Musical Borrowings, Copyright, and the Canard of “Cultural Appropriation”

Abstract

AbstractThis essay reviews the basic contours of the cultural appropriation controversies as they have been waged in reference to music in both academic and vernacular circles. It discusses some of the debates that have involved white performers’ musical borrowings from African American culture, and also musical flows outside the Euro-American mainstream. It explores relations of these ethical polemics to notions of copyright and argues that the latter can provide a moral guide to the propriety of many cultural interactions. It further critiques the terminological and conceptual distortions and obfuscations that have tended to plague discussions, both on scholarly and popular levels. These problems are evident in the very notion of “cultural appropriation,” which can be seen to emerge as a confused attempt to reconcile the anxiety generated by hegemonic borrowings, on the one hand, with the inevitability and ultimate desirability of cultural flows on the other.