Appropriation, Music, and

Identity: Who Owns What

Noah Potvin, PhD, LPC, MT-BC
Duquesne University
  Caretaker of a tradition and experience
 Religious leader
 Community leader
 Family leader

 Provides and blocks access to outsiders

Gatekeeper
 Respected, deferred to by members of the culture

 Distinct from leaders, who make decisions that impact the future of the
culture – gatekeepers are holders of knowledge
  Provided access to the culture by the gatekeeper

 Role: be present but not seen or heard UNLESS invited to

Participant  Important to take cues from

observer
 Invited to be an ambassador to share a culture
 Distinct from being provided permission to be an OWNER of that
culture
  An unearned inherited power that protects from harm and enables
Privilege opportunities not afford to others
  No easy boundary, but the gatekeeper is king

 Appropriation
Appropriation  The forcible claim of a tradition not of your own exclusively for your
personal gain or benefit
vs. Borrowing
 Borrowing
 The temporary claim of a tradition not of your own to express
admiration or extol respect
 https://twitter.com/jere_bare/status/9899810230762
08640

 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/world/asia/chinese-prom-dress.html
No easy When the furor reached Asia, though, many seemed to be scratching their
boundary heads. Far from being critical of Ms. Daum, who is not Chinese, many
people in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan proclaimed her choice
of the traditional high-necked dress as a victory for Chinese culture.
“I am very proud to have our culture recognized by people in other
countries,” said someone called Snail Trail, commenting on a post of the
Utah episode by a popular account on WeChat, the messaging and social
media platform, that had been read more than 100,000 times.
“It’s ridiculous to criticize this as cultural appropriation,” Zhou Yijun, a
Hong Kong-based cultural commentator, said in a telephone interview.
“From the perspective of a Chinese person, if a foreign woman wears a
qipao and thinks she looks pretty, then why shouldn’t she wear it?”
  When you’re working with a patient:

 Who is the gatekeeper?

How does this  Who is the participant observer?

factor into
healthcare?  Is it possible to be both at the same time?

Central question: Who owns what?

  Porgy and Bess
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr_D6J1VocU
 White storytellers telling stories about black people without any original
source material
 Draws upon damaging historical stereotypes (“Mammy”)
 Some in the community nevertheless feel an ownership of the story/music
 Can we spot the gatekeepers in this segment?

What about  Fiddler on the Roof

music?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBHZFYpQ6nc
 Non-Jewish storytellers telling stories about Jewish people but with
original source material
 Directly addresses historical struggles of the community
#itscomplicated
 Elvis Presley
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd1pXw1DmsA
 White artist profiting from songs written by black songwriters
 How many of those songwriters could have performed their own songs in this
day and age?
Except for
Iggy. She is
decidedly not
complicated.
  Different typologies of AAE users
 It is possible for “whites who have a sense of belonging in
African American communities can use AAE in a native-like
manner, rather unproblematically, in a very different way from
the commodified forms more typically found among white
speakers.”
 Whites have traditionally been at little risk
African  Problematic: ”a non-native user performing the language in a
native-like manner, commodifying blackness for increased
American profitability in the marketplace.”
English
 What about Eminem?
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgztAU7p-WM
 Gatekeeper
 Mentorship
 Lived the artform
  That is, even though Eminem had contact with and exposure
to AAE during his formative years, allowing him more
command over these forms than Iggy Azalea, who would
have had only mediated access to the language for at least
the first sixteen years of her life, he does not rely on
performance of AAE in the construction of his hip-hop
identity, similar to the ‘core’ hip-hoppers in Cutler’s (2003)
work...
Discussion To find such a dramatic shift towards copula absence in Iggy
Azalea’s music is remarkable, and indicative of her carefully-
constructed hip-hop identity in lyrical performance, even
beyond what we would expect from hip-hop artists, who are
‘ultraconscious of their speech’ (Alim 2002: 300). Furthermore,
the fact that she exceeds other artists in every category in her
lyrics –  artists who themselves make productive use of this
feature in their speech –  lends support to the claim that Iggy
Azalea’s use of this iconic feature of AAE is a case of hyper-
performance (Fix 2010), and at least partially responsible for
the popular perception that her music represents a mimicry of
  Ripping off of names
 Azalea Banks turned into Iggy Azalea
 Niki Minaj’s Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded (2012) turned into Iggy Azalea’s
Reclassified (2014)

 Claiming language and experiences not her own

 Example 1: D.R.U.G.S
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTb6m6n_i8o
History of  “When it really starts I’m a runaway slave ... master”
 Azalea Banks’ clapback
appropriation  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Y3I-TkGGU
 The message to white kids is “‘You’re great. You’re amazing. You can do
whatever you put your mind to.’ And it says to black kids, ‘You don’t have shit.
You don’t own shit, not even the shit you created yourself.’”
 And to prove her point, check out the original title of this article:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2014/05/19/hip-hop-is-run-by-a-w
hite-blonde-australian-blonde-woman/#697db67d5692

 Example 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI1A405jBqg
 Turning people of color and their respective cultures into fetishized objects
  In other words, while black female rappers use hip-hop as a way
of countering  narratives surrounding beauty and sex appeal, Iggy
uses hip-hop as a way of reinforcing narratives of mainstream
ideals surrounding women and their bodies.11  This is evident also
in her music videos: in Work , she plays the role of a stripper, with
African American female back-up dancers twerking behind her; in
Change Your Life , she stars as a Vegas showgirl, again surrounded
by African American female back-up dancers; and in Pu$$y , set in
a poor African American neighborhood, she is featured
Objectifying seductively eating a popsicle, and reclining between the legs of a
young African American boy (p. 319)

Iggy Azalea, the self-proclaimed ‘pretty white girl’, in conjunction

with appropriating the language and discursive practices of
African Americans, also crafts her public persona around what is
desirable and desired of African American female bodies in the
mainstream, without having to grapple with, or even
acknowledge, the struggles of the lived experiences of African
American women across the nation. Such benefits are an integral
component of racial privilege and the structural advantages that
  Miley Cyrus and twerking
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrUvu1mlWco&t=1m28s
 Twerking is more than a sexualized act – it is an expression of
empowerment

 Moby had a huge hit in 1999 with Play

But it’s not just  Sampled a number of blues and gospel recordings, including Bessie
Jones, who largely remained faceless and nameless
Iggy and it’s  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QaAL1w-1ek

not just hip-

hop  Coldplay and Beyonce
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YykjpeuMNEk
 https://www.npr.org/2016/02/07/465901864/cultural-appropriation-in-
pop-music-when-are-artists-are-in-the-wrong

 Gwen Stefani and Harajuku Girls

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qecNL1266ms
  Artforms are not random; they are inspired by lived experiences
that reflect and shape worldviews across an individual’s ecological
systems

 Art reflects the nuanced depth of culture with subtle implicit

Considerations messaging that is not immediately seen, heard or understood by
visitors to that culture

 No prescriptive “How To Not Culturally Appropriate for Dummies”

manual for borrowing vs. appropriating
  What power do you wield as a music therapist?
 How does that power intersect with the power you wield in your
personal life (racially, ethnically, socioeconomically, etc.)?

 What power are you deprived of in your healthcare profession?

 How does that disempowerment intersect with the power you are
Discussion deprived of in your personal life (racially, ethnically,
socioeconomically, etc.)?

 How do you envision these manifestations of power and

disempowerment factoring into your patient/consumer
interactions?