Category: cultural appropriation

  • Rebirth of a Nation

    [Content warning for disturbing, racist, and violent film imagery.] As we’ve discussed, the way that music and image interact can change, enhance, or even contradict the meaning of both the music and of the image. We are all familiar with the ability of image to define, revise, and re-write not only past history, but even…

  • Affrilachia

    A diagram of the major themes of country music. Country music may seem like the whitest of music genres, and has even been called “The White Man’s Blues.” Songs like Merle Haggard’s “I’m a White Boy” certainly advance that narrative. But is that narrative reliable? It’s true that some of the major themes of country…

  • Race, Class, Art, and Consumption

    Trigger/content warnings: N-word in original source. Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait d’une négresse 1800, Musée du Louvre. New Zealand singer Lorde’s 2013 hit “Royals” appeared to be a critique of conspicuous consumption: My friends and I – we’ve cracked the code. We count our dollars on the train to the party. And everyone who knows us knows that we’re fine…

  • Can A White Girl Sing Selena?

    April 16 is a state holiday in Texas: Selena Day. Who was Selena? Selena was, is, and, were I to guess, will remain for eternity the most beloved female of all time in the Latino community. (Second place is the Virgin Mary, if you’re looking for context.) . . . She looked like (a more attractive…

  • Blackvoice

    TW/CW: Racist imagery, blackface minstrelsy. You know what blackface is. Is there such a thing as blackVOICE? What is it? Historically, we might call “blackvoice” one of the performative tools of blackface minstrelsy. In the days when minstrelsy was considered an acceptable form of entertainment, blackface and blackvoice existed simultaneously in the same performance/performer. What…

  • Identity and Transformation

    Detail from Synecdoche by Byron Kim, a series of oil paintings that are “portraits” of racial identity. As we all know, Rachel Dolezal was by no means the first white American to take on aspects of African-Americanness in her persona — calling Elvis, is anybody home?. . . But blackness has always been an integral part of…

  • Cultural Appropriation or Cross-Cultural Encounter?

    Trigger/content warning: racist language, blackface minstrelsy. Rihanna wearing a Catholic bishop’s mitre at the gala for the Metropolitan Museum show “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” The lines between cultural appropriation and a more innocent cross-cultural borrowing can be blurry. Are there rules for determining which is which? Is this cultural appropriation? (Watch the…

  • Go Down, Moses

    The first published version of the spiritual “Go Down, Moses,” in 1862, attributed its authorship to “The Contrabands” — escaped slaves who joined the Union Army — who probably sang it as a rallying cry, rather than as a hymn. The song had been known for at least 15 to 20 years prior to its…

  • Blackface/Yellowface

    We’ve talked a little about the longstanding practice in opera of white singers “blacking up” to play characters of color. This practice has only begun to be thought of as controversial in our own century. For now, the least offensive choices for opera producers are to 1) cast singers whose race/ethnicity matches the race/ethnicity of…

  • From the Village to the Concert Hall

    Bartók recording folk music. His subject sings into the horn of an Edison phonograph, which incised a cylinder disk with a needle. Bela Bartók was one of the earliest ethnomusicologists. Here is a field recording he made of Romanian folk dances. Here is his piano composition entitle Romanian Folk Dances. Here is a folk song he…