Startseite › Foren › Kulturgut › Das musikalische Philosophicum › Culture Wars, Kulturelle Aneignung, Identitätspolitik, Wokeism … › Antwort auf: Culture Wars, Kulturelle Aneignung, Identitätspolitik, Wokeism …
Für Folge 142 seines (Roots Music-/Americana-)Podcasts The String hat Craig Havighurst neben Daniel Donato auch Jake Blount interviewt und ihn dabei auf das Thema „Cultural Appropriation“ angesprochen. Anlass der Interviews waren die jeweiligen Debütalben der beiden Künstler; im Falle von Jake Blount ist das Spider Tales, über das man bei seinem Label Free Dirt unter anderem folgendes lesen kann:
For as long as it’s existed, the American roots music industry has co-opted Black music into a package to be marketed and resold, defanging or erasing perspectives deemed too threatening along the way. Banjo player and fiddler Jake Blount resurrects these deep musical strains on Spider Tales (…). Named for Anansi — the great trickster of Akan mythology — Spider Tales features fourteen carefully chosen tracks drawn from Blount’s extensive research of Black and Indigenous mountain music. The result is an unprecedented testament to the voices paradoxically obscured yet profoundly ingrained into the Appalachian tradition.
Hier sind Jake Blounts Gedanken über „cultural appropriation“ (zu hören ab 00:39:50):
„To me, even aside from the ideological complications involved in something like cultural appropriation, which is still a very controversial idea for a lot of people, to me it’s all about the flow of resources. If I’m taking music from somebody or learning from somebody, one: I’m gonna pay them for teaching it to me; two: I’m gonna credit them when I perform that piece, I’m gonna talk about issues their community might be facing, right – I will talk about the labour and environmental exploitation of Appalachia, I will talk about what the [? Native American] community will have to do to prepare for climate change there in their ancestral lands. There’s a level of investment and return to those communities that I think is necessary when you take somebody else’s music.
And when it comes to something that is as commercially successful as Country Music or even as Bluegrass, let alone Rock ’n‘ Roll or whatever, if you are Elvis Presley or whoever else, who of course is a terrible example because he straight up stole music from black people and did not pay them royalties for it, you should be donating money back to black causes, you should be promoting black artists and black causes actively with the platform that you’ve been given, right? Every time Black Lives Matter flares up, I feel like there’s a large proportion of the black artists community going, okay, so where are all those white rappers right now? You know? They’re not speaking up – we don’t want people speaking on our behalf, but are they speaking in support of us, are they donating to bail funds? And some of them do it! And to them I’m like, okay, I have nothing to say to you – you know, if you’re down, you’re down, and that’s cool.
But I think when it comes to evaluating the specific impacts that individuals have had, whether or not they’re redirecting part of their profit back into the other communities they have learned or taken music from, is a really important thing to me. It’s all well and good to have the best of intentions but at the end of the day black people need to get paid. And the fact that between black face minstrelsy, Rock ’n‘ Roll, arguably electronic and disco music, and rap we have generated every major musical export this country has ever had and seen PENNIES of the pay-out – of course all artists see pennies of the pay-out, but that’s a different issue entirely – that to me speaks to there being a broad pattern.
And on each individual basis I will be saying: Are these artists looking for ways that they can redirect the material resources they have gained by using a black art form into a black community? That’s something that I am thinking about all the time – and I barely have money right now because we’re in a pandemic (laughs). You know, I’m thinking about, can I donate to someone, can I take a portion of my album sales and donate them to this cause – and that’s not something I am financially in a position to do in the near future, but I would hope that if I wind up in that position I would do it. And I would hope that other musicians who may be artistically or culturally indebted to an underprivileged minority group would also take the same opportunity. It’s the least we can do.“ (00:43:40)
Falls jemand Jake Blount noch nicht kennt – im folgenden Clip sieht man ihn, wie er „Roustabout“ von Dink Roberts darbietet, im Duo mit Tatiana Hargreaves:
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To Hell with Poverty