dragonflie
Blueblood
Posts: 1,956
Mar 14, 2005 2:10:14 GMT -4
|
Post by dragonflie on Mar 16, 2018 12:23:38 GMT -4
Deeconsistent I agree with much of your post. I'm not arguing for a black and white solution, or trying to be reductivist. This is why I specifically asked if there was/is a middle ground. My point being, in asking if it should be all filipino's in his band (as just and example), what is the marker? What IS the middle ground of paying homage/respect but also being able to play music? What should he do? What should we do? Or is it just acknowledging it? If so- I do have a problem with that. NOT with acknowledging it- at ALL- but with that being the end of it. We acknowledge it's a problem... but don't try to solve it? Why wouldn't we look to solutions? I agree that there is not one catch all solution, it is complicated and nuanced. My issue being: If it bothers you (not specifically YOU Dee) what would you suggest. We only get to nuanced solutions if people offer their solutions/ideas, and not just get offended but not point to what would make it better. I don't think he's some special case that should be excepted for. I'm just confused as to why he is being singled out. Especially because he is not white. This is where I may need to be educated; but I understand much more the decries of unfairness and downright racism when it comes to white artists stealing black music. Yet, I don't exactly see Filipino's taking all the Grammy's, rising up the charts. He is racially ambiguous I suppose. That makes some people angry because his music seems black. I agree at the systemic issues, but I also see artists like Beyonce, Jay Z, Usher (who- by the way held the most #1's on the charts until Bruno Mars took that title) who have probably more influence than most other artists I can even think of. Does that solve the inherent issues: no- of course not (oh: look- there's a few really popular black artists! I agree that does not mean it is all solved). I just don't understand what Bruno Mars himself should be doing about it/why people are specifically singling him out (it's not as if he pretends/lies about what influenced him- he references those black artists all the time). In particular because he is : 1- not white 2- not a part of a race/culture that has exactly been part of the oppressive system. 3- He does mention/pay homage to all the artists who influenced him, a lot. I had no idea this was even an issue until I came on here. After reading this thread I looked online and saw several predominant black producers/artists saying: NO. Bruno Mars is not the issue here. So who has the issue? eta: This quote kinda gets to what I am saying: The entire dialogue - which I found interesting- Here
|
|
|
Post by Neurochick on Mar 16, 2018 21:14:59 GMT -4
I don't disagree with anything you've stated. I didn't mean for it to come across that I thought that people that have issues with the level of Bruno's success were just jealous because their faves weren't winning. The butthurtness I was referencing was to the individual in the reference video that claimed that she'd bake a cake if Bruno mars died. The level of vitriol for someone who has benefited from a rigged system, seemed over the top and out of proportion. She not only hates the game, she hates the player. And I still believe that Bruno is just another cog in the system. He's doing his thing, and it just helps that he can be marketed to the masses. I can't blame him for winning. I don't know what the solution is to the industry problem. Wait it out? Let the older, whiter executives and Grammy voters die off? I don't know. But maybe I'm too far conditioned to just shrug and move on. I seek out what I find appealing. It may be harder to find, but it's there. Or I listen to old stuff. Right now it feels like yelling into the wind. Executives at record labels aren't going to wake up and become decent people. They're looking at the bottom line, and if they can sell an Adele, Sam Smith, or Macklemore, over a black artist, they'll do it in a heartbeat. I don't begrudge them their success, I just don't support them. That's all I can do. But I think it was that woman's right to say what she was feeling? Why do black people always have to be the ones to let everybody in? Bruno Mars wins because he's NOT black and today people want their black music from artists who aren't black. That's just the way it is IMO. It's like black people have all these ideas and never get the shine and some folks, like me, feel it's not fucking fair. Period. I know that's life, but I have the right to say it's not fair and it's not right. It's like, "we don't need black people to perform black music anymore, we have people like Bruno Mars." However, I'll be honest with you all, when I first saw him I thought he WAS black because...he's a lot darker than people in my family who actually ARE black. So there is that too.
|
|
|
Post by Babycakes on Mar 17, 2018 0:30:46 GMT -4
I don't disagree with anything you've stated. I didn't mean for it to come across that I thought that people that have issues with the level of Bruno's success were just jealous because their faves weren't winning. The butthurtness I was referencing was to the individual in the reference video that claimed that she'd bake a cake if Bruno mars died. The level of vitriol for someone who has benefited from a rigged system, seemed over the top and out of proportion. She not only hates the game, she hates the player. And I still believe that Bruno is just another cog in the system. He's doing his thing, and it just helps that he can be marketed to the masses. I can't blame him for winning. I don't know what the solution is to the industry problem. Wait it out? Let the older, whiter executives and Grammy voters die off? I don't know. But maybe I'm too far conditioned to just shrug and move on. I seek out what I find appealing. It may be harder to find, but it's there. Or I listen to old stuff. Right now it feels like yelling into the wind. Executives at record labels aren't going to wake up and become decent people. They're looking at the bottom line, and if they can sell an Adele, Sam Smith, or Macklemore, over a black artist, they'll do it in a heartbeat. I don't begrudge them their success, I just don't support them. That's all I can do. But I think it was that woman's right to say what she was feeling? Why do black people always have to be the ones to let everybody in? Bruno Mars wins because he's NOT black and today people want their black music from artists who aren't black. That's just the way it is IMO. It's like black people have all these ideas and never get the shine and some folks, like me, feel it's not fucking fair. Period. I know that's life, but I have the right to say it's not fair and it's not right. It's like, "we don't need black people to perform black music anymore, we have people like Bruno Mars." However, I'll be honest with you all, when I first saw him I thought he WAS black because...he's a lot darker than people in my family who actually ARE black. So there is that too. I agree with what you just said. I also acknowledged upthread that non-black artists are winning because it's more profitable to sell them to the masses. I also stated that the music biz has been rigged against black artists for decades. All that can be true, and it can also still not be Bruno's fault. I'm not caping for Bruno because I'm a stan, it's just that the vitriol that young woman directed towards Bruno was wholly unwarranted and eclipses her underlying message, IMO. Passion I get. Misdirected hatred I don't. Wishing/celebrating the death on a man who hasn't done anything to her personally was too far in my book. Bruno is not personally responsible for setting up a rigged system. Yes, he benefits from it, but he didn't build it. Is there something he could do to acknowledge it, and help dismantle it? Sure. And that's a conversation to have; but I can't get behind just kicking him around because he's popular and winning. Direct some of that vitriol towards Atlantic, Sony, EMI, etc. Call out the L.A. Reids (remember what he said to Pink?) And the people that have bidding wars over people like Lil Xan, Post Malone, and Takashi 69. Black people have always been asked to accommodate everyone else. We let everyone into the room, even when we don't have a seat at the table ourselves. Part of it is because we know how it feels to be excluded and marginalized, and part of it is because of how little control we have over guarding the door. We are not in the top positions at these companies. And even the so called black record labels run by the likes of Puffy, Rick Ross, Birdman, Jay Z, Dr. Dre, etc. they answer to people above them, and almost all of them have or have had a white act on their label. It's all about money in the end.
|
|
|
Post by petitesuite on Mar 17, 2018 0:54:30 GMT -4
I am trying (and hope I have succeeded) to tread lightly here; I don’t mean at all to contradict Neurochick’s point about her right to say it’s not fair because: indeed. As well, I will readily concede that this specific cultural appropriation issue is not ‘my’ issue; nonetheless, I can’t help but have some thoughts!
I tend to think that either a lot of people think Bruno Mars is black or his popularity stems from putting traditionally black music in a non-black package. I personally tend towards the former view, but I don’t think you can have it both ways. To me—and I guess many people here—this is raising some questions about what exactly cultural appropriation is and who decides it. If we say appropriation is taking the ‘thing’ (music, fashion, whatever) but removing the people, does it matter if most of the audience thinks the people have been removed or not? Personally, I think it does; I think many of the evils of cultural appropriation arise because they lead to, for example, people thinking that Native Americans no longer exist and are therefore an acceptable costume. I am not convinced a similar evil exists when people look at someone, think the person’s black, and enjoy that person’s black music. The other main evil of cultural appropriation (that I can think of—maybe I’m missing something major) is whether Bruno is taking the space of another, equally deserving, black artist; honestly I’m not convinced there either, but maybe that’s wrong. I guess ultimately I think yes, his music is appropriative, but it’s not actually causing any of the things that make me think appropriation is bad.
On an unrelated note, I think saying it’s as simple as ‘go see black panther/buy black music from black artists’ places way too much responsibility on the consumer and not nearly enough on the producers/directors of the world. I have only seen this view pop up a few times here, but wanted to address where I think all the responsibility belongs nonetheless.
|
|
|
Post by deeconsistent on Mar 17, 2018 1:07:01 GMT -4
Deeconsistent I agree with much of your post. I'm not arguing for a black and white solution, or trying to be reductivist. This is why I specifically asked if there was/is a middle ground. My point being, in asking if it should be all filipino's in his band (as just and example), what is the marker? What IS the middle ground of paying homage/respect but also being able to play music? What should he do? What should we do? Or is it just acknowledging it? If so- I do have a problem with that. NOT with acknowledging it- at ALL- but with that being the end of it. Dragonflie, I read the link you posted and I gotta say I had some serious issues with it. I didn't read the whole thing straight through, but I skipped around and took exception with every single paragraph I read. First, there's the definition of cultural appropriation they used: "theft of a minority culture by an oppressor, usually with malicious intent." Malicious intent? What malicious intent could a pop star have? Make money and gain popularity? Bruno's not doing that? Secondly, there was this: "And the shakiness of the insinuation that “ambiguity” played no part in Prince’s celebrity when it was a major thread is not lost on me." Seriously? That critic is going to pretend that he doesn't realize Michael, Prince, Whitney played the ambiguity game directly in reverse of Bruno Mars by paring down their blackness to make themselves more marketable? Michael literally appeared to change races over the course of his career. While Whitney didn't do anything more drastic than most other western black women in regards to appearance, her early and most successful music was so blindingly white-washed that she was once booed at the Soul Train awards for lacking soul. I loved her early stuff just as much as her later stuff, but even she took some shots at her earlier work when her music took a more traditionally urban turn. Then there's this: "It was always a multiracial enterprise by nature of the lay of the land here, and I think that speaking of hip-hop as though it was historically an exclusively black art is not only a misunderstanding of how the culture worked from day one."No. That is just a lie. Of course hip hop and r&b have not been exclusively black for their entire histories(no western form of art born in the modern age could be), but the overwhelming majority of performers as well as creators have identified as black. They were viewed as black forms of expression for black audiences, for better or worse. They were distintly black, not multicultural. Then there was this: "Bruno isn’t just a face, but a body that dances, too. You can’t really separate that aspect of him from the music itself. I don’t think you can see him dance and think, Oh, he’s just ripping off black artists. If you dance well, that’s all you. This was what allowed rock and roll to slide on the whole cultural appropriation front for so long: Guys like Jagger or Plant or Rose had a physicality to their stage presence that, though impossible to achieve without the example of black rock artists before them, was entirely their own."I can't even respond to that, beyond this: I could probably do a page-long post on my problems with that exchange, but I guess that it just goes to show that there is a variety of viewpoints to go around. One point I do want to go into is the idea that he's a minority, too, so it basically evens out. There was a George Lopez topic on here a little while ago after he made some racist comments towards a black female heckler, and I really wish I was able to find it and link it because there were some posts in that convo that were very frank and insightful. To summarize from memory, several posters in that thread said that Lopez's comments weren't surprising.Even though latinos and blacks are often talked about together and there's a lot of cultural overlap, there is a lot of racial tension and a lot of latinos are open about their negative opinions of blacks.Which is not to say all latinos and non-black minorities- and Bruno Mars, in particular- are like that. The bigger issue, though, is that the idea that "america wants it's black culture from non-black bodies" is specifically about BLACKS. And, even from blacks, America prefers that blackness to be portioned out really conservatively. Just yesterday on ONTD, there was a thread about this actress and her response to criticism of her being too light for the X-men role she was cast in. Someone in the responses points out how most of the under-30 black actresses being cast in major films aren't just light-skinned black women (which has been par for the course forever in Hollywood) but are of mixed race. Elsewhere, in the culture in general, there's a concurrent dialogue going on about how so many black American roles are going to black British actors. These things probably seem laughably inconsequential, but they are just examples of how the culture is moving: this veneer of diversity masking a more insidious attempt to actually limit diversity. The light-skinned actress debate has been going on forever. I don't think actresses should refuse to work if they pass the paper bag test, but Amandla Stenberg (mixed race young actress)claimed she was offered the opportunity to audition for Black Panther and turned it down because she didn't think it was appropriate. What is the solution? I honestly think sincerely listening and having a genuine dialogue IS the solution. There are obviously a lot of black Bruno Mars supporters, so his detractors opinions don't necessarily hold more weight as to whether or not he's "allowed" to perform certain music. If people buy it, he's allowed. Miley and Macklemore were allowed. One of the reasons there's not a catch all solution is because there's not unanimous agreement that there's a problem, or at least what that problem is. When I look back over the last few pages, I think there was one glaring instance of playing deaf solely so positions didn't have to be re-examined. Everyone has blind spots, but just trying to acquire perspective and awareness is a step in the right direction. For anyone.I'm including me in this, too. Before the Harvey Weinstein allegations caught steam, I had such a narrow definition of what a sexual harassment victim was, and literally, within a matter of days, my entire viewpoint on the issue changed.
|
|
|
Post by ladyboy on Mar 17, 2018 9:13:09 GMT -4
Just curious: How would the conversation around Mars change if he didn't appear black? I thought he was black or mixed until I read this thread (I enjoy his music but am not "into" him so don't know anything about him except he is really short). What if he were lighter skinned? Caucasian looking? Obviously Filipino? Yet the music, backing dancers, etc stayed the same?
ETA: This is written in a "Discuss" style - I have no opinion or agenda to push, I am just wondering how the conversation changes, if at all. Please support your argument with examples from your reading. (I always hated having to support the ideas I plucked out of the air with examples! I just thought it and made it up!)
|
|
celerydunk
Sloane Ranger
Posts: 2,521
May 3, 2005 21:57:59 GMT -4
|
Post by celerydunk on Mar 17, 2018 10:16:34 GMT -4
On an unrelated note, I think saying it’s as simple as ‘go see black panther/buy black music from black artists’ places way too much responsibility on the consumer and not nearly enough on the producers/directors of the world. I have only seen this view pop up a few times here, but wanted to address where I think all the responsibility belongs nonetheless. Do consumers not drive the market? Also, if consumers are not to blame, I wouldn't pin in on producers/directors. They make projects they believe in. It's the entities that finance (or don't finance) projects that decide what's getting made. It can be done, but its a lot easier to get a project made with mainstream funding. And if you are not tied to a major company, it's harder to get distributed. Having said that, I don't understand why we dont recognize the power we have as consumers. Why do we just expect the "white man" is going to come to his senses and start making minority films out of the goodness of his heart?
|
|
|
Post by petitesuite on Mar 17, 2018 13:22:52 GMT -4
On an unrelated note, I think saying it’s as simple as ‘go see black panther/buy black music from black artists’ places way too much responsibility on the consumer and not nearly enough on the producers/directors of the world. I have only seen this view pop up a few times here, but wanted to address where I think all the responsibility belongs nonetheless. Do consumers not drive the market? Also, if consumers are not to blame, I wouldn't pin in on producers/directors. They make projects they believe in. It's the entities that finance (or don't finance) projects that decide what's getting made. It can be done, but its a lot easier to get a project made with mainstream funding. And if you are not tied to a major company, it's harder to get distributed. Having said that, I don't understand why we don't recognize the power we have as consumers. Why do we just expect the "white man" is going to come to his senses and start making minority films out of the goodness of his heart? I mistyped--of course you are right about the distinction between producers and financers; I incorrectly conflated the two and meant financing entities/people. I don't disagree with anything you said. I meant primarily that I think there is plenty of responsibility to go around and that consumer impact takes a long, long time (numerous women-driven movies have done well and we are only incrementally closer to proportional representation in speaking roles, for example) and financers are the ones who have the ability to drive more immediate change. We definitely all share the responsibility, I just think some of us share it more than others.
|
|
|
Post by deeconsistent on Mar 17, 2018 14:47:27 GMT -4
I've been trying to limit my posts in this thread, but I've gotta admit I'm somewhat surprised that no one has brought up the seemingly obvious comparison between women's standing in the entertainment industry and other minorities'. Women, as a group, are a much larger minority and have more economic and social influence than blacks, but we see that Hollywood still treats both groups as second class citizens. The industry is hesitant to make womencentric films (even though we know they can be successful with support), they are hesitant to support female characters in films that aren't considered womencentric, the films that do get made are often problematic, when they don't do well it's seen as a bellwether to the industry not to do anymore movies focusing on women because they have to get back to making flop after flop starring white guys. Every inch of progress women see in front of the cameras seems to be matched by a millimeter behind the cameras. If we've learned nothing else over the last few months, we've seen that the power structure of the entertainment industry is not the result of a capitalistic meritocracy but is buoyed by longstanding, deeply entrenched and aggressively reinforced sexism. In my mind, it's not a stretch to look at those issues and conclude that similar types of institutional hurdles exist for other minorities. People who have power don't like to lose it.
|
|
|
Post by Neurochick on Mar 17, 2018 15:49:09 GMT -4
Passion I get. Misdirected hatred I don't. Wishing/celebrating the death on a man who hasn't done anything to her personally was too far in my book. Bruno is not personally responsible for setting up a rigged system. Yes, he benefits from it, but he didn't build it. Is there something he could do to acknowledge it, and help dismantle it? Sure. And that's a conversation to have; but I can't get behind just kicking him around because he's popular and winning. If a person felt that someone was contributing to their erasure, I doubt they'd want them around. I read that quite awhile ago about Alexandra Shipp. That was an interesting point. Today there are more mixed race people than they were when I was born. The funny thing is, the folks on the Grapevine was upset because Megan Markle says she's mixed. But if she said she was black, then some of those same people would be upset, "she's not black, she's biracial." I think the reason people say they're biracial today is because there are more biracial people around, safety in numbers. Most of the biracial people I knew just said they were black because it made sense, that's what Halle Berry's mother told her to do. If there aren't any other biracial people around, you'll be out on your own. I had a roommate in college who was half Japanese, half Irish and she had a hard time because at that time, at that school, there weren't people like her around. She was off on her own, so she hung around us black girls. I don't think Bruno Mars would have had a career if this were 1975. He would have been told he wasn't black, he wasn't white and his last name is Hernandez. He would have been told to stick to Latin music. End of story.
|
|