if you want other examples of this kind of thing, look at the way disco music went mainstream while gay men were still being lynched. New Age marketing is rife with Native American cultural ripoffs, while that genocide is ongoing. We’re happy to eat at taco bell and celebrate Cinco del Mayo, while still keeping Latinos down. Black culture examples are more prominent now because the president is black and the music industry’s making money from it, but it’s a bigger problem than all that.
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So, what is this X culture that is exclusively X? What if a person from group Y grows up in a group X neighborhood? What if they learn the art of group X and become rich and famous performing the art of X? Are we to now say that this group Y person is appropriating culture X because they were not born race X?
Elvis grew up in a poor neighborhood of Tupelo, Mississippi where black music and culture were booming. At 13 he moved to Memphis where black music was all around him. Many say he appropriated black music for his own financial gain. Others say he was simply playing music he liked. I’m more of the latter camp.
It matters more where and how you grew up as to what cultural sub group you are part of than it does your race or national origin.
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So long as intentions are pure, it doesn’t matter that Elvis got rich off black artists work?
Let’s be clear, American culture is inherently a mixed/re-mixed culture. Pretty much everything has gotten thrown together and borrowing goes both ways (blues guys loved country as much as early jazz and blues). The problem here, which she points out, is that when a group that has historically had no power, and has consistently been exploited, has their culture used for the profit of others. This is not about no whites ever being able to enjoy, consume, or even to show their influences off through their music. But it’s about the group in power profiting off the exploitation of others, with little to no recognition of the struggle of the people who made that culture. It’s incredibly hard to deny the influence of hip-hop, funk, soul, reggae, etc in modern music. But we need to be cognizant of how white artists (yes, including Elvis) have benefited off the exploitation of black artists historically.
Honestly, I don’t understand why that point is so very controversial. Seems like giving others basic human respect.
ETA: Have you ever read Leroi Jones Blues People? Go give it a read. He addressed lots of this back in the 60s.
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Fixed. Cheers.
Perhaps it has to do with us all standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. For any group to say “we created this all by ourselves and it is ours” seems to ignore the work and hardships of those who came before. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. I am a human being, nothing human is alien to me.
None of this should be construed to say that the struggles and hardships of others should be disregarded. Only that such adversity infers no exclusivity.
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There’s a great clip in that video, starting around 3:06, including, “And it says to black kids, you don’t have shit, you don’t own shit, not even what you create for yourselves.” It’s a brilliant illustration of alienation, where the economic concept meets the humanistic concept.
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The thing I’m struggling with here is that we’re really doing this: we’re going back, 50, 60 years later, and holding Elvis Presley to modern standards. Not only that, we’re blasting him for getting rich off of black artists’ work.
http://clatl.com/cribnotes/archives/2012/08/20/why-i-stopped-hating-elvis-presley
We forget that the man got rich in spite of recording what people saw as “black music”. And while yes, he benefitted from racist society–his take on black music was marginally more acceptable because he was white–saying that he said nothing about it or did nothing about it is disingenuous, at best.
That artists like Mary J. Blige have declared him, after death, to be racist, is insulting to the memory of one of the few decent famous people of that time, at best; however, to be fair to her, it’s probably based at least in part on the persistent urban legend that Elvis made openly racist remarks on Edward R. Murrow’s show.
While I think we need to keep in mind that, sure, his own race was of benefit to him when presenting black music, it’s also true that Elvis and others helped foster a wider acceptance of what was seen as black music.
And I didn’t even say how much it amuses me that my openly racist, late father-in-law loved bluegrass, especially banjo music. Banjo - Wikipedia
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Wut? Is the international news not reporting something?
That would describe, say, Native American headdresses. That doesn’t describe cornrows.
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So… should she only dress, act, and star in films that YOU find culturally appropriate for her? Why do you get to decide how she should decide to wear her hair?
This sounds like a good quote, but I think it still plays into stereotypes. Even most black people don’t seem to agree about what “blackness” is, or what black culture is. Since my outlook is that of avoiding assimilation. I need to take claims of appropriation with salt when they come from people who affect Euro languages, hair and clothing styles, family structures, religions, musical scales, etc, etc. This is not to deny them whatever identity they might choose, but to point out that appropriation and influence tend to be relative. And I think it does a disservice to black people when their measure of “success” is perceived by themselves and others as the practice of being assimilated. Also, it renders their visible cultural identity as being all surface, mere stylistic quirks of people who otherwise supposedly share the same values and ways of life.
This sounds like reality to me. People don’t really have or own anything - none of them do. Pointing this out merely reflects a peculiar philosophy of an acquisitive culture.
Ah yes, I thought that’s where your comment was going!
The real racists are the victims of racism. Got it, thanks, bye.
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Cultural Appropriation is pretty great for the most part, all music results from it. People complaining about it, and then using hip hop as an example I always find particularly ridiculous, even ignoring the the fact that hip hop wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for Kraftwerk, the vast majority of it is created by sampling other people’s records anyway, mostly without paying for it! And it’s not just sampled from soul and funk records either, crate diggers have incredibly diverse and eclectic tastes. The birth of hip hop in new york was a pretty multi-cultural affair as well, as diverse in it’s influences as it was in who was participating. To try and assign ownership of such a diverse culture to a skin tone is pretty ridiculous.
Even blues and jazz wouldn’t have existed were it not for cross pollination of traditional african rhythms with various european folk and classical forms (and instruments), it’s the same for all music.
The only real problem in music related to this area that I can think of is that today’s pop music has very little genuine creativity, and most of their ideas are lifted pretty much wholesale from various underground movements where they blandify them to make them acceptable for the widest possible audience. Occasionally some of these original producers may end up working on these records and will at least get paid (though for the most part they won’t), but they certainly won’t get any credit, and instead everyone ends up thinking Kanye West is a genius. But this has little to do with race, black commercial acts benefit from this as much as white acts do.
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I think that is somewhat of a fair point, except people were debating these issues at the time. it’s not like People woke up after Selma and said, “Oh, that’s racist, what Americas been doing.” There is a long discourse going back to the 19th century on these very issues. it also assumes that African Americans did not understand that they were being exploited or they didn’t fight back against that, which is untrue. Jones himself did discuss this sort of issue in the 60s and continued to do so as Amiri Baraka. You find pretty fierce debates of this sort in jazz magazines, too. So, while I agree that we shouldn’t have modern expectations of folks like Elvis (and I’m not 100% convinced he was the problem as much as the industry in which he produced music was), we should also recognize that these are not wholly new ideas.
Agreed (also, that article is from the Loaf! yay!), and that’s why I recommended Brian Wards work for you. He makes just that argument (about the Beatles, too). That being said, we need to recognize that embracing black music doesn’t mean someone is political progressive. I’ve known plenty of people who love soul, funk, or whatever, and had no love for black people. Again, I think that’s the very point she’s making…
That was a weird thing that just happened… I tried to post this, it wouldn’t work, and then the whole thing goes out…
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I took that claim from an interview I heard many years ago with one of the original producers of Osmonds (perhaps Mike Curb - I don’t remember anymore). That gentleman claimed he went looking specifically for a “White Jackson 5,” because there was an audience for an act with that sound (an explicitly African-American sound – “Motown”) that wasn’t associated with African-American culture.
The Osmond’s very much followed the Jacksons. The Osmond’s first hit, “One Bad Apple”, was released in December 1970 – after the Jackson Five had put up four number one hits in a single year and Jacksonmania was in full swing. Indeed “One Bad Apple” was written by an African-American from Mississippi and was originally intended for the Jackson Five. Instead, the song was released by a group from Utah that got started doing Barber Shop quartets. A pretty clear example of what the young woman in the video discussed.
@anon61221983 has already addressed your corn rows discussion.
In 1922, Dvorak’s pupil William Arms Fisher used the English horn melody from the Largo to create “Going Home,” as you claimed. But that is an entirely separate point.
Like many Romantic composers, Dvorak drew upon “folk” melodies and themes for inspiration. During his stay in America, Dvorak explicitly sought out African-American musicians such as Harry T. Burleigh to learn about “Negro Spirituals.” This acquired background in African-American music is widely (though not uniformly [*]) considered to be an important (but hardly sole) source for the largo. I would argue this was a respectful from of “cultural appropriation,” but still an example.
[*] Some argue that English Horn melody was actually a Bohemian appropriation, and thus an expression of Dvorak’s well-documented homesickness. Musicology is nothing if not contentious.
Except hip hop has it’s roots in the Caribbean too (literally, as DJ Kool Herc was Jamaican).
The problem isn’t that people share culture and music, it’s the power relations around that and who financially benefits.
This has not always been true and black artists have tended to be the ones who lost out the most.
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This one’s still my fave:
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She is talking about very specific things, if you watch the video. Black women’s hair and its care is a very specific thing, i think. She is not talking about assimilation, but about things specific to black women.
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Why do you think that? Again, did you watch the video?
I agree. Now, on to the pedantry.
Cinco de Mayo and tacos are exclusively Mexican. And Taco Bell are NOT tacos.
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