FEATURE:
Let Me Reintroduce Myself
IN THIS PHOTO: Gwen Stefani
A Complex Debate: Cultural Appropriate vs. Appreciation in Music
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I love Gwen Stefani…
PHOTO CREDIT: Gwen Stefani via Instagram
and I have nothing but respect for her. From fronting No Doubt and being responsible for some of the most important songs of my childhood, through to her amazing solo career, she is someone that I am in we of her. She can do no wrong in my eyes. That said, she caused a stir this week following an interview with Allure. In it – when she was promoting beauty/perfume brand -, she claimed that she was Japanese. Some have seen this as her coming out as Japanese, or at least saying she identifies with their culture. It has provoked an argument as to whether her comments were cultural appropriation or appreciation. Not saying that she is a Japanese person, Stefani did suggest that she felt Japanese. Maybe her choice of words was not wise, but it did make me wonder whether artists should be cautious when it comes to potential cultural appropriation:
“GXVE isn’t Stefani’s first beauty brand, though. Before that, there was Harajuku Lovers. The fragrance line launched in 2008, four years after the release of her solo album Love.Angel.Music.Baby., which took inspiration from Japan’s Harajuku subculture for its visuals and marketing (and subsequently Stefani’s own personal style). The fragrance collection included five scents and each was housed in a bottle shaped like a doll caricatured to look like Stefani and her four "Harajuku Girls," the Japanese and Japanese American backup dancers she employed and named Love, Angel, Music, and Baby for the promotion of her album. The perfumes gained industry recognition, winning The Fragrance Foundation’s Fragrance of the Year Award in 2009, and spawned generations of flankers. Magazines (Allure included) covered them extensively. Meanwhile, I, a first-generation Filipina American teen in New Jersey, starving for Asian representation in pop culture, begged my mom for the "Love" fragrance. She consistently responded with a hard no, always pointing to its price tag: $45 for one ounce of perfume at Macy’s.
I desperately wanted that little perfume bottle on my dresser because it made me feel seen in a way that I never did in fashion or beauty or really any mainstream media or marketing. I honestly didn't question, or even really register, that the woman behind this Asian representation was white. As an adult, however, I have come to examine Stefani's Harajuku era — and I have not been alone.
In recent years, the "L.A.M.B" universe, along with some of Stefani’s other projects, has been the subject of many conversations surrounding cultural appropriation. So when I recently sat down to interview Stefani at an event celebrating GXVE’s latest collection, I asked her about her new brand’s mission — "I wanted to create a community of makeup lovers like me" — and what went into its newest products, which include lipsticks that are a departure from her signature red: "We all have different color skin and all have different things that we wear different colors for." But I also included a question about what she felt she may have learned from Harajuku Lovers — considering its praise, backlash, and everything in between. She responded by telling me a story she’s shared with the press before about her father’s job at Yamaha, which had him traveling between their home in California and Japan for 18 years.
Like Stefani, I am not Japanese. But I am an Asian woman living in America, which comes with sobering realities during a time of heightened Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) hate. I am a woman who has been called racial slurs because of her appearance, feared for her father’s safety as he traveled with her on New York City subways, and boiled with anger as grandparents were being attacked and killed because they were Asian. I envy anyone who can claim to be part of this vibrant, creative community but avoid the part of the narrative that can be painful or scary.
I spent 32 minutes in conversation with Stefani, many of them devoted to her lengthy answer to my question about Harajuku Lovers. In that time, she said more than once that she is Japanese. Allure’s social media associate (who is Asian and Latina) was also present for the interview and we were left questioning what we had heard. Maybe she misspoke? Again and again? During our interview, Stefani asserted twice that she was Japanese and once that she was "a little bit of an Orange County girl, a little bit of a Japanese girl, a little bit of an English girl." Surely, she didn’t mean it literally or she didn’t know what she was saying? (A representative for Stefani reached out the next day, indicating that I had misunderstood what Stefani was trying to convey. Allure later asked Stefani’s team for an on-the-record comment or clarification of these remarks and they declined to provide a statement or participate in a follow-up interview.)
I don’t believe Stefani was trying to be malicious or hurtful in making these statements. But words don’t have to be hostile in their intent in order to potentially cause harm, and my colleague and I walked away from that half hour unsettled. I wanted to better understand why.
Stefani told me she identifies not just with Japan’s culture, but also with the Hispanic and Latinx communities of Anaheim, California, where she grew up. "The music, the way the girls wore their makeup, the clothes they wore, that was my identity," she said. "Even though I'm an Italian American — Irish or whatever mutt that I am — that's who I became because those were my people, right?" I asked Fariha I. Khan, Ph.D., codirector of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, to help clarify the line between inspiration or appreciation and appropriation. "Simply put, cultural appropriation is the use of one group’s customs, material culture, or oral traditions by another group," she said, and raises two important factors to consider: commodification and an unequal power relationship”.
This is not a new thing. Cultural appropriation has always existed in music. Artists blurring the lines between appropriation and appreciation. Even Kate Bush, someone who I obviously adore, has been accused in the past when she visited Japan in the 1970s. I know artists want to show they are fitting in and love a particular culture, but there is a line between saying that she admired Japanese culture and identifying herself as Japanese. Things can be taken out of context, but I think there will be a larger discussion following this Gwen Stefani interview regarding what artists say in terms of other cultures and countries. ThoughtCo. explored cultural appropriation in the music industry back in 2020. They mentioned a few artists (Gwen Stefani included) who have been highlighted as possibly being guilty of appropriation:
“Cultural appropriation is nothing new. For years prominent White people have been accused of borrowing the fashions, music, and art forms of various cultural groups and popularizing them as their own. The music industry has been particularly hard hit by this practice. The 1991 film “The Five Heartbeats,” for example, which was based on the experiences of real Black bands, depicts how music executives took the works of Black musicians and repackaged them as the product of white artists. Due to cultural appropriation, Elvis Presley is widely regarded as being the “King of Rock and Roll,” despite the fact that his music was heavily influenced by Black artists who never received credit for their contributions to the art form. In the early 1990s, White rapper Vanilla Ice topped the Billboard music charts when rappers as a whole remained on the fringes of popular culture. This piece explores how musicians with wide appeal today, such as Madonna, Gwen Stefani, Miley Cyrus, and Kreayshawn have been accused of cultural appropriation, borrowing heavily from Black, Native American, and Asian traditions.
The Italian American superstar has been accused of borrowing from a host of cultures to sell her music, including gay culture, Black culture, Indian culture, and Latin American cultures. Madonna may be the biggest culture vulture yet. In “Madonna: A Critical Analysis,” author JBNYC points out how the pop star wore Indian saris, bindis, and clothing during a 1998 photo shoot for Rolling Stone magazine and the following year participated in a geisha-inspired photo spread for Harper’s Bazaar magazine. Prior to this, Madonna borrowed from Latin American culture for her 1986 video “La Isla Bonita” and from gay, Black, and Latino culture for her 1990 video “Vogue.”
“Although one can argue that by taking on the personas of otherwise underrepresented cultures and giving them exposure to the masses, she is doing to world cultures like India, Japan, and Latin America, what she has done for feminism and gay culture,” JBNYC writes. “However, she made political statements about feminism, female sexuality, and homosexuality about their ideological representations in the media. In the case of her Indian, Japanese, and Latino looks, she has made no political or cultural statements. Her use of these cultural artifacts is superficial and the consequence is great. She has further perpetuated the narrow and stereotypical representations of minorities in the media.”
Singer Gwen Stefani faced criticism in 2005 and 2006 for appearing with a silent group of Asian American women who accompanied her to promotional appearances and other events. Stefani called the women “Harajuku Girls” after the women she encountered in the Harajuku district of Tokyo. During an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Stefani called the “Harajuku Girls” an art project and said, “The truth is that I basically was saying how great that culture is.” Actress and comedienne Margaret Cho felt differently, calling the foursome a “minstrel show.” Salon writer Mihi Ahn agreed, criticizing Gwen Stefani for her cultural appropriation of Harajuku culture.
Ahn wrote in 2005: “Stefani fawns over Harajuku style in her lyrics, but her appropriation of this subculture makes about as much sense as the Gap selling Anarchy T-shirts; she’s swallowed a subversive youth culture in Japan and barfed up another image of submissive giggling Asian women. While aping a style that’s supposed to be about individuality and personal expression, Stefani ends up being the only one who stands out.”
In 2012, Stefani and her band No Doubt would face a backlash for their stereotypical cowboys and Indians video for their single “Looking Hot.” In the late 1990s, Stefani also routinely sported a bindi, a symbol Indian women wear, in her appearances with No Doubt”.
I have a couple of other articles to get to that have written about cultural appropriation and artists. It is a complex and decades-running debate and issue that needs highlighting. Also in 2020, Pitchfork wrote about wokeness and cultural appropriation. Whether it is a sound, culture or race, they note how music has always been the site of cultural shifts; a medium that is ripe and receptive for discourse about the intersections of race and power. I am borrowing quite heavily from their article, as it does provide some fascinating insights and angles:
“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.
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 Native Appropriations, a blog 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.
IN THIS PHOTO: Robin Thicke/PHOTO CREDIT: Matthew Takes
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.
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”.
I am going to finish in a minute. This 2019 article discusses how to distinguish between cultural appropriation and appreciation. I guess this is the main point. In most cases, I think artists are trying to show appreciation, but it comes across as appropriation. Maybe crossing and blurring lines, it is admirable that artists do want to embrace and embody other cultures. What is the solution going forward?
“Artists are crossing cultural lines with music, as evidenced by recent Billboard Hot 100 hits like Post Malone’s “Wow.,” Ariana Grande’s “7 rings” and Cardi B and Bruno Mars’ “Please Me.”
But when they break these boundaries and take on genres from other cultures, some fans wonder if artists are practicing cultural appreciation or cultural appropriation.
Cultural appropriation is when a person takes elements from another culture without paying tribute to their authenticity and value, said Timothy Welbeck, an Africology and African American Studies instructor.
Post Malone, Ariana Grande, Bruno Mars and Iggy Azalea, all non-Black artists, are known for performing music like R&B and hip-hop influenced by Black people and culture.
Azalea’s performances, particularly the voice she uses while rapping, is an example of appropriation, Welbeck said. Azalea uses a “blaccent,” an imitation of a Black accent by a non-Black person, while rapping, he added.
“When she raps, she sounded like a poor imitation of a Black woman who lived in an urban area in America,” Welbeck said. “But then when she spoke, she spoke in a dignified Australian accent.”
When an artist tries to profit from the music style without showing respect to the culture, they also demonstrate cultural appropriation, said Gabriella Duran, a freshman global studies and political science major.
Justin Bieber’s inclusion on the remix of “Despacito” stood out to Duran as a bilingual track that disrespected Spanish culture and helped Bieber profit.
“Music is an art form, and we can learn so much from it when it’s done correctly,” Duran said.
But distinguishing between cultural appreciation and appropriation in music isn’t always easy to define. Fans of Bruno Mars debated whether or not the artist respectfully represented Black culture in his music last March, Vice reported.
Mars was accused of cultural appropriation by Seren Sensei, a writer and activist, but Black celebrities defended him on Twitter.
Sensei accused Mars of using “his racial ambiguity to cross genres.” In response, celebrities tweeted he has paid homage to Black culture and helped bring back certain aspects of the culture’s sound.
Mars, whose father is Puerto Rican and Jewish and mother is Filipina, often credits Michael Jackson and other Black musicians as inspirations.
“The situation is complicated, but the point is that there is a lot of misunderstandings and not enough conversation,” said Dynas Johnson, a junior English major”.
Gwen Stefani’s recent comments (where she identifies as Japanese) will reignite the discussion as to how artists discuss other cultures through interviews, their music and other avenues. The distinction between cultural appreciation and appropriation has been active for many years now, and it does need to continue. Stefani meant no offence with what she said, but it has received backlash. As the article I have just sourced says: the situation around cultural appropriation is complicated, so there needs to be fewer misunderstandings and…
MUCH more conversation.