“Coldplay and Beyoncé’s ‘Hymn for the Weekend’ Video is More Orientalist Than Appropriative”
“ “Appropriation” gets thrown around a lot by writers (including me) when they accuse big pop stars of misrepresenting or misinterpreting a marginalized culture. But the “Hymn for the Weekend” video isn’t really an exercise in taking something out of context and using it as your own. The real issue is that the Whiteness of Coldplay’s members stands in stark contrast to the rest of their surroundings, which solidifies their privileged outsider status…
Plus, understanding this video as Orientalism also helps decipher the reduction of Beyoncé and Kapoor to mere props in Coldplay’s explorations… no matter what you feel about Coldplay or their music, they seem to take center stage against the seeming “wonder” of India. They are four White British men who, like The Beatles decades before them, project their desire for transcendence and immersive beauty onto a culture that not only isn’t theirs now, but certainly wasn’t theirs when Britain colonized and exploited India for over a century. Unlike The Beatles, however, Coldplay seems to have no genuine interest in the musical traditions that anchor Indian music. Instead, the group seems only interested in a surface-level look at a country and region whose diaspora make up the largest group of people of color in Coldplay’s home country — something you might not know because British Asians have been virtually erased from America’s popular imagination of British identity. It’s safe to say that any British Asian act aiming to do the same thing would never get the kind of attention that Coldplay garners for looking cool and interesting against the backdrop of a country that the West doesn’t fully understand.”
