Appropriation versus Appreciation
The conversation Beyoncé made us have again
Before Beyoncé caused an uproar and got a discussion going with her song and video Formation which is about cultural empowerment, she featured in a new Coldplay song called Hymn for the Weekend. The video set in India sees Beyonce in traditional clothing and accessories right down to the henna and raised another question, is Beyoncé appreciating and appropriating?
In the wake of the Formation video, the question is for the most part moot but the fact it was a question in the first place shows that it’s a subject that we should delve into in order to avoid raising it inappropriately in the future.
Cultural appropriation at its very core is in fact about two things. The first being about taking from another culture to claim and present as your own to an audience that for the most part doesn’t know better. Secondly it’s about adopting a culture to cultivate and ingratiate an audience.
One wouldn’t have to necessarily meet both criteria to appropriate but the subtext of the secondary definition is that the people that are appropriating are reaching heights of success and acceptance in which the indigenous people of that culture aren’t able to reach.
Appropriation is rampant throughout modern society in lesser forms such as eye-liner wingtips adorning the eyes of women, stretched earlobes and tattoos. Such is the level of acceptance of these things in western culture that we don’t even bat an eyelid as to the origins of them. But what we do sit up and acknowledge is the likes of Iggy Azalea who as a white female from Australia sought success by changing her accent, her clothing and her hair (cornrows) to appeal to both appeal to indigenous Hip-Hoppers and sell to a middle class who would find her aesthetic more palatable.
Iggy Azalea won’t be the last and she certainly wasn’t the first. Long before her, before the various rumours of how he died on a toilet eating a piece of chicken, Elvis appropriated Rock ‘n Roll. Not only did he take a music from a race that wider America wasn’t ready to accept, but he also took dance moves.
It raises the question of appreciating and it’s in Elvis that we’re probably able to give the best example of appropriation rather than appreciation. Still today called the King of Rock and Roll, you only need to draw parallels with Michael Jackson. Jackson defined a whole genre, he essentially took R&B and refined it, he found the sweet spot and mass produced it and the influence is still found in music today. Elvis can claim no such thing, the only repackaging he done was to front the sound he’d been a fan of. The legacy of Elvis wasn’t to highlight the forefathers of that sound or to widen the acceptance, it was simply to profit.
Appreciation is to pay homage the indigenous people of whichever it is which you are presenting to the world. I suspect Beyoncé had little influence over the Coldplay video, but nonetheless, as much as she is presented in Indian culture within that video, she’s completely immersed. She’s immersed in a culture respectfully and her follow-up shows her back within her own culture. She shone a fleeting light on a beautiful culture and left it up to the audience to follow that up. In a time where all people with brown skin are facing prejudice based on a small subset of people, it’s important to highlight the beauty in the culture which that skin colour has presented to us. The reality is that appreciation is to sow the seeds of equality where as appropriation is to the reap the fruits in self-interest.
