“Do You Hear Me Calling from the Big Wave of the Storm?”. Displaced Persons, Asylum Seekers, and Refugees’ Representation in Music Videos

About ten years ago, research on media coverage of refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom was published under the title Bad news for refugees (Philo et al., 2013), alluding both to the ways refugees and asylum seekers were represented and to the consequences of these perspectives on local citizens and therefore politics, policies and attitudes toward the newcomers. Now, the recurring chapter on worldwide media interpretation of migrants and migrations—which also includes the matter of refugees and refugeehood—in the last report by IOM is titled “Disinformation about migration: an age-old issue with new tech dimensions” (Culloty et al., 2022), thereby showing continuity in depicting the situation in an erroneous manner. Moreover, although being now a longstanding and continuous phenomenon all over the world, so that ours is quite commonly defined the “age of migration” (Castles et al., 2014), a deep absence of knowledge about it on the part of the host society citizens’ nevertheless persists, so that mainstream media, virtual platforms, and social media keep on being called upon to fill it. Music videos—hybrid media products between the commercial and the experimental—have been dealing with the issue of refugees for years alongside other topics of potential proximity, such as migration, inclusion, citizenship and rights in contemporary multicultural societies. Through the use of different forms of expression that sometimes follow thematic and visual paths already ploughed (arrival, discrimination, sacrifice, redemption, etc.), they develop articulated discourses on the phenomenon, frequently contrasting negative or victimizing representations staged in mainstream programs, but more with more correct narratives and reconstructions of the phenomenon. The article focuses on the representation of refugees in music videos presenting specific case studies in order to reconstruct an overview of the different perspectives developed on the matter.