Residente’s ‘War’ and the reframing of terror

Abstract

The music video ‘Guerra’/‘War’ (Pérez Joglar or Residente 2017), directed and sung by the Puerto Rican musician Residente (René Pérez Joglar), features war-scarred landscapes, fleeing refugees, overcrowded camps and eerily idyllic suburban life. The discordant realities challenge viewers’ potential apathy towards ongoing conflicts and refugee crises while the rap lyrics in Spanish, when sung by the listener, conflate the singer with suffering groups, thus placing suffering and terror centre-stage through visuals and lyrics. This article proposes that Residente begins his music video with a narrative of terror, currently associated in popular discourses with refugees from areas in conflict, then overwhelms this narrative with one of suffering, which is subsequently followed by images of wealth, effectively reframing the terror factor through comparisons and stark contrasts. In addition to the perpetrators of terror, the viewer is confronted with refugees as the victims of terror, the hypocritical illusion of the security of suburban life and the realization that, in war, everyone loses.