Drake and Justin Bieber are among the biggest popular music stars in the world.
Part of their appeal has been blurring pop, hip-hop and R&B — music genres the music business has traditionally segregated along racialized lines.
My doctoral research has examined how Drake, Bieber and Jessie Reyez each innovatively approach R&B music — and build distinctly Canadian lifestyle brands that reinforce, complicate and/or challenge dominant beliefs about Canadian identities as exclusively white and R&B as a genre style exclusively practised by Black American artists.
