You Can't "Appropriate" Popular Culture

Cultures sell a product to others. That's the point.

I am going to break my rule of putting out only the highest-quality literary and cultural commentary and just swerve all over the place, maybe into dangerous territory. Exciting! 

First, as a public service announcement, I encourage you all to watch the film Theater Camp. My younger daughter and I watched this (again) a few nights ago, and we laughed the entire time. If you love art, art about art, and art that can laugh at art about art, this is indeed the film for you. If you need to laugh and laugh hard, this will deliver. I promise.

Swerving back onto the road… there is a funny moment in Theater Camp where a kid decides to audition by singing a Post Malone song. Full cultural disclosure: I do not listen to Post Malone, have any stake in Mr. Post’s street cred, and what I have heard of the Malone canon does not move me. But you know what? That won’t stop me from reading a Vox article about Post Malone and then posting right here about Post Malone! That is my job as a cutting-edge cultural critic in criticism’s twilight. We know it’s the twilight because, as The Atlantic has horrifically reported, there are now schools that do not require students to read a single book in its entirety. The age of content plunges the final stake into the age of criticism’s heart. I am tempted to look on the bright side and say, “Kids will start reading poems again! They’re short (the poems, and maybe even the kids). But I know this isn’t the case. I type this having just picked up two Helen Vendler books.

Anyway, in this Post Malone deep dive (about why so many people are collaborating with him), the now empty-calorie accusation of “cultural appropriation” is thrown around, somehow relating to Post Malone posing as a rapper, appropriating that culture so he could do something unspeakable, like glide over into a country album. No one has ever done this. Not even recently.

Sigh. 

I know there are real and serious examples of cultural appropriation. It also takes real and serious people to identify such actions. Let’s all say it together: you cannot appropriate popular culture because the key word is not “culture,” it’s “popular.” The entire point of popular culture and its financial model is that it be appropriated. That’s how we judge its success. It’s supposed to reach, infiltrate, and be consumed by as many cultures as possible. Jay-Z is famous for saying “I’m a businessman” rather than acting as any sort of cultural ambassador. More importantly, can you think of any musical genre more popular and pervasive right now across global cultures than rap? It is impossible to culturally appropriate rap music because the entire point of rap music (and the lyrics say as much) is to be sold to others and generate as much revenue as possible. The culture of rap (i.e., popular) music is capitalism. I say this as someone who listened to “Rapper’s Delight” multiple times a day on the radio in 1979. I saw KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions live in the 1980’s. Are people not aware of the Beastie Boys? Gee, what was that thing called The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? Was there a song attached to that show? Are people not aware of what was, at the time, Eminem’s record-setting chart appearances and awards (enter Drake). How can someone who grows up steeped in rap music (an incredibly common thing, just chaperone a dance) appropriate what is largely the only music they’ve ever known because it is incessantly marketed to them? 

Double sigh.

Today I listened to Prince. I worship Prince. Imagine accusing Prince of cultural appropriation. You would immediately combust into purple ash. Prince is a rock-and-roll star! Purple Rain is Prince essentially shredding on the electric guitar (think of Eddie Van Halen on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” or Run-DMC and Aerosmith providing a “moment” by collaborating on “Walk This Way”). Prince, among many other things, was a product of the Minneapolis music scene. His contemporaries included The Replacements and Hüsker Dü. There are any number of Prince songs, such as “When You Were Mine” and “When Doves Cry,” where if you removed the vocals it would sound like straight rock-and-roll. I have never heard anything but praise for Prince’s ability to effortlessly shift genres, including playing Gershwin (without sheet music) during soundchecks.

Of course, this is where the “infinite regression” counterargument arrives in the form of, “but there would be no rock music without the blues and what’s really happening here is a callback to….” Please stop. Are we really going to say that Tupac sampled Bruce Hornsby (!) in “Changes” because he wanted to send a larger message about how Hornsby needed to give proper credit to so-and-so? No. He did it because it sounds dope. Why do so many rappers sample Bob James? Because Bob James, a white jazz musician, is super-damn-funky. Finally, SAMPLING IS A STAPLE OF RAP CULTURE. What is sampling? It began as 100% appropriation without compensation for the original artists! Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, in today’s lazy critical ecosystem, is not one of the best albums ever released, it’s simply a start-to-finish exercise in appropriation that doesn’t reward the original sources in the only way capitalism can: monetary compensation.

We truly are inhabiting the laziest level of critique when all we have to offer is cultural appropriation and cancellation as broad-brush efforts to dismiss someone without doing the real work of textual and media interpretation and criticism. Are we completely surrendering the discussion of actual quality, technique, relevance, contexts, and commentary? 

There are important discussions to be had about appropriation. Popular culture is the least important and least “appropriate” forum for such discussions. Popular culture translates as “market culture,” where a cross-cultural market is supposed to trump any concern for the protection of a single culture’s control over the expression in question. And to be very clear: I am not talking about misrepresentation of a culture, which is something else entirely.

Please, let’s breathe some life back into thoughtful and thorough criticism that enables discourse rather than closing it off. Also, watch Theater Camp. Let’s meet back here and discuss.