Is cultural appropriation ever okay?
I was recently hanging out with a rock band, discussing our shared love for a particular R&B album. They said they'd love to cover the album track for track, but would never. A band of white indie-rockers performing the songs of a black R&B singer? No way. It would be seen as cultural appropriation, and their reverence for that music was probably better expressed through conversations like the one we were having that night anyway. As badly as I wanted to hear their covers, they were right.
When is cultural appropriation - the act of making art that reaches for new ideas across lines of race and class - ever acceptable in pop music? Finding an answer requires us to clarify the difference between theft and influence, or more specifically, taking and making.
When Justin Timberlake beatboxes, or Taylor Swift raps, or Miley Cyrus twerks to a trap beat, it feels like taking. Nothing is being invented other than a superficial juxtaposition. On the flip side, when the Talking Heads echo African pop rhythms, or the Wu-Tang Clan channels the spirituality of kung-fu cinema, or Beyoncé writes a country song, it feels more like making. The borrowed elements become an essential, integrated part of a new, previously unheard thing.
We think we know this difference when we hear it, but sometimes we don't - so there are more questions to ask, and many of them point toward an imbalance of power. Is the appropriating artist profiting off a culture that remains marginalized? Does the appropriator seem to understand the complexity of their own relationship to the culture they're cribbing from? Will their appropriated music steer attention toward its source? Or will it divert potential attention away from it?
White rappers are by far the most flagrant appropriators on today's pop charts, and many of them flunk these questions. Yet, scores of mediocre white rappers - from Iggy Azalea to G-Eazy to Post Malone to Bhad Bhabie - continue to climb far higher in the marketplace than they would if they were black. This falls on the audience and the industry. For these artists, it's not that their whiteness automatically makes them bad rappers; it's that their whiteness automatically sets them up to become successful rappers.
Here's one last question that might be helpful to ask of white rappers, or any musician who appropriates: Are they travelers, or are they tourists? Travelers move through the world in order to participate. Tourists simply look around, have some fun, take what they want and bring it back home.
Which brings us back to the indie-rock band in love with the R&B album. They knew they weren't going to perform these songs at next summer's Essence Festival. Their covers wouldn't transcend tourism. So they stayed home.
2. Should we listen to music against a dead artist's wishes?
Everything about Prince's death felt unreal, including the fact that the single greatest musician of our time vanished from this world without leaving a will. Maybe he thought he was going to live forever, just like the rest of us did.
What Prince did leave us, however, is a knot of anxiety over how to approach his body of recorded work. Would he really want us streaming his albums on Spotify, the very type of hyper-corporate, artist-unfriendly music distribution system that he spent all of his purple life railing against? And what about the contents inside his mythic vault? Would he have wanted us rifling through the recordings that he had so purposefully locked away in the depths of his Paisley Park studio?
I believe that vaults are meant to be cracked open - and even if they weren't, it's ultimately a musician's responsibility to be clear about what should happen to their music when they die. If an artist doesn't want a particular recording in circulation once he's gone, he should destroy that recording himself, or at least leave explicit instructions for his executors in regards to the shredding. Otherwise, that music will find its way out into the world.
But "the world" and "the sales floor" are two very different things, and I know I'd feel much better listening to Prince's unheard music via the Library of Congress or the Free Music Archive than on a commercial streaming service. In September, I'll have to decide exactly how to listen once Prince's estate releases "Piano and a Microphone 1983," his first posthumous album from the vault.
Paying cash money to hear songs that Prince may not have wanted us to hear in the first place might flash us back to the unfinished Michael Jackson recordings that L.A. Reid finished off in 2014, or those private Kurt Cobain demos that surfaced a year later. The listening might feel good on our ears, but the money changing hands will inevitably feel gross.
That's one of the ugliest downsides of the streaming era. When we stream music, our listening becomes transactional. And surely, that drove Prince crazy. To honor his memory, I continue to listen to his albums on vinyl and CD, and I sleep a little better at night.
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