Jerry: I love D’Angelo. The guy is a masterful songwriter, musician and orchestrator. His latest album, “Black Messiah,” is a performance-enhancing drug for me when I run.

But as a painfully self-aware white guy, I can’t help but wonder whether I seem like a phony (or worse) to the African-American community when I run and revel in the album’s energy. Especially if you consider the significance of the album’s early release (source):

“D’Angelo and RCA, partly inspired by the nationwide protests over the police killings of unarmed black men, had moved up the release of ‘Black Messiah’…”

Am I appreciating culture or appropriating it?

Great art is above politics…or is it?

Jia Jia: For me, the beauty of art is its ability to connect with every person at an instinctive level that’s beyond politics. And that’s wonderful. So if listening to d’Angelo puts you in a lovely mood, that’s great. Sure, there are deep political nuances to the music that you might be missing, but hey, art can be appreciated at multiple levels and at least you’ve hit level one.

Joy: I really think the political is not something we can get away from. If you’re gonna be down with D’Angelo (that album is amazing, isn’t it!!) and oppose the #BlackLivesMatter movement, or if you’re gonna wear moccasins and ignore the rampant use of reservations as dumping grounds for toxic waste (or, let’s set the bar lower even, the blonde in front of you in line at the Halloween store buying a Pocahontas costume)….NOPE. It’s not about attaining some sort of “down with the cause” card, it’s more about an orientation, a sensitivity, and actually doing something concrete, whatever that means within your purview. 

Jia Jia: Good point. Sensitivity’s important. Though it feels like a lot to ask someone to take action every time. What I do think that even the laziest person can do is have respect. In my book, it’s ok to like D’Angelo’s music and do nothing, but it’s not cool to go around professing to speak for him or his community.

In college, during my Chinese history and philosophy classes, there’d invariably be a certain kind of white guy quoting from the Dao De Jing or Analects or correcting the rest of us on the interpretation of a specific line of poetry. Ugh. Cultural pimping at its intellectual masturbatory worst.

Are you really into another culture or do you simply enjoy projecting that image?

MQ: This reminds me of a Chinese New Year’s party I attended earlier in the year that was 90% white-people-who-lived-in-Beijing-for-one-summer.  Which reminded me that I had a few non-Jewish friends who organized their own Seder a few years back.

These occasions made me think of a related component—whether there’s an intended audience. With the Chinese New Year party and the Seder, hipsters reading anime, suburban frat boys listening to hip hop, etc. etc., what seems off is that they’re all scenes of white people using ethnic props to perform for one another. In other words, when the point of being into something seemingly foreign is to differentiate oneself from other, blander white people, then it starts feeling more appropriative.    

Joy: Yeah, it’s all about your motivations. You doing it for yourself, or to project some exoticized image, because you feel you have a right to the ‘other’, whatever the fuck that means?

Music can be a tricky one, because some of it’s what we grew up with, some of it’s choice, and some of it’s just something intangible that grabs you. I think about this, too, when my Black neighbors do a double-take walking by my house, as I’ve forgotten that I left the window open and am blasting Tupac while I study.

I feel like the Blues was something that just grabbed me; I ran into Muddy Waters, etc. almost by accident. But then the rap and hiphop that I’m into nowadays was more of a choice—I was curious, made a conscious effort to check it out, and the more I listened to it the more I got into it. But I grew up in more of a classic/prog rock household so I know myself to be very much of an interloper in the whole culture of it. I don’t have a coherent answer, really, the whole issue is just something I try to be sensitive to, I guess. Is it weird that my brother and I find ourselves driving through Palo Alto listening to Public Enemy? Maybe. It’s the difference, maybe, between acting cautiously as a guest, and rolling in like a colonizer who feel a right to take and twist whatever they please. As long as I don’t turn into this guy from Office Space.

Naiveté is ok, lack of respect isn’t

Jia Jia: I’m inclined to cut people some slack if they’re culturally naïve. As long as they’re open to learning. I mean art and life are about appreciation and appropriation to a certain extent. You innovate and grow by building on existing influences. Acknowledging that influence is what’s key. Saying that Elvis Presley’s the king of rock ‘n roll without acknowledging that his music was basically black is an egregious miss.

Joy: Yeah, and there’s a different conversation if it’s white people culturally appropriating to, I dunno, try and be ‘ethnic’ and shit, versus POC appropriation (which can also be really problematic, i.e. Pharrell with a headdress). Lately I’ve decided that Eddie Huang, Fresh off the Boat author, is a really standup dude, and I want to make friends with him. He’s got some insightful thoughts about his own identification with black culture and hiphop (some in this interview—and then some in other clips that I can’t remember). 

But…inspiration knows no cultural boundaries!

Jia Jia: Speaking of headdresses reminds me that Lagerfeld sent them down the runway in 2013. And I swear I read a quote where he dismissed the cultural appropriation debate because to him, it was not about politics but rather aesthetic inspiration.

Also, The Metropolitan Museum’s Alexander McQueen exhibit featured a headdress that distinctly reminded me of Chinese wood sculptures. My first thought on seeing the McQueen work was actually, “That’s genius! It looks so cool!” Should I have been offended?

Buffy: I feel that for me, it is all about the quality of the idea. If someone is doing something because they think it looks cool, then I basically think that’s boring. So if they’re appropriating a head-dress simply because they look cool in it (hey I’ve made mistakes like this too) then basically their work fails artistically, and just becomes the realms of hipsterdom.

I saw a nice documentary recently about Butoh, and one of the dancers was saying that he liked traveling, and working with people of other cultures, because he was not afraid of misunderstanding—that is, he welcomed the experience of misunderstanding head on. I’m with him on this: I like art work that is brave, and which gets stuff wrong—I like work which troubles our hegemonically-imposed definitions and categories, which doubts and communicates. 

Joy: I get massively pissed at things like the Lagerfeld quote—in de-historicizing oppression and genocide, and thinking he can simply lift pieces of a culture because they’re pretty, when he is standing on land that was stolen through the murder and dispossession of millions….I have, really, no words strong enough for that. I’m not saying he can’t take aesthetic inspiration from the form. But if he wants to de-politicize something he’s got to depoliticize it by changing the form enough so that it becomes something that’s clearly his artistic vision, taken outside of the original context of meaning. You can’t just take something with layer of meaning and history, put your fingers in your ears, and say ‘lalala I can’t hear you, I don’t want it to have that history so I’m going to pretend it doesn’t, and if you call be out I’ll just say you’re being oversensitive.” Nah. 

Jia Jia: Hmmm…this makes me wonder whether cultural appropriation only becomes a discussion with bad art. Good art should fuse influences in ways that bring out their best and transcends them. Which I guess is what Lagerfeld assumes he always does in his fashion. Except I don’t think he succeeded with the headdresses—those don’t look like “Lagerfeld genius to me,” just bad versions of Native American headdresses. Whereas I still love McQueen’s headdress. He took the delicacy of the Chinese wood sculpture and turned it into wearable art that also has echoes of Chinese headdresses. But the final product is something completely new.

The one thing we agree on: Rihanna’s dress

Jia Jia: For a more recent fashion cultural foray, what do we think of Rihanna’s dress at the Met Ball? The theme was China: Through the Looking Glass. At first I thought that Rihanna’s empress gown was a bit self-aggrandizing. I mean, an empress, really? But then I read that she’d researched Chinese couture online, fell in love with the dress, and contacted the Chinese designer Guo Pei to ask for permission to wear it. And then I realized that practically every other celebrity was wearing “China-inspired” outfits by Western designers that were insipid at best, ridiculous at worst.

Joy: I was down with it…though I agree with some of the snarkier online bloggers that she looked a tad like an omelet. 

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By: Buffy, Jerry, Jia Jia, Joy, MQ