Go on…
Oh, I should keep an open mind.
So you can fill it up with bullshit?
Well, in that case, while I'm watching you
I'm gonna eat this delicious plate of Western
made sushi, which I'll be eating using my
culturally appropriated chopsticks.
Oh!
Oh! It's appropriation!
Cultural appropriation, to be exact.
And even though you think these college kids
are going too far, you generally seem to agree
with them that cultural appropriation is a
negative thing.
Please enlighten us: why is it so bad?
*sushi spew* Wrong!
Totally wrong!
Utterly and completely wrong!
Seriously, if you're that ignorant about culture,
you should not be commenting on social issues.
Ok, now that I've calmed down, and cleaned
the rice out of my laptop, let's get serious.
I actually do know something about this subject,
so now I'm going to ask you to keep an open
mind, while I first tell you where you're
wrong, and then tell you a little bit about
the history of cultural appropriation.
Let's go back to the 1950s, when Elvis broke.
Back then, blacks were still the "other" of
American culture.
America saw itself as a civilized nation,
and regarded the blacks as uncivilized people,
as representatives of the savage origins that
we left behind.
So when a black entertainer was dancing provocatively,
no one had any problem with it – white people
laughed at it, and saw it as part of the black
man's nature.
No black entertainer was ever punished for
it.
When Elvis appropriated black music and dance,
on the other hand, it was a huge scandal.
Elvis was blamed for degenerating the youth,
for bringing it down to the level of the black
people.
He was regarded by some cultural guardians
as literally a danger to Western civilization,
a danger that must be stopped.
Because of that, he was censored, hounded
and smeared, and rock'n'r'oll, which was basically
white performers appropriating black rhythm
'n blues, was blamed as the cause of juvenile
delinquency and crime, and suspected as
a communist plot.
But rock'n'roll won, defeating back these
cultural supremacists, and freed us from the
inhibitions that they imposed.
And so, by the virtues of cultural appropriation,
Elvis and rock'n'roll further liberated Western
society.
But cultural appropriation did more than that,
because in a free society, appropriation goes
both ways.
The entire history of American pop music can
actually be portrayed as blacks and whites
appropriating each other's cultures and enriching
each other's worlds.
Because when the black slaves were brought
from Africa, their masters made sure to erase
any cultural heritage they had, which meant
that post-slavery, African-Americans basically
had to create their culture from scratch.
They did it by appropriating elements of American
culture and doing them their own way, mixing
them with what little African heritage they
had left, like rhythm and dance.
At first, the majority of the African-American
community rejected these new musical styles,
and didn't like the fact that black kids were
appropriating white culture.
But these styles did appeal to some white
youth, kids that recognized that this was
basically American culture, taken to a new
level of freedom, ecstasy and fun.
These white kids eventually appropriated these
musical styles and started playing them their
own way, having to overcome the objections
of white cultural supremacists at first, but
eventually winning and making the style popular
with the general public.
This is what happened with ragtime, blues,
jazz, rock'n'roll, soul, funk, hip-hop, and
techno, to name but a few styles that became
popular through this process.
And every time one of these initially black
styles was appropriated and became popular,
blacks became a little less of an "other"
to American society, until eventually African-Americans
became part of the fabric of America, a community
with its own heritage that is both unique
to it and part of American history.
Thus, cultural appropriation advanced social
harmony and social justice in America.
Let's take just one example to illustrate
what I'm talking about.
Do you recognize this little snippet?
This is the classic 1982 record 'Planet Rock'
by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force,
one of the cornerstones of hip-hop.
Now, this is a very early hip-hop recording,
but hip-hop was actually around for almost
a decade by then.
Hip-hop was born in the early seventies, when
a few DJs from the Bronx appropriated a custom
they learned from Jamaican DJs, and started
throwing street parties in which they played
records on their mobile sound systems.
While in Jamaica the DJs played reggae records,
in the Bronx they played mainly funk, and
at some point the DJs noticed a new phenomenon:
while everyone else was dancing, some kids
would stay on the sidelines and wait for "the
break", a moment in funk records in which
only the percussion is playing.
When the break came, these kids would jump
into the square and perform a dazzling new
type of dance, which was aptly named "breakdance".
In time, the DJs developed techniques that
enabled them to play the break parts back-to-back,
and weave them together with samples from
other records to create a wholly new musical
piece, which catered to the dancers' needs
and enabled them to breakdance with no interruptions.
Thus, through this interplay between pioneering
dancers and DJs, hip-hop was born.
And one of the greatest of these pioneering
DJs was Afrika Bambaataa.
Afrika Bambaataa, real name Kevin Donovan,
was born in 1957 in the Bronx.
As a child he saw the 1964 movie Zulu, which
depicts the true story of an 1879 small British
regiment stationed in South Africa, which
bravely defended a fort against an army of
four thousand Zulus.
The story focuses on the white heroes, but
young Kevin was impressed by something else:
the solidarity he saw among the Zulus, a solidarity
he felt was missing in the African-American
community.
And so, via white Hollywood, Donovan connected
to his African roots, and found his identity
and his mission in life.
Calling himself Bambaataa after a great Zulu
king, he formed the Zulu Nation, a collective
of DJs, rappers, breakdancers, graffiti artists,
and other creative people aiming to replace
gang violence with creativity and positivity
and spread solidarity through the black community.
But he went even beyond that: a great liberal,
Bambaataa believed in solidarity between all
people, and wanted to spread his message to
the entire world.
As a DJ, he enjoyed opening the minds of his
listeners and exposing them to new sounds,
making them dance to records they've never
heard before.
He particularly enjoyed poking holes at their
cultural supremacy, like informing the cool
black kids that they just danced to a riff
taken from some nerdy white band, like for
instance the Monkees.
His group of MCs, the Soulsonic Force, also
displayed this cultural openness – as we
can see, those are not exactly traditional
African outfits that they are wearing.
Hang on...
Where's this melody from?
This isn't funk! This is...
Right
That little snippet was a sample from Kraftwerk's
'Trans Europe Express', and this is where
our cultural journey takes us to Europe, specifically
to Germany, a country that witnessed some
of the greatest cultural supremacists in history.
The Nazis, naturally, hated cultural appropriation.
They even believed that the infiltration of
American popular culture into Germany is a
terrorist plot against the Aryan nation.
Eventually, of course, they took this line
of thought to its logical conclusion, and
tried to purify Germany not just from non-Aryan
cultures but also from non-Aryan people.
One of the many negative results of their
actions was that they completely destroyed
the German spirit, and the German culture
scene became a wasteland for decades, even
after the Nazis were gone.
At the end of the sixties, finally, a revival
began.
German youngsters appropriated Hippie psychedelic
rock, and started to make music that went
against German musical traditions.
Kraftwerk, seen here in a clip from 1971,
came out of this scene, and at first they
also had a Hippie look and sound, but then
they wanted to bring back some German traditions
into it.
In 1975 they shocked the rock world when they
cut their hair short, assumed a persona that
made them look like mannequins or robots,
gave up their electric guitars, and played
completely synthesized music influenced by
German electronic composers such as Karlheinz
Stockhausen.
They gave German culture a new direction,
a direction that even today still yields fruit.
In 1977 they released their masterpiece album
Trans Europe Express, in which they envision
a Europe with no inner borders, where the
different European cultures feed and enrich
each other.
The title track is a long train ride through
this borderless Europe, and through completely
novel sounds created by synthesizers.
It ended up transcending the borders not just
of Europe, but way beyond that.
It is one of the most influential pieces in
music history, and many regard it as the starting
point of electronica.
When Afrika Bambaataa introduced this record
to the New York hip-hop kids, they could not
believe their ears.
This was music that went against anything
African-American music ever stood for, music
that sounded like non-musical racket to most
people.
And yet, it made more sense than anything
they've heard before.
The repetitive electronic beats created by
these white boys from Germany were somehow
the funkiest thing they ever heard.
It was futuristic, urban and cool, exactly
the way they perceived themselves.
It was also a perfect soundtrack for breakdancing.
'Trans Europe Express' became a hip-hop anthem,
and it was only natural that five years later,
when he recorded 'Planet Rock', Bambaataa
sampled it into the music.
This cultural appropriation of German electronic
sounds into hip-hop was the starting point
of the style called electro, which in turn
got appropriated by white European DJs, to
create one of the leading musical styles of
this millennium.
But there was another thing that made Kraftwerk
easy to digest for African-American kids.
Let's go back to 1975, to their first international
hit.
In the track 'Autobahn', Kraftwerk are using
electronic sounds to simulate a ride down
one of Germany's long highways.
"Wir fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der autobahn"
– we ride ride ride on the highway.
But of course, this fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n is
actually appropriating…
These are the Beach Boys in their 1964 hit
'Fun, Fun, Fun'.
This record was part of an early sixties rock'n'roll
fad that was known as hot rod music, which
celebrated the fun of riding cars.
While other German bands were part of what
was known as progressive rock, and had a snobbish
attitude towards simple three minutes pop
records, Kraftwerk tapped into that rock'n'roll
tradition, fused it with the electronic German
sounds and thus made their music accessible
for hip-hop and other pop styles to appropriate.
As a result, they became one of the most influential
bands in history.
As were the Beach Boys.
The Beach Boys are credited with popularizing
hot rod music, but they were also the most
famous surf rock act, and to be honest, hot
rod music is just surf music with lyrics about
cars.
So let's talk about surf.
Surfing was appropriated from Hawaii, were
it was a religious ritual of the Polynesian
natives, a way of communing with the forces
of nature.
After Hawaii was annexed by the US, some young
pioneering Americans brought surfing to California,
where it became a counter-culture to the American
way of life.
In opposition to the Puritan values of working
hard for tomorrow, the surfers emphasized
having fun in the here and now, being at one
with nature and the universe.
When rock'n'roll came along in the 1950s,
some surfers realized that they could employ
the power of electric guitar to emulate the
experience of riding a big wave.
In the early sixties, surf rock was born.
This is Dick Dale, the king of surf guitar.
Dale transformed the sound of rock music,
creating a roaring, cascading sound, packed
with power and menace.
Along with the Beach Boys, he introduced surfing
to the world, helping it become a global sport.
Dale, who was of Lebanese descent, also incorporated
Middle Eastern melodies into his sound to
give it a more exotic feel, like he does with
this tune, originally an Egyptian song called
'Misirlou'.
It was this combination of drama and exotica
in Dale's music that caught the attention
of an up-and-coming Italian composer called
Ennio Morricone, who realized he could appropriate
it into traditional European classical music
and give it an updated sound.
And it was this combination that he concocted,
of symphonic music along with electric guitars
and exotic folk melodies, that made Morricone
the perfect man to compose the soundtracks
for the Westerns directed by his Italian compatriot,
Sergio Leone.
We're listening to a tune called 'For a Few
Dollars More', which Morricone composed for
a movie by the same name, the second installation
in the "dollars trilogy" directed by Leone,
and starring Clint Eastwood.
In the 1950s, Westerns became a very respectable
movie genre, through which Hollywood commented
on American society.
They focused mainly on the years right after
the civil war, when gunmen suddenly had no
war to fight so they became outlaws or guns
for hire, and showed how modern American values
developed out of this Wild West.
Leone's trilogy, made in the mid-1960s, uses
the western format to satirize those values,
and describes American society as driven by
nothing more than greed.
They can be seen as a commentary made by a
European artist, who uses an American art-form
to show trough it how American capitalism
destroyed European traditional values.
But for rebels everywhere, they had another
meaning: the characters played by Eastwood
became models of how an outsider can manipulate
the capitalist system in his favor, and fueled
their dreams of somehow doing the same.
It's no wonder, then, that Morricone's music
found its way into 'Planet rock'.
But Sergio Leone required one other inspiration
to begin his dollars trilogy, to appropriate
something that came from outside Western culture
and helped him gain a better perspective of
its darker sides.
The first movie of the trilogy, 'A Fistful
of Dollars', was a remake of the 1960 film
'Yojimbo', by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.
Kurosawa was another non-American director
who made movies inspired by westerns, since
he recognized in them something that corresponded
with Japanese history, particularly with what
is known as the Edo period.
The Edo period started at the beginning of
the 17th century, when centuries of war ended
in one shogun taking power and imposing a
strict social order, which included closing
Japan to the outside world and turning it
into an isolated island.
As a result, there was very little cultural
appropriation, and Japanese culture stagnated
and became stringent, xenophobic and plagued
with a superiority complex.
Japan reopened itself to the world at the
end of the 19th century, but this cultural
supremacist mentality was still in power,
and led it straight to the catastrophe that
befell it in WW2.
Shortly after the war, Kurosawa began making
movies, and he realized that the tropes of
American westerns are perfect to portray the
Edo period.
Just like the westerns focused on gunmen after
the civil war, Kurosawa depicted Samurais
who were suddenly out of a job when there
was no inner or outside enemies to fight.
Needless to say, Japanese conservatives did
not like his appropriation of Western forms
into Japanese traditions.
But Kurosawa prevailed, and his movies inspired
a new generation of American filmmakers that
transformed the face of Hollywood in the 1970s.
His movies had something familiar, and yet
they were different, offering a different
look on the old Hollywood forms, and inspiring
a diverse selection of movies from 'A Fistful
of Dollars' to 'Star Wars'.
This was the beginning of a long and prolific
cultural exchange between Japanese and American
pop cultures, an exchange that continues to
this very day, and enriched both cultures
beyond measure.
We've been around the globe and found ourselves
back in Japan, so I can finally go back to
my sushi.
But before I go, let's recap what we've learned
about cultural appropriation.
Cultural appropriation is the thing that saved
us from the world of the past, a world where
every culture saw itself as superior to others.
Conservative culture guardians always try
to prevent cultural appropriation from happening,
to make sure that the purity of their culture
is not defiled.
But in every society there are youngsters
who feel alienated to their parents' culture,
and find in another culture something that
they can relate to, something they can make
their own.
They realize the thing that the cultural supremacists
are working hard to deny: that underneath
our cultural differences we are all humans,
and in every culture there are people who
are similar to them.
And so, they appropriate that thing they found,
fuse it with elements of their own culture,
and create something new and exciting.
This process builds bridges between cultures,
undermines intolerance and prejudices, and
makes our world more harmonic and peaceful.
It revitalizes every society it touches, making
it more diverse, abundant and free.
Whenever a new culture is born, it happens
through the process of cultural appropriation.
In short, without cultural appropriation,
there would be no culture.
Cultural appropriation is essential to a liberal
society, the thing through which humanity
frees itself from supremacy and bigotry.
Unfortunately, the supremacists were not totally
defeated, and now they are trying to make
a comeback.
The mentality that was driven out of 1940s
Berlin now resides in Oberlin, and on many
other campuses.
It is slowly seeping through our society,
threatening our freedom.
It is driven by cultural supremacists, but
they could not be doing it without the help
of useful idiots from the left.
The supremacists have exploited the ignorance
of these idiots, and made them believe that
cultural appropriation was done not by the
rebels of every society, but by the leaders.
In other words, that it is a form of colonialism,
when in fact, nothing terrifies colonialists
more than cultural appropriation.
And so, part of the left appropriated extreme
right-wing views.
Let's be clear: there is no need to "keep
an open mind" towards people with neo-fascist
notions.
What we have here is clear choice, a choice
between the cultural supremacists and the
cultural appropriators.
Choosing the former is the sure way to cultural
death; choosing the latter leads to a free,
vital, culturally rich and socially harmonic
society.
