Listener discretion advised: the power and politics of intercultural encounters on music radio

On April 14, 2007, rapper Cadence Weapon and indie pop musician Final Fantasy featured on Fuse, a weekly radio program produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) about serendipitous encounters between musicians from diverse scenes, styles, places, and cultures. By bringing together disparate strangers—or, at least, unlikely pairings—producers sought to stage unique performances that demonstrated the capacity for collaborations to spark creativity and enable communication across sometimes vast musical and cultural differences. This article addresses the deployment of power in situations of intercultural collaboration, exploring first how the form of the episode communicates ideological assumptions about the nature of multiculturalism and then focusing on two collaborative performances from the episode to demonstrate how the music may add to a more complicated discourse about social norms. In addition to pointing to the gulf that exists between intention and realization as a means of positively engaging the operationalization of principles of multiculturalism, my approach provides a potential model of analysis suitable for situations of intercultural performance that involve disparately present audiences and levels of mediation.