguistic Perspective” that communicative practices communicate not only messages, but also identity, which allows cultural groups to feel identified and represented.

Songs are closely related to people’s feelings and thoughts; some of these are a representation of cultures, traditions, context, backstories, roots, and more. When they look to convey a message, these artistic strategies are a chance to get to the speakers’ minds, giving them a perception of what they are. According to Riley (2007):

Communicative identity is an amalgam of speaker identity (who I am and who I want to be taken for) and perceived identity (who you think I am and who you take me for). It is being used by discourse analysts to refer to the self-image projected by a speaker in and through his or her discourse. (p. 213)

Ultimately, language (whether spoken, performed, or sung) is key for humanity as a powerful tool that is useful to express; communicate; protest against any unacceptable social or political situation; give visibility to minorities; communities; problematics; or to highlight the positive things too, depending on the goal; embrace culture, traditions, roots and identity. Artistic manifestations as the songs are, allow people to connect with the situations that are lived and make part of the several realities and contexts, what permit us to feel empathy and be aware of things that are often silenced or smoked-screened to continue spreading ideologies that separate people and generate segregation, social consciousness is needed in order to transform and improve the world where we live and that belongs to all of us.