Spotify's Corporate Colonialism

The Implications of Deplatforming Buju Banton

A few years ago I attempted to listen to Buju Banton’s 1992 hit “Boom Bye Bye” on Spotify, but the song was nowhere to be found. After a quick Google search, I found out that the song had been removed from the streaming platform due to its violently homophobic lyrics. Surely, the song is morally atrocious, as it incites its listeners to beat to death any gay men that approach them. And the removal of the song was in part due to Banton’s disavowal of his misguided past. And yet I couldn’t help but feel that the decision to remove the song embodied the cognitive dissonance of our neoliberal age.

Major corporations like Spotify have been quick to jump on the diversity bandwagon, adopting slogans du jour reminding us that Black Lives Matter, Love is Love, My Body My Choice, and that the systems which have historically oppressed certain populations ought to be fixed, or even abolished. 

Numerous critics have called out the performative nature of major institutions backing such causes, as they demonstrate little concern for actually disrupting the current status quo, and end up continuing to benefit elites in power. But other critics have dug a little deeper, asserting that the predominant mode of “social justice” discourse itself is elitist, masking its more sinister intentions with talk of equity and uplifting the oppressed. 

Perhaps the push for moral revisionism and expressive individualism is an attempt to concentrate power into the hands of powerful elites, under which individuals are rendered atomized consumers, uprooted from the protection of traditional sources of meaning and empowerment like community, family, tradition, and long-held moral values, thus rendering them powerless to the whims of a global technocratic hegemony.