Cultural appropriation in music - what's acceptable?

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Eno acknowledges that Czukay was ahead of them incorporating samples in that way, but he says he and Byrne were the first to make it funky. Can't argue with that.

I love My Life and Remain in Light a whole lot but I doubt Eno and Byrne would have given so much of a shit about funk and dance rhythms without guys like Czukay earlier in the 1970s. They were definitely playing catch up and the rhythms/sample arrangements are such specific steals from the ex-CAN guys its honestly shameless. But maybe not quite as shameless as King Crimson got ripping off Bryne/Eno a few years later! The circle of art rock.

There's a quote from Weymouth and another in Chris Frantz book about it but I can't find them anywhere.

[sevendaughters]

cultural appropriation talk should be focused on the people actually stealing/not paying royalties instead of vague calling outs of bands that incorporate traditional folk in their music.

agree. always feel this is one of those topics where what we're actually talking about displaced issues of capital but end up on some bowdlerised halfway house that actually begins, by pointedly not talking about the exploitative dimensions exclusively, doing the opposite of what was intended (ie. essentialising and commodifying race and culture).

[chutnut]

Yamasuki Singers?

Checked this out and I'm actually quite enjoying it so far! Although it's definitely not as absolutely crazy!! as the blurb/comments make out (maybe it was at the time)

I've got this album which is also made by exclusively white (as far as I'm aware) French musicians and it's great

[Famous Mortimer]

I wonder if the extremely strict definition of it was started by those on the less right-on side of things, to make we of a slightly nicer bent argue amongst ourselves and not make music with wider influences just on the off chance there's a shitstorm?

[Rizla]

From the great Drew Friedman

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

You'd think a handy guide for acceptability would be how much of a dickhead Whitey sounds with their appropriation. Then again, Tim Westwood has been getting away with it for decades, so who knows?

Cultural appropriation obviously shouldn't be an issue... in an ideal world. The analogy I thought of is doing a project with the school bully. They take credit for your work and then carry on bulling you afterwards.

[Pink Gregory]

cultural appropriation. Can't quite put my finger on it though. It certainly makes me cringe less than Sting's 'walkin' an de moon' reggae voice in The Police.

Was talking to someone the other day who wouldn't have it that Sting deliberately puts that affect on.  Like that's his accent or something.

[Cuellar]

Fine:

David Rodigan

Not Fine:

Chet Hanks

Any questions?

Good.

[Johnny Yesno]

I love My Life and Remain in Light a whole lot but I doubt Eno and Byrne would have given so much of a shit about funk and dance rhythms without guys like Czukay earlier in the 1970s. They were definitely playing catch up and the rhythms/sample arrangements are such specific steals from the ex-CAN guys its honestly shameless. But maybe not quite as shameless as King Crimson got ripping off Bryne/Eno a few years later! The circle of art rock.

There's a quote from Weymouth and another in Chris Frantz book about it but I can't find them anywhere.

I think you need to give some examples because I don't think MLITBOG sounds more than superficially like anything I've heard from Can or their solo work. That Czukay album with the samples might have been out there first but it is vastly inferior.

As for King Crimson 'ripping off' Eno and Byrne, Robert Fripp was on MLITBOG and worked with Eno on other releases. Of course they would influence each other. And I say that as someone who has very little time for KC or RF.

[Johnny Yesno]

What do people make of the work of Les Baxter? Did his work give a totally false impression of those island nations it was meant to evoke?

I believe 23 Skidoo thought so.

And they didn't mind taking their influences from the global south. For example:

[Johnny Yesno]

The problem is that while I'm not especially fussed about the music of Les Baxter specifically, I am mad about some music that clearly was influenced by that style, e.g. the music of Tipsy:

I love it so much and I'd hate to see it go the way of Qu'Ran by Eno and Byrne, although I'd find it difficult to argue against if it did. It's just that it's such a nice dream when you're in miserable old Blighty.

[Johnny Yesno]

But then there's the atrocity that was Deep Forest.

On one level, I can see that this is a progression from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. To my ear, though, it manages to trample all over the source material in a way that Eno and Byrne's work didn't. But is that just my biases showing? I vaguely remember there was a bit of a fuss about it at the time.

[greenman]

I love My Life and Remain in Light a whole lot but I doubt Eno and Byrne would have given so much of a shit about funk and dance rhythms without guys like Czukay earlier in the 1970s. They were definitely playing catch up and the rhythms/sample arrangements are such specific steals from the ex-CAN guys its honestly shameless. But maybe not quite as shameless as King Crimson got ripping off Bryne/Eno a few years later! The circle of art rock.

There's a quote from Weymouth and another in Chris Frantz book about it but I can't find them anywhere.

Most specifically I think Sunshine Day and Night from Saw Delight provides a pretty good blurprint for Talking Heads afro infected work...

That came out just a year before Fear of Music.

[Johnny Yesno]

Most specifically I think Sunshine Day and Night from Saw Delight provides a pretty good blurprint for Talking Heads afro infected work...

That came out just a year before Fear of Music.

Kind of, but we were talking about My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Remain in Light. I suppose Animal Waves off the same album is superficially similar to some of Remain in Light.

What about MLITBOG?

[Glebe]

Mike Read's 'UKIP Calypso' is just a bit of harmless fun of course!

[Midas]

pretty much anything goes. maybe if you covertly recorded the baka forest people of south east cameroon and made loads of ca$h from their tracks or "whatevs" then that'd be a bit rum and you should possibly be shot to death, but everything in creation stems from uncoordinated killing, appropriating and interbreeding. i'm not going to get all nihilistic but have you ever noticed how nothing actually matters? our destiny is to evolve back into horrible gloopy micro-onanisms and await the coming of the andromeda collision, i reckon. precious souls can easily maintain ownership of the world's voltage-controlled sinewave slide-whistles by taking a leaf out of my book and never releasing anything. maybe the ultimate fate of the universe is to collapse in on itself into a singularity undoing all of history's injustices. we'll all taste victory eventually. horrible space gits out in the stars.

[Glebe]

i'm not going to get all nihilistic but have you ever noticed how nothing actually matters? our destiny is to evolve back into horrible gloopy micro-onanisms and await the coming of the andromeda collision, i reckon.

That is fairly nihilistic tbh.

Life is a precious chance to do things like make culturally inappropriate music.

[Johnny Yesno]

Most specifically I think Sunshine Day and Night from Saw Delight provides a pretty good blurprint for Talking Heads afro infected work...

That came out just a year before Fear of Music.

Also, look what else came out a year before Fear of Music:

And what came out a year before Saw Delight...

[H-O-W-L]

Is Biko alright? I really like Biko.

[sevendaughters]

Mike Read's 'UKIP Calypso' is just a bit of harmless fun of course!

If Mike Read did a sincere calypso then fine. Whack, but fine.

The deliberate juxtaposition of music in a British context evoking migrant journeys with a party of (let's be generous) nationalist concern is exploitation.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

What about MLITBOG?

I can't find any of the quotes from the relevant books, but the story is that when the Talking Heads and Eno were in Europe, they stopped by Czukay for a visit, and he was delighted to show off his famous home studio. While they were there he played them an unreleased project that was a continuation of CAN's E.F.S series, where he'd worked the tape collage into grooves juxtaposing from different sources. When MLITBOG came out, lots of people mentioned how close it was to Czukay's project and he was upset about it. iirc Frantz and Weymouth said it was almost identical, but they're probably biased against Byrne.

Eno later said Czukay's tracks used the samples in a way that was more like sampling, and the MLITBOG was to use the cut up tracks in the place of "lead vocals" which apparently is the difference. Only bits of Czukay's stuff got released so we can't know now.

[chutnut]

I love Hamilton Bohannon, I've never noticed the similarity to Talking Heads before

[Better Midlands]

Some information about Dunya Yunis whose Abu Zeluf was sampled in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and also the same track in MARRS - Pump Up The Volume and didn't receive any recompense for either.

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2012/the-schizophonia-of-david-byrne-brian-eno-and-the-orb/

The ululating vocal is by the Lebanese singer Dunya Yunis, sampled from the Tangent Records album The Human Voice in the World of Islam.

Byrne and Eno were scrupulous about legally clearing their samples and listing the original sources in the liner notes. However, in this case, they obtained permission from Tangent Records, not from Dunya Yunis herself. She had been recorded by the Danish ethnomusicologist Poul Rovsing Olsen, and there was some controversy over whether Olsen or his label were the proper owners of the recording. Again, Yunis was never seriously considered to be the recording's owner, and to my knowledge, has never received any compensation from the sample usage.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Fine:

David Rodigan

Not Fine:

Chet Hanks

Any questions?

Good.

Mike Read's 'UKIP Calypso' is just a bit of harmless fun of course!

Judge Dread exists between Rodigan and the rest of these and yet was the first white musician to score a reggae hit in Jamacia, for making quite daft and obscene nursery rhymes to quite legitimate reggae.

Although it seems like him and the guys at Trojan had a mutually beneficial relationship and he wasn't really taking the piss
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Dread

I think a lot of this rest on how good/dedicated/convincing you are rather than any specific framework or any other reasoning, I guess you get less points if you 'genre hop' and can consider being an interloper but the rest is largely 'vibes'.

Ultimately nobody's going to haul Average White Band over the coals are they?

I guess another thing to consider is that it isn't always 'bad/selfish artists cashing in' as such. If we look at UK dance music, it's quite often predominantly black or fairly mixed and then gets whiter as it gets more popular, I don't think that's entirely broad-shouldered white-boys co-opting it, there's the suits in there choosing who to advance, and also then convincing the people they do advance to being more marketable. It was certainly a thing with DnB, and look at who got the charting Garage hits.

To follow on from that, if you want to see an example of people whitening Black artists, amongst other things there's a good example with Leigh-Anne from Little Mix on iPlayer:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09fy1qy/leighanne-race-pop-power

Bill Drummond made a point in one of his books that white people eulogise and stick to things like blues, disco, funk and rap while Black people are always looking and pushing things forward, but I don't think he fully concluded why, but I think the continual industry co-option and then laundering/marketing diluting it is almost certainly why.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I also realise this is Oscillations rather than the film sub, but I was quite pleasantly surprised when I saw this about Quentin Tarantino given I think he's a big appropriator in film:

As a child, Mark Hartley discovered many of the "Ozploitation" B-movies from the 1970s and '80s while watching late-night television, but was disappointed when they were completely overlooked in books he read detailing Australian cinema.[4] After becoming an accomplished music video director, his interest in this era of Australian filmmaking grew and he spent years researching a potential documentary film.[4] He was close to giving up on the project when he sent a 100-page draft[5] of the script to American film director Quentin Tarantino, not expecting to receive a reply.[4] Tarantino was a longtime fan of "Ozploitation" films and had even dedicated his film Kill Bill to Brian Trenchard-Smith's work.[2] He replied the day after, telling Hartley that he would do whatever he could to get the film made.[4] Hartley traveled to Los Angeles, California to meet with Tarantino, who agreed to sit for hours of interviews as one of the film's most prominent interviewees.[1][6] Hartley spent the following five years interviewing other actors, directors, screenwriters and producers, collecting original stock footage,[7] and then cutting the 100 hours of interviews and 150 hours of film footage down into a 100-minute film.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Quite_Hollywood:_The_Wild,_Untold_Story_of_Ozploitation!

I realise Aussies aren't exactly a marginalised group but still.

[gilbertharding]

Is this ok?

How about this?

[ProvanFan]

Got on da bus wit me day save-ah
Smoked da reefa in da corn-ah

[Sebastian Cobb]

Got on da bus wit me day save-ah
Smoked da reefa in da corn-ah

the wheels on the bus go round and round
skeng man fi ticket
save two pound

[Kankurette]

Does Leigh-Anne say owt about Jesy blackfishing? I can't imagine she's too happy about that.

Was talking to someone the other day who wouldn't have it that Sting deliberately puts that affect on.  Like that's his accent or something.

They should listen to that godawful musical he did where he tries to sound more Geordie than Jimmy Nail (who's also in it) and Steve Bruce put together.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I'd argue Jimmy Nail's 'aint no doubt about it' is better than any of Sting's solo stuff.

The Police were great but I reckon most of it was in spite of Sting, and the tight work of Copeland et al.