Rethinking Appropriation and Wokeness in Pop Music

The registry of celebrity missteps, like life itself, is long and often horrifying. Some things linger, many fade away. On the collectively-forgotten end of the scale is whatever Lily Allen was doing in 2013. The British singer-songwriter had come to fame a few years before, in her early 20s. With a studied irreverence and a MySpace origin story, she presented as a kind of acceptable agitator—rougher around the edges than some of her pop-star peers but not so much that she precluded tabloid appeal. (Her family, which includes an actor father and Oscar-nominated film producer mother, certainly fueled the press’ interest.) A few years into her career, the erstwhile outsider had become an insider, and Allen made an attempt to reckon with the patriarchal structures of the music industry. The result, her third album Sheezus, wasn’t exactly a success. Not only was its first single, the satirical “Hard Out Here,” a flop, it was widely considered a racist flop.

The song’s primary conceit—that it’s “hard out here for a bitch”—borrows heavily from a Black colloquialism; its lyrics, at points delivered in AutoTune almost to the point of absurdity, further suggest who she may be critiquing: “I won’t be braggin’ ’bout my cars or talkin’ ’bout my chains/Don’t need to shake my ass for you ’cause I’ve got a brain.” The references are not subtle. In the video, a caricature of a manager-type, ostensibly a stand-in for the music industry at large, encourages Allen to receive cosmetic surgery and later to twerk her way towards success. And yet that is not who gets the brunt of her critique; instead, it’s the Black women who surround her, backs bent and butts jiggling. She both blames and uses them as props for her own clunky purposes.

Critics swarmed to accuse Allen of cultural appropriation, and worse. “The return of Lily Allen, an artist whose career encapsulates the concept of white privilege, with a video that encapsulates [a] clumsy fascination with and liberal disdain for black music, feels apt,” wrote Alex Macpherson in The Quietus, pointing to the video as “ugly race/class caricaturing.” Allen defended her work and her intention to take on the “objectification of women within modern pop culture,” and deflected blame onto her label for the quality of her music. Just a few years earlier, though, she might not have even needed to. Not because there weren’t people who, for example, objected to Gwen Stefani's flirtation with Indian, Jamaican, and Japanese cultures during the 1990s and 2000s, but because those objections were not given much airtime then. That is to say, cultural appropriation hadn’t yet been appropriated.

The concept, of course, is not new. Nor does it exist solely within the contexts of race and/or pop culture. Consider one of the most famous white women in history: During her reign over 18th-century France, Marie Antoinette ordered the construction of the Hameau de la Reine, a fake village on the outskirts of Versailles where she could escape the stodginess of the French royal court and the pressures of politics by pretending to be a peasant. There, in a hamlet intentionally designed to look run-down, the Queen would gallivant as a milkmaid, while members of the actual working class went hungry under her rule. (That Marie Antoinette may have been among the most prominent cultural appropriators in history is almost too on the nose, considering she would become an icon of romanticized fascination for a stratum of white women’s culture.)

In academia, the ethics of appropriation have been debated for years, covering issues that include archaeological artifacts, indigenous spiritual practices, and, yes, music. But its leap into the zeitgeist over the past decade was large. The Google Trends graph for the phrase “cultural appropriation” between 2010 and 2020 looks like a cityscape. Among its first peaks—that is, periods of time during which searches for the phrase shot up—were in April 2010 and October 2011. The first corresponds with the publication of a pointed, F.A.Q.-style post by scholar Adrienne Keene explaining why it’s damaging for non-native people to wear indigenous headdresses or similar sacred items as costumes. She’d run the blog Native Appropriations, dedicated to exploring issues of appropriation as they relate to indigenous people, for a while. But April and October account for Coachella and Halloween, holidays for people who casually wear indigenous headdresses.

The idea had traction, and a platform, elsewhere too. By then, Tumblr had emerged as a home base for social justice-minded young people, and a repository for growing networks of stan bases. They overlapped in the form of blogs like Your Fave Is Problematic, offering a taxonomy of offending celebrities, and a simple, effective framework through which to consider morality in pop culture. Concepts like intersectionality, rape culture, toxic masculinity, and safe spaces joined appropriation to puncture mainstream language around race, gender, sexuality, and beyond. Such terms, once the domain of academics, theorists, organizers, and nonprofit professionals, popped up everywhere. So much so that their meanings became slightly obscured; any bad male behavior could be described as toxic masculinity, Audre Lorde’s radical practice of self-care was reduced to signify personal indulgence, and intersectionality went from being a legal theoretical framework to a buzzword vaguely gesturing at progressive gender politics. Ironically, the effects of appropriation—what happens when something is removed from its original context—happened to the language itself.

This was the world into which Allen had released “Hard Out Here”: People knew what they were not to do, even if they didn’t seem to understand why. Writing in Grantland in 2013, Rembert Browne declared cultural appropriation the winner of the year. “People were existing with an almost reckless abandon, with discussions previously too taboo to breach exploding everywhere,” he said by way of diagnosis.

It’s true that in 2013, the decades-long norm of white artists making ‘Black music’ seemed to have reached a new apex. The year’s farthest-reaching songs included takes on R&B by Robin Thicke, Justins Bieber and Timberlake, and Ariana Grande. Macklemore had a breakout arrival. Pop culture seemed to reflect the philosophy that undergirded centuries of American life: We want the fruits of Blackness, but not Black people. That this followed a string of widely publicized events involving racist police, the vigilante murders of Black people, and the inception of the Black Lives Matter movement, was crucial context. It was the simple act of loudly and proudly listening to Black music, after all, that made teenager Jordan Davis a target for murder in a Florida parking lot in 2012. These connections lingered, even if they weren’t always articulated.

Still, music has long been the site of cultural shifts, and it continued as a potent venue for discourse about the intersections of race and power. The visibility of artists offered an accessible entry point through which to understand discrepancies mitigated by the parameters of race. Around 2013, and for the two or three years that followed, race and raceplay became increasingly common lenses through which to digest and discuss pop music. Segments of the public watched, named, and critiqued, for example, Miley Cyrus’ Bangerz-era racial performance, how she was profiting from Black women while rendering them invisible. What was disparagingly dismissed as ‘outrage culture’ could have more generously been understood as a collective grappling with concepts that weren’t new but were newly front-and-center. During that time, I thought often, with a kind of esprit d’escalier, about an argument I’d had with a white friend at a bar; I regretted that, just a few years earlier, I didn’t have the language to explain to him why I bristled at his casual use of Black slang and why that bristling was valid.

Also during that time, I joined many others in projecting my own experiences of the world onto artists whose work, or words, validated me in the right way, or challenged me but only enough that it felt comfortable. The neoliberal obsession with individualism crystallized, and focused growing social justice discourse on celebrities and eventually, to the burgeoning class of influencers made in their image. In 2013, that meant taking the parts of Kanye that aligned with my values and conveniently discarding those that didn’t. In the absence of real-world progress, I saw his defenses of Beyoncé and of his own ambitions as a mirror.

Representation had been elevated as the solution to centuries of structural, systemic, and interpersonal racism. For every Katy Perry dressed as a geisha and every Macklemore being Macklemore, some semblance of balance could be achieved by focusing on the identity markers of their counterparts from marginalized backgrounds. Representation is objectively good. But in the absence of critical thought, heralded as the end all and be all, it can be a flattening. The public began to equate identity with morality, erasing the complex relationships between people and the powerful structures that govern our world. Identity was enshrined as a weapon for some, and a shield for others.

By 2015, social justice and identity had coalesced into core marketing and PR strategies. Social justice aesthetics began to dictate the terms of public discourse; celebrities braided their politics into social media imagery and, sometimes, into their public-facing work. When Beyoncé’s Black Panthers-referencing guest spot upstaged Coldplay’s Super Bowl 50 halftime show in 2016, it was both because of her superior skill as a performer and because she appeared to be making a statement in support of Black Lives Matter and against the police murder of Mario Woods. After some police unions and pro-police organizations attempted to rally public sentiment against her, she even sold official “Boycott Beyoncé” merchandise.

Few artists working at Beyoncé’s level are as inventive or effective at using visuals and style to gesture at politics, but in her wake, an unspoken expectation spread that a personal politic was something to claim rather than something to practice. Public figures were evaluated on perceptions of their place on the spectrum of progressive politics. Only a handful were ever truly ‘canceled,’ but many were put on notice. On the one hand, this brought attention to causes that long needed them. On the other, it spotlighted the fallibility of pop culture in its current iteration as a venue for political change. What did it mean that we had spent the Obama years rallying for representation and visibility if what they ultimately yielded was Trump?

Within the chaos of wokeness as a litmus test, urgent considerations were rendered secondary. Instead of, “Who is problematic?” we should have been asking, “What is the harm being done, and to whom? How can it be repaired, and by whom?”

A recent tweet sums up the frustrating paradigm: “Millennials love to say ‘problematic’ without understanding the problem.” One widely understood objection to cultural appropriation is that white or non-Black people of color benefit from Blackness while Black people go unrewarded or even stigmatized for our cultures. But there are even more insidious effects. As rap officially became recognized as the most dominant music genre in the U.S., its whitening has had dire consequences for certain groups. Police and prosecutors across the country have increased their use of lyrics to criminalize Black and Brown people.

In such cases, rap songs as irritatingly ubiquitous as “Gummo” by 6ix9ine to those by artists as regionally specific as Baltimore’s Young Moose have been used against their creators in criminal proceedings. Music is surveilled and literalized in ways experts, and at least one judge, have described as unfairly prejudicial evidence. (Moose, in particular, was targeted by a police officer he accused on a 2014 song of “trying to fuck up [his] life.” The officer was later convicted in a high-profile police corruption scandal.) Rap is among the U.S.’s most prominent global cultural exports and a multibillion-dollar industry that has enriched stakeholders in some of the world’s largest corporations. Yet for too many members of the largely Black communities that originated, nurtured, and innovated the art form, “participation in hip-hop is painted as a moral shortcoming that suggests a propensity for real-world violence and degeneracy,” wrote Briana Younger in 2019.

Black music has a rich history of in-group codes, from the work songs repeated by enslaved people in the antebellum south to the dozens of subgenres of hip-hop that thrum in marginalized communities around the country. That is, in part, what makes Katy Perry's baby hairs worth talking about: There is a material connection between legitimized appropriation and the conditions of freedom for Black people. But in beginning and ending the conversation on the offense and not the impact, we risk clouding the real stakes.

The flipside to the absence of intellectual rigor in celebrity-driven reckonings with race is representation. The culture in which any achievement by a Black artist is commemorated has its own dangers. Identity, celebrity, and a shaky media ecosystem converged to force significance onto absolutely anything, and to protect the Black celebrity class from meaningful critique. As a longtime Rihanna fan, why should I view her obscene wealth hoarding any differently than Kylie Jenner’s?

Some years and several paradigm shifts on, a few things have changed. For one, Lily Allen eventually came around, and apologized. (“After I got called racist, I started reading lots of Black feminists online and learning about intersectional feminism, realizing how much worse it is for other people. I was consumed by it for a long time,” she told The Guardian in 2018.) Among the most prominent conversations about appropriation this year centered on Beyoncé, who was challenged for her use of music, imagery, and spirituality from various African cultures in the Lion King soundtrack she helmed last year and the accompanying film she released this summer, both under contract for Disney. At its best, the critique sought neither to suggest Beyoncé must have a greenlight because of her identities as a Black woman, nor to bar her from engaging with African and diasporic cultures altogether, but, more productively, to investigate what the implications of that engagement might be and to raise important, if ultimately unanswerable, questions about the power dynamics of appropriation under capitalism.

The rapper Noname, a deft storyteller whose career began alongside Chance the Rapper in Chicago’s youth poetry scene, was both applauded and decried for tweeting critiques of Beyoncé’s Black Is King. Notably, Noname had begun publicly documenting her ideological evolution in early 2019; when she tweeted a defense of Black capitalism last year, Noname was flooded with criticism by socialist-minded fans. But instead of becoming defensive and issuing a Notes-app apology, she engaged with the ideas she was challenged with, did her own research, and publicly admitted she was wrong—much like she did when she discovered her original stage name included an offensive slur. In that twin vulnerability and accountability, I see a model for what it might look like for artists and the general public to engage with one another in a meaningful way. “It’s important for folks to see me do this,” she said in an interview earlier this year. “To see me learning, but to see me struggling and not being afraid to continue.”

She also launched Noname Book Club, a community reading group that offers anyone interested access to political education through selections like Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis and The Wretched of the Earth by the anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon. Not only has Noname effectively challenged the idea that people must arrive into the public eye with their politics fully formed, she offers a version of artist activism that is more in line with the collective goals of movement work. Rather than a top-down, charity-minded approach, which itself replicates many of the structures that have prompted this moment in the first place, Noname’s book club attempts to center community over celebrity. There is a reason that concepts like horizontal organizing, mutual aid, and relinquishing power—that is, frameworks prioritizing not who you are, but what you do—have begun to enter the mainstream consciousness. They, too, are at risk of being misappropriated.

Of course, there is no wielding of celebrity that is not even just a tad self-serving. I am wary of holding her, or anyone, up as a paragon of ‘good celebrity’—that would willfully replicate some of the same transactional, aestheticized politics I hope to interrogate. Instead, as someone whose livelihood has been bound up in harm-perpetuating pop culture, I simply acknowledge that Noname has recently demonstrated some of the qualities I hope to see and practice more of: vulnerability, accountability, surrendering power, and committing to honesty. Even at the risk of being wrong in public.

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork