Naïve ideologists have started a culture war that leaves little room for factual discussions. Suddenly white reggae musicians are cancelled. Pop music has long shown that everyone can benefit from cultural exchange.
Culture is not a matter of skin color or hair style. Even white musicians can play reggae – if they have enough talent.
How long does it take for hair to become matted in dreadlocks? Long enough to immerse yourself in Rastafarian culture. How long do you have to practice until the offbeats are on the guitar? If you don’t have a passion for reggae, you’ll never learn it. It is all the more irritating that white reggae musicians are currently generally suspected of violating Jamaican cultural assets. They are regularly canceled by organizers, as the Austrian singer Mario Parizek found out in the Zurich bar «Gleis»; on Tuesday his concert was canceled at short notice.
The problem is not new. The success of light-skinned pop stars has often aroused a guilty conscience towards the Afro-American role models, whose inspiration he was partly to thank for. Today it is regularly articulated in discussions about “cultural appropriation”.
According to this concept, which comes from American cultural studies, cultural exchange becomes an economic problem or even a discriminatory offense whenever a dominant majority misappropriates the cultural assets of a minority. Their opponents also want to see rock’n’roll as a racist sin, because the white majority has tampered with the musical tradition of the black minority.
Black does not become white
The celebrated compassion for Afro-American musicians, however, reveals two things: good will and incompetence. The first successes of Elvis Presley show that cultural appropriation is much more complicated than its theorists assume. In 1956, the country boy wowed white teenagers with “Hound Dog”. The title was coined by the Afro-American singer Big Mama Thornton in 1953. In this respect, the Elvis recording appears like a poor copy of the Afro-American original. However, “Hound Dog” is a composition by Jewish songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.
Almost a decade later, the Rolling Stones also happily used blues pioneers. Their imitation might show artistic deficits. But precisely thanks to the musical simplification, amateur musicians were able to praise their noisy versions as a new sound: Rock’n’Roll tore young British people out of the cultural rigidity that the country had fallen into after the Second World War.
The phenomenal popularity that white rock musicians experienced irritated Afro-American observers. The civil rights activist Frantz Fanon described the blues as an answer to oppression and racism – so what were white musicians doing in the blues? But soon Rock’n’Roll surprised with side effects that benefited the black musicians.
Soul singer Bobby Womack was initially annoyed that the Rolling Stones’ snotty noses landed a number 1 hit in 1964 with his song “It’s All Over Now”; obviously the hooligans had a bigger impact on the white kids than black artists. But then the royalty consoled Bobby Womack about the British appropriation.
On top of that. The success of British rock has sparked interest in the blues originals. Rock stars like Keith Richards stood up for their black idols. The European audience then cheered for old blues pioneers who seemed long forgotten in the USA. More importantly, thanks to the symbiotic fate of rock and blues, black music was able to assert itself as the pacesetter of global pop. The whole world is listening to you today.
Stealing is exhausting
One can certainly describe the interactions between blues and rock as appropriation. If you look closely, however, the process has little to do with the current controversies. But instead of delving into the concrete diversity of cultural exchange, naïve ideologues have now started a culture war with the power of their pro-seminar knowledge, which leaves little room for the intellect. The fanatics misunderstand pop history as a fate of racist sin and economic guilt, from which only the maximum demand of an eleventh commandment could actually lead: You shouldn’t play black music if your skin is white!
This is just as if the European colonialists had to leave America to the indigenous people again. Colonialism is based on oppression and exploitation. In line with the concept of cultural appropriation, cultural exchange is also essentially an abuse: selfish exponents of a majority always seem to be plundering the culture of a minority.
But that is nonsense. Artists are never just representatives of a dominant or minority group, but individualists with their own character. And the apparent stealing and stealing often proves to be a complex exercise in cultural spheres – it certainly requires interest and motivation. Anyone who has ever had to learn a foreign language knows that it is difficult to move in a new language community without perseverance and empathy.
Such processual efforts are more typical of so-called appropriation than the childish or carnivalesque adoption of exotic attire or hairstyles—examples regularly cited. The same applies to the minstrels – white comedians who blackened their faces at the end of the 19th century to make fun of the former slaves. The “blackfacing” of the minstrels is actually not about appropriation, but about a superficial racist spectacle.
racism
There are gradual differences in appropriation – from quotation to pastiche to authentic expression. At the beginning of the 20th century, for example, classical composers such as Shostakovich and Gershwin were inspired by jazz. They did not play jazz, but inserted jazzy motifs into their compositions. At the same time, musicians with a Jewish, Italian or Anglo-Saxon background got involved early on in the Afro-American scene in order to sometimes develop their own styles.
The fact that they were often treated better than the black idols by the promoters and the phono industry had nothing to do with appropriation, but with rampant racism, which also had an impact on showbiz. Bandleaders like Paul Whiteman were celebrated as figureheads of the genre, while the style-defining Afro-Americans had to fight for their existence. Meanwhile, among the pillar saints of the jazz tradition, there are almost exclusively African Americans: from Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker to Miles Davis.
In jazz, as later in rock’n’roll, white musicians generally dealt with genres and traditions and, of course, studied and appreciated the achievements of black idols. In the context of postmodernism and sampling, however, cultural appropriation now seems to be more of a matter of copy and paste. In this respect, it is understandable that people are worried about individual works and traditions. But it is copyright and not cultural studies with its negative concept of appropriation that protects against theft and plagiarism.
Against purism
Mixed cultures are also a consequence of multicultural socialization. Whoever tries to stop this trend quickly goes astray, which in turn can be illustrated by music history. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were still no clear genre boundaries. Blues and gospel mixed with folk, polka, marching music. Only the early phono industry invented the category of so-called “Race” or “Negro Music”. Just like that, African-American musicians were pushed out of the white music market, white radio and white consciousness.
In the context of rock’n’roll, it was above all white cultural critics who wanted to see a quasi-moral problem in the mixing of the music scene. On the one hand, this applies to American racists: When black artists appeared on television, resistance was formed. The mob, led by radio host and Ku Klux Klan leader Asa Carter, took to the streets to protest the “bastardization” of culture.
White blues purists in Europe, on the other hand, idealized the true blues musician as a country boy in black dungarees who plays an acoustic guitar and sings of his sad fate. The fact that black musicians played electric guitars for dance and entertainment seemed to them commercial treason. It’s a racist stereotype that the blues is always about grief.
Today’s critics, who fight against cultural appropriation like Don Quixote against windmills, remind us of these false blues purists. They lament the exploitation of the Afro-American music scene, even though it benefits materially from global pop on the one hand and dominates it aesthetically on the other. Among the top-earning pop stars are numerous African Americans such as Kanye West and Dr. Dre, Rihanna and Beyonce. And when we talk about the cultural hegemony of the West, then the influence of American R’n’B and hip-hop is also meant.
Everyone has benefited from the cultural exchange – white and black, artists and the public. Anyone who fights it now in the sense of a nebulous concept of appropriation will promote racism rather than reduce it.