Penn State Berks Thun Library celebrates Fair Use / Fair Dealing Week, Open Education Week and Black History Month
A Black and White Issue: Appreciation and Appropriation in Music
Damian Marley pictured with Joss Stone (credit: Collin Stark), and Chuck Berry pictured with Mick Jagger (credit: Ethan Russel Photographs). Used under Fair Use.
Cultural appropriation occurs when
members of the public copy and transform cultural products to suit their own tastes, express their own creative individuality, or simply make a profit.
Although cultures writ large are not protected by copyright, the products of culture – literature, music, drama, dance, visual art, audio/visual works, and architecture – are all subject to copyright protection. Furthermore, the act of ‘borrowing‘ from a minority culture is exploitative when it results in the original creators losing recognition for, control over, or compensation from their work.
Cultural appreciation occurs when people are motivated by a genuine interest to explore and understand the traditions, histories, beliefs, and day-to-day lives of others. Acts of cultural appreciation respect the significance of cultural objects, identify original creators, affirm their ownership of their work, and seek their permission when reuse of their art exceeds the activities protected by fair use.
The Claim
An early, albeit imperfect, analysis of white Americans’ affinity for black subculture appears in Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay in Dissent magazine, titled “The White Negro.” Mailer situates this cultural plurality in the context of the existential malaise following the ascendance and defeat of totalitarianism during World War II, including the atrocities of genocide and nuclear warfare. He draws connections between the terror of totalitarianism and the historical experience of African Americans, including slavery and its resistance, black codes and Jim Crow, and the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Migration:
The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it….
A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve. The only courage, with rare exceptions, that we have been witness to, has been the isolated courage of isolated people….
A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands for the general anxiety is greater. Indeed if one is to be a man, almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries….
So no wonder that in certain cities of America, in New York of course, and New Orleans, in Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles, in such American cities as Paris and Mexico, D.F., this particular part of a generation was attracted to what the Negro had to offer. In such places as Greenwich Village, a ménage-à-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.
Rent party in Greenwich Village, NY, in the post-war era. Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993, to International Center of Photography, under Fair Use.
More recently, Dr. Perry Hall reexamined the intersection of white and black cultures in his 1997 essay, “African-American Music: Dynamics of Appropriation and Innovation.” Hall traces the success of white musicians performing black music or as frontmen and -women of backing bands featuring black performers.
[With 1930s swing jazz] and similar points in the history of Black music, it becomes clear that a complex “love-hate” relationship connects mainstream society and African-American culture – in which white America seems to love the melody and rhythm of Black folks’ souls while rejecting their despised black faces. In no area is this complex relationship more evident than in musical tradition.
Hall goes on to claim that the separation of black music from black performers constitutes not only economic exploitation of black creativity, but also cultural appropriation which diminishes the significance of black genres in communicating and memorializing the black experience.
Award (recognition) and reward (compensation) structures often evolve that grossly enrich white appropriators, while only a few Black innovators have comparable levels of compensation,.. [and] the Black human beings whose collective living experiences most consistently contribute innovative impulses to the music of the wider culture continue as despised, feared, rejected symbols of undesirability.
In the post-war era, Hall points to the evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll, the emergence of soul as a foundation of disco, and the reactionary innovation of funk as a precursor to hip hop as exemplars of the diffusion and dilution of black cultural forms in mainstream American society. The examples below demonstrate the evolution of gospel into soul, and the sampling of soul in hip hop, using Ray Charles’ “I’ve Got a Woman” as a bridge:
The Southern Tones perform gospel song “It Must Be Jesus,” which Ray Charles covered as “I’ve Got a Woman.”
Ray Charles performs his soul hit, “I’ve Got a Woman,” which Kanye West and Jaime Foxx sample as a cover in their collaboration, “Gold Digger.”
Historical examples of this interplay range from Elvis and Janis Joplin, who both borrowed broadly from black rhythm and blues, each notably covering songs originally recorded by Big Momma Thornton; to Bob Dylan, who used the spiritual “No More Auction Block” as a foundation for “Blowin’ in the Wind;” to British Invasion ensembles the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who popularized the sounds and songs of African American artists like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
In recent years, white artists like Macklemore, Iggy Azalea (who is Australian), and Justin Timberlake have been criticized for appropriating black musical genres for both critical and commercial success. Joss Stone, a white British soul performer, was named Billboard’s 2015 reggae artist of the year for her collaboration with Damien Marley on the album, Water for Your Soul.
Songwriting team Jerry Leiber (lyricist) and Mike Stoller (composer), both Jewish Americans, composed numerous pop music hits, including “Hound Dog.” LA Times, under Fair Use.
https://youtu.be/JvbSXVc451Q
Big Momma Thornton first recorded “Hound Dog” in 1952.
Elvis recorded his version of “Hound Dog” in 1956. Despite changing the lyrics to refer to a hunting dog rather than an opportunistic male suitor, Elvis’s performance is undeniably sexualized.
While some evidence demonstrates white exploitation of black music for commercial gain, market research also suggests that black music relies heavily on a white audience to remain commercially viable. This can have a damaging effect on the essence and craft of black genres when they are distorted by the recording industry to appeal to a white audience.
Still others point to culture and creativity as “a continual process of borrowing and sharing” by their very nature, acknowledging that jazz as an African American musical genre was heavily influenced by white European music encountered by black soldiers during World War II. Indeed, cultural appreciation can move in many directions, as when black performers entered the punk music scene in the 1990s and 2000s. Music analyst Mark Reynolds observes that ‘punkers of color’ found in punk music what Mailer claimed white hipsters found in black music of the mid-20th century:
[D]anger, excitement, validation, and a sense of personal freedom.
