Appropriation and Art

I bought a record the other day with a price as insignificant as the name on the disk.

I started out by walking down the stairs in a blank corner of Mount Auburn Street. The walls smelled more like piss than the rest of Cambridge. I noticed good speakers, the kind that makes music more intimate than lust. Noticed what came out of them too—a liquid-smooth kind of rhythm, an uninviting and reckless shift of beats—though I couldn’t name the band. Spent a good half hour in the store. Kept trying to find something that would look pretty and simple on red brick walls. Settled on “Can’t Stop the Prophet” by Jeru the Damaja, not because I liked him or I had heard the song before. Liked, instead, the crisp white of the paper, the red sticker on the black record. Didn’t know much about Jeru the Damaja or the song on the disc. Only saw him two years ago in a video on Youtube arguing with Lauryn Hill, the only rapper I knew from the time period, and figured if he was sick enough to chill with L Boogie he’d be pretty enough to put on my wall. Didn’t think about it much after that, even when someone saw the vinyl gummed next to its cover on my red wall and asked about his albums, and I had next to nothing to say.

There are more examples to list, especially having to do with hip-hop, especially having to do with culture, especially having to do with art and the consumption of art. Like the men I sat next to in the theater for “Straight Outta Compton” who fist-pumped and bobbed their heads drunkenly to the music as if it were a concert, who replied to every part of the movie, regardless of emotional weight, with “isn’t this awesome” and “I loooooove this shiiiit.” Like non-black girls who wear dreadlocks for how it looks and how it feels. Like me, an Asian-American girl from middle-class suburban New Jersey, blasting Tupac while doing calculus homework or doodling “death is my sect guess my religion” when the closest encounter I had with the police was a “good morning” in the parking lot. Like all those self-proclaimed OGs in prestigious college campuses, white-as-cream suburbs, movie theaters, nightclubs, and libraries.

There is appropriation involved, but somehow that word seems too accusatory and defensive to be functional. It leaves you, and me, convinced that innocence needs a defense and there are few ways to claim it.

I won’t point out those aesthetic incongruities; they speak for themselves. I won’t point out repeated arguments that often sound liberal-biased, “ism”d and incomprehensible unless an appropriator has an extraordinary capacity for empathy, but more importantly, a good, liberal education. I will, instead, point out the intention of art, which becomes the main communicative device of culture.

There is a belief that art is for everybody to consume, which makes appropriation a topic that seems superficially sticky. Why limit the influence of art? Why limit a consumer? The belief is true, to some extent. Art supposedly has the ability to speak to the inner workings of the soul. It supposedly erases nuances, although momentarily, of race or gender or social class, to reveal what is the most critical, what is the most essential. And when art is for everybody to consume, art becomes profitable.

But art is not for everybody to consume. Art is meant to be understood more than consumed. And it’s to be understood in a human reality where “there is no greater pain than to be misunderstood” and “there is no greater pain than to be completely understood,” where “even internationally recognized artists can be invalidated with just one, ‘um…OK,’” where people scoff at blank canvases, where chewed-up wads of gum on Guggenheim floors are skirted around and observed as pieces of art because art no longer seems to exist with a nametag, where “[music] turned up in sterile bullshit clubs in LA, separated from the spirit we made it in."

Art is meant to be analyzed, but it is so hard to understand on a personal, emotional level. It requires an Avatar-like transformation where empathy becomes visceral. So it is so much easier for some art forms to be elite. It is so much easier to steal the flash and bang of aesthetics from Makavelli than Machiavelli; to scribble “Thug Life” on a desk than to look up all the political and social references in a song like “Thugz Mansion”; to use the description OG instead of making up one for yourself. But art doesn’t exist for people to like it.

Art is created to be understood. It is meant to be consumed by people who want to respect it. And perhaps a lack of this relationship is what resonates with me most in cases of appropriation—a lack of respect manifesting in a refusal to admit that some types of art should be treated as art.

I notice how subtly acts of appropriation occur, and I wish interests, preferences, and attractions were not so political. However, when the vinyl gets taped on my wall, when another rap album rolls through my speakers, when I bob my head to a beat, I’ll notice more. How the groove lays intentionally in the crevices of noise. How spoken word can stick to the mind. How lyrics seem careful in their careless construction or careless in their careful construction. How beautiful it is to admire the work of a person I can never be, in a culture I can never claim.

Christina Qiu ’19, lives in Matthews Hall. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.