A completely different issue than the Washington football thing. Not even remotely comparable.
The waters have been muddied on that issue to the point where I can only stand back and watch from a distance. I would prefer that the name changes and that 20 years from now kids will ask why the team was named after a potato. Unfortunately that is not likely to happen.
In the meantime, who is defending the Cleveland baseball team and their particularly awful mascot? There can’t be hardly any Native Americans out there who are okay with that:
You mean these “analogies”? (And why analogies, as opposed to “other hypothetical examples”?)
indigenous people selling art and clothing to other people, or outsiders creating art or music in the style of (or simply borrowing from) another culture, and I have zero problem with that kind of thing.
The first isn’t appropriation, so I don’t know why you brought it up, and the second, I think I’d go case by case on that. It could be harmful behavior, as opposed to “ideologically driven victimisation fetishism.”
No, it’s a hypothetical example, a parallel in my view to the Washington name (and yeah, pretty much to the Cleveland and Atlanta names, and especially to that dumbass Cleveland mascot).
I certainly have no problem with Elvis, if anything he did a lot of good in normalising white America’s relationship with African-American music (as did many other white musicians over the decades, Al Jolson in particular did a lot of good, especially when you consider he was around at the height of the KKK at a time when Birth of a Nation was in theaters). The alternative, given the context, was for no cultural acceptance of black art, and no progress. Cultural appropriation by those guys had an overwhelmingly positive impact on American society.
Re royalties, certainly there were a lot of people in the music business who profited off black music in an exploitative manner, but then music industry exploitation is hardly a phenomenon unique to culturally appropriated music, the problem there isn’t related to the transfer of culture, it’s orthogonal to that.
the case of Elvis is particularly infuriating because for many black people he represents the most successful white appropriation of a black genre to date…
in the face of much black criticism of Elvis, some writers have offered their own theories as to why the singer should be awarded more, not less accolades. Michael T Bertrand’s Race, Rock and Elvis contends that the arrival of Elvis and rock’n’roll helped white Southerners to rethink their attitude to race and gave as yet unacknowledged impetus to the burgeoning civil rights movement. And this week the Daily Mirror’s Tony Parsons imagined a world without Elvis as a cultural armageddon. “Elvis changed the soul of modern music,” he argues. “Without him, Madonna would be a teacher in Detroit.” He also quotes John Lennon’s remark that “before Elvis there was nothing”. An Elvis-free world would have seen black music remaining “underground” and “segregated”, Parsons suggests.
But the reality is, black music never stays underground. White people always seek it out, dilute it and eventually claim it as their own. From Pat Boone’s Tutti Frutti to current boyband sensations N Sync and Blue. This is fine, but be honest about it.
but then music industry exploitation is hardly a phenomenon unique to culturally appropriated music, the problem there isn’t related to the transfer of culture, it’s orthogonal to that.
Orthogonal? Um no, I’d say “part and parcel” is a better way to describe yet another common white form of theft.
Nothing is as simple as it seems. Ms. Kolawole mentions “Hound Dog”, which is an excellent example. Elvis brought the song into the mainstream, and it was first recorded wonderfully by Big Mama Thornton in 1952. But like a great deal of music from that era, the song was written by Jewish songwriters ,in this case, the team of Lieber and Stoller from L.A… It seems like Ms. Kolawole did not check the origin of the song she uses as her main example of appropriation before she published the article. That makes it another prime example of misguided anger over appropriation. She made an assumption about the song’s origins, based on her own preconceptions. Of course, such songs could not have been written without influence of American Black and Appalachian music traditions. American music is about cultural sharing, not appropriation.
No it’s not, and not surprisingly you’ve posted an article that is the perfect example of ‘ideologically driven victimisation fetishism’, with a lot of rewriting of history including passing off as fact a completely unsubstantiated - and by the sounds of it incredibly unlikely - rumour that Elvis once said “The only thing black people can do for me is shine my shoes and buy my music” (“Presley categorically denied making the statement. “I never said anything like that,” he declared, “and people who know me know I wouldn’t have said it.”, also snopes); and Big Momma Thorton didn’t write “Hound Dog”, it was two Jewish guys - Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote the song for her at the request of Greek-American, and R&B legend, Johnny Otis (father of Shuggie), they later worked with Elvis and gave him that and wrote many other songs for him.
Okay, so then it’s fair to say you two are men upset by a cartoon?
What I think you’re both determined to overlook is that Elvis was, nevertheless, another objectionable cultural appropriater. Just because this or that specific example doesn’t strictly fit that overall fact doesn’t mean it’s not still a fact.
Is it so hard to acknowledge that like many white singers and musicians, he made a fortune by adapting black cultural forms, while not openly acknowledging that he was doing so?
As another writer puts it, better than I can,
rock’s legacy as a genre pioneered by black people before white artists discovered it, white media re-branded it, and white audiences embraced it means that despite Elvis not spouting racist ideas, his legacy is still rooted in racism—even if that racism isn’t directly born of the man himself. He attained his stature because he was not black [while appropriating black culture] and in doing so, he opened the doors for a generation of his [white] disciples to reap those same benefits.
