Residente took home an award at Cannes Lions thanks to the ‘This Is Not America’ video | celebrity | rmmn | Lights

Puerto Rican rapper and songwriter René Pérez JuglarresidentHe won an award at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for his music video on colonialism and social division ‘This Is Not America’, Sony Music reported on Wednesday.

Directed by French Gregory Aurel, and creatively by “Residente,” the music video blends the symbolism of different cultures, depicting indigenous children sitting on disposable objects from global capitalism.

With this award, Grand Prix for Entertainment Lions for Music, “Residente” becomes one of the first Latin and urban artists to win this honor at the said festival, according to a statement from Sony Music.

The music video also places pre-Columbian monuments amid first-world landscapes and highlights parallels between dance steps and police assault, in order to make the audience think.

Residente is accompanied by the Ibeyi French-Cuban twins: Naomi Díaz, who contributes percussion to the song, and Lisa-Kaindé, who sings in the choir.

This Is Not America, released last March, is about a three-year resident project with professors from Yale University and New York University.

Experts studied the singer’s brain waves along with the brain patterns of worms, mice, monkeys, and flies, among others, in order to create musical frequencies that would become rhythms.

For this song, Residente used his brainwaves and those of his worms to develop emphatic waves of electronica mixed with rap, eby sound and rhythm.

The work, produced by Doomsday Entertainment and Sony Music Latin, in collaboration with Residente’s production company, 1868 Studios, also won “Best Director, Best Music Video and Best Video Effects” at the MVA gala in Berlin.