The appropriation of culture in music is nothing new – even Debussy did it. In 1889, Claude Debussy heard Javanese gamelan music for the first time at the Paris Exposition, and would later draw on its structure and specific scales in compositions like Nocturnes and, most famously, 1903’s Estampes. To make a gross understatement, Debussy transformed impressionist music as a result, hauling late 19th-century music out of its past and into the modernist mood that followed. But how much of his success in those pieces was owed to the Javanese musicians who opened his ears in the first place? And how much should we care?
Since Debussy, countless musicians have continued to borrow from music around the globe. The Beatles did it famously in their adoption of the sitar in 1965’s Rubber Soul, as did the Kinks in the single ‘See My Friends’ and The Rolling Stones in ‘Paint it Black’. Talking Heads paid homage to afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti in 1980’s Remain in Light, and Fela Kuti himself incorporated jazz and psych-rock elements into his notorious West African rhythms. In 1986, Paul Simon’s album Graceland caused a stir with its contributions from numerous South African musicians in the thick of the UN’s cultural embargo on the country during apartheid. In the 90s, the likes of Deep Forest and Enigma were responsible for the surge of the ‘Worldbeat’ genre (describing the fusion of pop/folk music with ‘world music’ – a problematic term in itself). Truth Hurts' 2002 hip hop single ‘Addictive', which sampled Bollywood veteran Lata Mangeshkar’s song ‘Thoda Resham Lagta Hai’, spurred an outpouring of hits that followed suit. Since then – thanks to the likes of 2 Many DJs, Girl Talk and Danger Mouse – the rise of commercial hip hop and sampling/remix culture in general (not to mention their many offshoot genres, such as glitch hop) has meant that, more than ever, musicians are decreasingly concerned about who or where they borrow from and how.
It doesn’t take an ethnomusicologist to work out that it’s the ever-increasing rate of travel, migrancy and communication across the globe that’s responsible for increasingly opening up the cultural floodgates. In our very own Internet Age, the once clearly defined boundaries of cultural identity now overlap more than ever, and as academic James O. Young puts it in his book Cultural Appropriation and the Arts, “The spaces people traverse as tourists, migrants, refugees or touring musicians are often depicted as though they are bounded sites … and much less as multiply overlapping zones in which identities and musics are always blurred and defy easy definition.”
In critiques of alleged cultural appropriation in music, the cultural ‘space’ is often theoretically reduced to a tangible place that no longer exists so clearly. This isn’t to say that unethical appropriation doesn’t take place – it often does – but amid the hazy boundaries of the modern world’s diaspora, where appropriation is coming to be virtually unstoppable, perhaps critique should more specifically question issues of intent, ethics, preservation, misrepresentation and, of course, originality (not to mention the elephant in the room – copyright law). As 19th-century symbolist painter Gauguin so simply concluded: “Art is either plagiarism or revolution”. The question is now: can it be both at once?