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The problem in enjoying the "cross-pollination" is that it never rewards the founders, and often rewards others that deliberately copy the overlooked artists.

The problem in enjoying the "cross-pollination" is that it never rewards the founders, and often rewards others that deliberately copy the overlooked artists. Many modern works completely lift sounds and rebrand them as founded by someone else new. That is where the problem lies in modern appropriation. It's sad that social media now encourages people to completely copycat ideas and totally steal credit for innovation... We should support original culture and artists just as much as those who sample them.

elefanten 5y ago
Founders being rewarded is completely orthogonal to culture, in this picture. Any knowledge or innovation could be “stolen” and used by someone else, whether its origin is cultural or not. Using the possibility of value extracting theft as a reason why (certain) people should never find inspiration in (certain other) cultures… is just bigoted and nonsensical. It’s racist territorialism. Especially when all culture is built on something that came before anyway.
- winternett 5y ago
  I disagree. There is a history of issues in the industry, and with audience exposure that makes things much more complex than with certain other genres. If reggae has been around this long yet Sting, UB40, Boy George, Snow, 311, Sublime, and Matisyahu are probably the people most Americans would think of as the best musicians making reggae music, it might show a bit of inherent cultural bias for both the industry and listeners...
  - zuminator 5y ago
    History must be replete with situations such as where a music producer buys a song outright from a semiliterate performer for 50 bucks and then turns it into a million selling hit with no royalties for the original writer. And that type of exploitation has historically been enabled or facilitated by a classist or racist framework where the original writer would have no conceivable access to fair compensation nor to proper legal representation. And that is certainly appropriation. But the fact that it's cross-cultural may be relevant to the appeal of the stolen good, but it's incidental to the act of thievery. Hence, if Sting stole musical licks from specific performer(s), that's a problem. If those people would've been entitled to compensation but for the fact that they were poor island countryfolk incognizant of their rights, that's a problem. But if he just borrowed his musical aesthetic from reggae or from "Jamaican culture," that seems morally uncontroversial to me. Maybe musically derivative, but that's a matter of taste.
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    If asked to name a reggae artist, 99% of Americans would say Bob Marley.

elefanten 5y ago

Founders being rewarded is completely orthogonal to culture, in this picture. Any knowledge or innovation could be “stolen” and used by someone else, whether its origin is cultural or not. Using the possibility of value extracting theft as a reason why (certain) people should never find inspiration in (certain other) cultures… is just bigoted and nonsensical. It’s racist territorialism. Especially when all culture is built on something that came before anyway.

winternett 5y ago
I disagree. There is a history of issues in the industry, and with audience exposure that makes things much more complex than with certain other genres. If reggae has been around this long yet Sting, UB40, Boy George, Snow, 311, Sublime, and Matisyahu are probably the people most Americans would think of as the best musicians making reggae music, it might show a bit of inherent cultural bias for both the industry and listeners...
- zuminator 5y ago
  History must be replete with situations such as where a music producer buys a song outright from a semiliterate performer for 50 bucks and then turns it into a million selling hit with no royalties for the original writer. And that type of exploitation has historically been enabled or facilitated by a classist or racist framework where the original writer would have no conceivable access to fair compensation nor to proper legal representation. And that is certainly appropriation. But the fact that it's cross-cultural may be relevant to the appeal of the stolen good, but it's incidental to the act of thievery. Hence, if Sting stole musical licks from specific performer(s), that's a problem. If those people would've been entitled to compensation but for the fact that they were poor island countryfolk incognizant of their rights, that's a problem. But if he just borrowed his musical aesthetic from reggae or from "Jamaican culture," that seems morally uncontroversial to me. Maybe musically derivative, but that's a matter of taste.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  If asked to name a reggae artist, 99% of Americans would say Bob Marley.