Appropriation, Again...

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Dox47
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18 Jul 2014, 3:57 am

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/15/iggy_az ... e_remixed/

Quote:

Recently, my nine year-old nephew came running into the room, eager to find a seat to watch a performance by Iggy Azalea on an awards show. He sat, enraptured by her performance, yelling, ?Iggy!? utterly oblivious to the look of chagrin and dismay on my face, as I, too, tuned in to watch this white girl from Australia, turned ATL-style rapper, caricature everything I love about Southern Hip Hop.

The look and feeling of chagrin has stayed with me each time I turn on my radio and hear Iggy?s hit song, ?Fancy? coming through my speakers. And some of the dismay I feel is at myself, because almost without fail, I immediately start bobbing my head to the beat.

Iggy is a protégé of T.I., one of my all-time favorite rappers. Though T.I. is known for Atlanta-style, crunk Southern bravado that is a hallmark of Black culture in that city, according to journalist/blogger Bené Viera, T.I. recently expressed disappointment that ?we?re at a place in America where we still see color.? Apparently, color is only relevant when he?s talking about racist acts against Black men, but not when he has to think through his complicity in white appropriation of Hip Hop music.

As a born-and-raised Southern girl, who believes that lazy summer evenings are best spent with your top back or your sun roof open, bass-heavy music booming through nice speakers, while you slowly make a few blocks through the neighborhood, to see who?s out and what?s poppin,? I resent Iggy Azalea for her co-optation and appropriation of sonic Southern Blackness, particularly the sonic Blackness of Southern Black women. Everytime she raps the line ?tell me how you luv dat,? in her song ?Fancy,? I want to scream ?I don?t love dat!? I hate it. The line is offensive because this Australian born-and-raised white girl almost convincingly mimics the sonic register of a downhome Atlanta girl.

The question is why? Why is her mimicry of sonic Blackness okay? Though rap music is a Black and Brown art form, one does not need to mimic Blackness to be good at it. Ask the Beastie Boys, or Eminem, or Macklemore. These are just a smattering of the white men who?ve been successful in rap in the last 30 years and generally they don?t have to appropriate Blackness to do it. In the case of Southern rappers like Bubba Sparxx or Paul Wall, who do ?sound Black? as it were, at least it is clear that they also have the accents of the places and communities in which they grew up.

That's just an excerpt, you really should read the whole thing.
I'm tired at the moment, so I'll ad my own specific comments later, but I'll be curious to see what others think of the article absent me giving my own opinion first.

This is the artist being discussed:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-zpOMYRi0w[/youtube]

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The_Walrus
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18 Jul 2014, 5:10 am

Never mention Iggy Azalea on the internet!

The_Walrus
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18 Jul 2014, 5:23 am

Now that the most important thing that needed to be said has been said, I would like to make a few points:

1) The author is not complaining about white people doing hip-hop. She's complaining about a white woman who isn't even American putting on a Southern US accent when rapping, taking a character trait from other people and using it to sell records.
2) Iggy is undoubtedly benefitting from her race. Record labels have been looking for the "female Eminem" since, well, Dre discovered Eminem. Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP (78 on Metacritic) massively outsold Jay Z's far superior The Blueprint (88 on Metacritic) - Jay's total sales are about 2m, Eminem shipped 10m in the US alone. Race is a huge part in her success.
3) Bring back OutKast
4) The one true Iggy is Pop.

Stannis
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18 Jul 2014, 6:18 am

I don't think it's a good song.

I suppose the author of this article needs to get paid, and pulling indignation out of thin air can get hits.

Janissy
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18 Jul 2014, 9:59 am

So Macklemore is fine because he's not trying to fake a Southern Black accent.

And Bubba Sparxx is fine because it is his authentic regional accent even though he isn't black.

Now I wonder what her reaction would be if somebody black from outside the U.S. (UK, Australia or wherever) tried to fake a Southern Black accent. Is it "faking accent" that makes it appropriation or is it "not black and faking accent" that makes it appropriation?

In any case, this is the first I ever heard of Iggy Azalea. The particular rock I've been living under was populated by punkers and rockers of my generation so whenever I heard people say "Iggy" in conversation I assumed they meant Iggy Pop. Nobody on my Facebook friends list is <40 so that particular avenue of hearing about her was not open to me. The internet is a big place. It's impossible to be everywhere at once.

Anyways, business is business. The writer may be irritated that the market for "female Eminem" is so huge but then the market for irritated articles is pretty huge too, so what would she write about if everything was fine?

Raptor
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18 Jul 2014, 10:02 am

I find it mildly annoying, including that particular song. I think most people would just place her in the "wigger" (excuse my French) category and leave it at that with little to no further thought. Personally, I just don't listened to that kind of music because I find no enjoyment in it.

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sonofghandi
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18 Jul 2014, 12:10 pm

The_Walrus wrote:

4) The one true Iggy is Pop.

^That is my only input into this subject.

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luanqibazao
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18 Jul 2014, 1:03 pm

Can blue men sing the whites?

Dox47
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18 Jul 2014, 1:28 pm

The_Walrus wrote:

1) The author is not complaining about white people doing hip-hop. She's complaining about a white woman who isn't even American putting on a Southern US accent when rapping, taking a character trait from other people and using it to sell records.

Why is that a problem? British artists routinely sing with American accents, and no one calls appropriation on it, it's just marketing, or to be less cynical, art.

The_Walrus wrote:

2) Iggy is undoubtedly benefitting from her race. Record labels have been looking for the "female Eminem" since, well, Dre discovered Eminem. Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP (78 on Metacritic) massively outsold Jay Z's far superior The Blueprint (88 on Metacritic) - Jay's total sales are about 2m, Eminem shipped 10m in the US alone. Race is a huge part in her success.

Well, in the case of Em vs Jay, clearly the market felt differently than the critics, I don't see what the problem there is. Look at Jay's sometime nemesis, Nas, who's Illmatic is universally considered an absolute classic of the genre, but had to change to a more commercial, less critically lauded style to move albums, which illustrates how critical acclaim doesn't automatically guarantee sales. More importantly from where I stand, do you think Jay would have sold more albums had Em not been out at the time? That seems to be the contention that this particular author is making, that Iggy Azelia is somehow taking market share from the black female rappers she thinks deserve it, which is a whole other can of worms to get into.

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techstepgenr8tion
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18 Jul 2014, 2:21 pm

Heh, so it's an Australian and a Brit making American-style pop. I knew the second half as I was familiar with XCX, not so much with Iggy.

I might need to stop making drum n' bass though as this author suggests though since I've never been to London and I'm apparently stealing what it means to be urban and British by the mouth of the Thames.

My take on it - a lot of times people who get an outside view on something get to see it without the cultural baggage, actually get to see the music for the music without worry about the culture, and it can open a lot of creative directions as their own music will reflect a love of the genre moreso than needing to a be a stickler about living the culture to a T that spawned the genre. In a lot of ways Burial being a shut-in, even living in London, had that kind of distance for inventing his own sound in dubstep that caught on like wildfire and was sort of able to live in the sound as a bit of an outsider; the results sounded pretty good.

Not trying to say I care much for Iggy's work, but yeah - I think we tend to cling to a lot of things and I think more than anything the author is complaining about what's really a form of local or underground snobbishness that gets triggered when people they never liked start raving on about their favorite genre. It happens just as easily when its people of your own color as it is of a different color. Plenty of diehard country fans went through that I'm sure when that got commercialized into a mega-pop movement and they were packed in with guys and girls at a concert who didn't even know what a farm looked like.

Misslizard
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18 Jul 2014, 2:37 pm

She's not doing a very good job of appropriating the accent.Plus she is annoying.
I don't like hearing fake Southern accents.

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Last edited by Misslizard on 18 Jul 2014, 3:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Dox47
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18 Jul 2014, 3:10 pm

Janissy wrote:

Now I wonder what her reaction would be if somebody black from outside the U.S. (UK, Australia or wherever) tried to fake a Southern Black accent. Is it "faking accent" that makes it appropriation or is it "not black and faking accent" that makes it appropriation?

That's actually a very interesting question, and one I'd love to see someone who holds views similar to the quoted author answer. My gut says that while they'd object in theory, it would really be more of a pro forma cover-their-ass type of objection, as I think it's really the whiteness that's the problem but they don't want to come out and say that, but I could just be being uncharitable.

Janissy wrote:

Anyways, business is business. The writer may be irritated that the market for "female Eminem" is so huge but then the market for irritated articles is pretty huge too, so what would she write about if everything was fine?

Indeed, that's pretty much Salon's entire business model these days. I used to go there when Glenn Greenwald wrote for them, but these days I mainly cruise it for examples of progressive stupidity, for which it is an inexhaustible vein.

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Dox47
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18 Jul 2014, 3:29 pm

Stannis wrote:

I don't think it's a good song.

I suppose the author of this article needs to get paid, and pulling indignation out of thin air can get hits.

That's the funny thing, she doesn't say that it's a bad song, she's mad because of the race and culture of the person singing it, which sounds remarkably racist when put that way.

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LoveNotHate
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18 Jul 2014, 5:29 pm

The "hip hop" music seems to have a common theme of expressing malcontent and taking no personal responsibility.
However I don't listen to it much, so maybe I am wrong.

What I expect from "hip hop" or maybe it is "rap" music ...

Life is hard cause they make me do A
Life is hard cause they are always doing B
Life is hard cause they are always saying C
Life is hard cause they don't understand D

So, it seems like you need to be a malcontent to enjoy the music ?

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Janissy
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18 Jul 2014, 5:59 pm

Dox47 wrote:

Stannis wrote:

I don't think it's a good song.

I suppose the author of this article needs to get paid, and pulling indignation out of thin air can get hits.

That's the funny thing, she doesn't say that it's a bad song, she's mad because of the race and culture of the person singing it, which sounds remarkably racist when put that way.

Not only does she not say it's a bad song, she actually likes it (at least subconsciously).

Quote:

And some of the dismay I feel is at myself, because almost without fail, I immediately start bobbing my head to the beat.

So a part of her approves of the song but another part of her smacks that down and she starts feeling guilty for liking it. Racism is having a war with happiness inside her head but racism is winning.

Stannis
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18 Jul 2014, 6:29 pm

To paraphrase, I think, Bob Ellis (it's hyperbole, I know), "I think the reason the right don't tend to put out a lot of good fiction, is because to write good fiction, it helps if you have a good sense of empathy, which the right do not have". Perhaps this similarly applies to their (your?) ability to respond emotionally to social justice themes in music when those themes don't apply to their personal situation.

Enjoy this interview with Bobby Seale
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IGN2NDCopU[/youtube]

Last edited by Stannis on 18 Jul 2014, 9:42 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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