Music Banter - Musical Culture Appropriation?

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You are certainly not alone in your concern about cultural appropriation, TH. It's a tricky topic, but I thought these comments were particularly good:-

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheBig3 (Post 2182242)

I think it's a problem reflected in music but not caused by music.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bob_32_116 (Post 2182384)

In general I don't agree with the premise that you have to be black African to sing traditional black-African songs, that you have to be Irish to sing Irish folk songs, etc. I think it should all be fair game, as long as it's done respectfully.

*every member of a white blues band sighs with relief*

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terrapin_Station (Post 2182700)

"Cultural appropriation" criticism is a pet peeve of mine. I think it's deeply flawed for a number of reasons. Some of those reasons are:

It promotes thinking in racial/tribal terms, where we're making just the same sorts of reasoning errors that fuel prejudices such as racism and sexism in the first place; it sees particular cultural tropes as "belonging" to some race, ethnicity, nationality, etc. merely by virtue of people being in that categorization, and it sees people as divorced from the cultural tropes, including artistic tropes, in question merely by not belonging to racial, ethnic, nationality etc. categorization in question.

.....

But I'm also giving too much credence to the notion of "authenticity," which is itself very misconceived. The arts, including music, are very often fictional in a broad sense, where artists are essentially acting/playing characters, where people who don't know the artist personally would never know this, and where there is nothing wrong with this fact. The whole gist of acting is that you're playing something that you're not in real life. The more you're simply being yourself, the less you're acting at all.

I thought this was an excellent post, T Station.
It also moves the discussion away from cultural appropriation, and towards the connection between singing and acting. It is therefore the perfect chance to bring up this old thread of mine:-

https://www.musicbanter.com/general-...t-fiction.html

Not much analysis, but it has a few more examples and reaches the staggering conclusion that, er, we like some songs, but not others.
EDIT: A better way to say that might be: We allow ourselves to be convinced by some songs, but we balk at accepting others.

It's a thorny issue for certain. I'm finding in my new country music journal that the contribution made by African-American musicians to the genre, including the introduction of the banjo, was totally erased from history until recently. This is particularly galling in what became, let's make no bones about it, one of the most racist music genres. They really wanted it to be a whites-only club, but if you dig a little there is a whole host of black men and women standing behind the so-called giants of the genre.

And then you have the first ever real country hit, written by a white man, sung by a white man, in which an old slave remembers his old master and mistress fondly. I don't think it's possible to be more disturbing and disgusting than that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by elphenor (Post 2182909)

taking from an African artist who's art is directly influenced by the hardships of apartheid is not remotely similar to an African borrowing from Mozart

"Taking"? That's an odd word to use. Why would you use the word "taking"? No one owns general ideas/tropes, etc. (even if we accept copyright laws as they stand). So you're not taking anything from anyone.

Apartheid hasn't existed for awhile, by the way. (My wife is a South African who grew up as a minority under Apartheid.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terrapin_Station (Post 2182943)

It's a larger trend enforced by the music industry, but to individualize it: Imagine that a homeless street performer in a third world country plays a song that a popular artist records on their cell phone while on vacation and takes into the studio. They use millions of dollars of funding to bring in great performers, arrangers, producers, and marketers that popularize the sound. When those campaigns work and make a lot of money, it can drive some crumbs of attention to the original artist once the sound is popularized, but it's nowhere near the level that they'd receive if they had backing that could afford to fail.

The music industry works in a more abstracted way and it's not immediately damning, but it's definitely something to be conscious of. Some artists make up for it by bringing artists from the cultures that influenced their sound onto their tours, labels, and such, which I think is a great approach for it despite still being a crumb approach. Sublime Frequencies is the plutonic ideal of that but I think the Grateful Dead are a good example too.

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Originally Posted by Frownland (Post 2183142)

I want to come back and address some stuff you said here, but first I want to ask if you'd say the above has anything to do with the idea of it being okay for Frank Sintra to sing "Ol' Man River" contra Paul Robeson?

It was more on the idea of "taking" in the context of cultural appropriation. Elvis with black or Hawaiian culture would be a better example.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frownland (Post 2183147)

It was more on the idea of "taking" in the context of cultural appropriation. Elvis with black or Hawaiian culture would be a better example.

Sure.

So the idea is basically you feel that someone should be compensated for general ideas that someone utilizes to make a lot of money from, right?

Why would that have anything to do with cultures? For example, say that Taylor Swift has a family that doesn't at all believe in sharing wealth, and Taylor Swift has a living-below-the-poverty-line sister who actually came up with a lot of ideas that Taylor based music on. Should Taylor's sister be compensated?

Right. My post is a better representation of the idea than that framing though.

I focused on cultures because the discussion is about cultural appropriation.

Ja pay the underdog Swift.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frownland (Post 2183149)

Right.

I focused on cultures because the discussion is about cultural appropriation.

Ja pay the underdog Swift.

Sure. But then it's not the notion of "cultural appropriation" really. The idea is just a general combo of:

(1) General ideas, not specific expressions, deserve compensation when they're capitalized on (which is a big can of worms even if we agree with copyright law, because provenance is so hard to establish)

combined with

(2) A general economic egalitarianism where there's a belief that (1) is a reasonable way to try to shoot for this.

It's not really a point about the ethics of cultural appropriation per se or about "ownership" relative to cultures, specifically, regardless of the financial situation involved. (For example, a lot of people who have a problem with cultural appropriation would have a problem with Taylor Swift exploiting Singaporean cultural tropes, even though Singapore is one of the wealthiest countries in the world.)

Retribution should reach all spheres of exploitation but the cultural level, especially when it falls along nationalistic lines, is one of the more obvious cases to recognize and resolve.

Singapore is wealthy but doesn't have the industry influence that an American mainstream artist like Swift would have, not really comparable imo. Even so, it'd be pretty cool if she spotlighted the Singaporean artists that influenced her if she doesn't already (not familiar with her career outside of that one single that made her big tbh).