She's not really interested in talking about why Eminem is controversial but Adele, who borrows from the tradition of soul, is not. Nitasha Tamar Sharma, a professor at Northwestern University who studies hip-hop, says she's not that interested in talking about when appropriation is right or wrong. To the more complicated: Shakira, a Latina of Arabic descent, belly dancing and Macklemore acknowledging the theft of black culture in a nine-minute song that exploits the very thing he's railing against. From the obvious: Katy Perry in cornrows and a Taylor Swift video filmed in an entirely white Africa.
Since then, there have been many more examples. As The Guardian tells it, when he heard someone praise Simon for shining a spotlight on South African music he replied: "So, it has taken another white man to discover my people."
The legendary South African musician Jonas Gwangwa was one of the few dissenters. "And that was my way of saying that I thought that they were extraordinary."Īt the time many of the black musicians who played and sang on the album said they were happy with the collaboration in part because it had brought South African music to the global stage. "My idea was, they play their best, I'm going to play my best," he said. Instead, he said, wanted to make a good album. It wasn't even to bring their music to the Western world. In an interview with World Cafe in 2012, Simon said that his intention wasn't to document the plight of black South Africans suffering under the oppression of Apartheid. We had it in the '60s when George Harrison included a sitar in Norwegian Wood.Īnd then 20 years later, Paul Simon released Graceland, a lush album in which Simon reworked South African songs. In a lot of ways, that's why we keep having this conversation. "You learn to get better by kind of borrowing or adapting or training yourself in the way of the people who came before you." "Your training as an artist is essentially about impersonation, imitation," he said. He says there is a key tension in any conversation about appropriation: First there is an artists' desire to receive credit for their work - whether monetarily or artistically - and then there's the fundamental relationship between art and theft. Greg Tate, a musician who wrote a book about appropriation titled Everything But the Burden, says it's more complicated than that. "The music business sees Latin America and this kind of music as an inspiration to make more money," he said.
Jimenez runs a runs the pop culture site Pousta and he said the song is a type of cultural colonialism.