Opinion of Iggy Azalea

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Probable racist and HP. Plus, everything Maxwell said. I feel like she's been a bad influence on the much more talented Charli XCX.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

She seems to get more crap as a white female rapper than white male rappers do. I don't understand why sjw's could still celebrate Eminem getting a Grammy after he threatened to rape her, but it's not really my area of expertise.

I haven't heard any celebration of that from any 'SJW' of my acquaintance, and there are several.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Ok, so basically the rap world is still so male-dominated that once we start talking about any subset (such as "white rappers with ways to set themselves apart") we get an overwhelmingly if not exclusively male group. (Not that that excuses any of Iggy's appropriation as you've outlined.)

That's basically my impression, and it's a large part of why I don't like rap in practice very much even though it appeals to a lot of my aesthetic sensibilities in theory (since it's basically the love child of talking blues and Mahler-style allusions and sampling, both of which I love).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

BTW this whole being angry at a artist for "racial appropriation" is sickening.

Strong words. Why 'sickening' and not just 'excessive' or 'uncalled-for' or something like that?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

BTW this whole being angry at a artist for "racial appropriation" is sickening.

Strong words. Why 'sickening' and not just 'excessive' or 'uncalled-for' or something like that?

Because when I read such statements, I get this bad feeling in my gut. That feeling is not "uncalled-for" or "excessive" it's "sickening".

Okay, fair enough.

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You really don't see a difference between good-faith, mutual cultural exchange and blithely helping oneself to a grab-bag of traditions and aesthetic sensibilities airlifted in from other cultures wholesale? It's basically the same as the difference between literary allusion and plagiarism...

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

ingemann, this is admittedly not directly comparable but I'm going to submit that what Iggy Azalea is all about is a sort of distinctly uncomfortable middle ground between this and the sort of good-faith cultural exchange that you seem to assume it is: Do you understand what the problem with minstrel shows is?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

ingemann, this is admittedly not directly comparable but I'm going to submit that what Iggy Azalea is all about is a sort of distinctly uncomfortable middle ground between this and the sort of good-faith cultural exchange that you seem to assume it is: Do you understand what the problem with minstrel shows is?

Yes I do, the fact that they ridiculed Black people and portraited them as buffoons.

Here's the thing, you can't say that Iggy act is a ministel show and say that she copy them at the same time. Unless you want to say that modern African-American musicians run their own ministrel show for the benefit of White Americans, and if you believe that's the case, Iggy is really the least problem.

Yes, the fact that it can be argued to be mimicry rather than cruel parody is why I conceded that the comparison isn't direct. But the issue is that it's chimerical to claim that mimicry can't be mocking unless the thing being mimicked is itself flawed. I know I characterized this in terms of 'airlifting things wholesale' earlier; the thing about airlifting things wholesale is that it entails not adjusting for context. As any artist familiar with color wheels and mixing pigments will tell you, if you copy something from one context to another without adjusting for the new context, the whole image ends up clashing badly.

Besides, the 'cultural appropriation' talk is kind of losing the plot in that what's so terrible about Iggy Azalea specifically isn't so much the music as the defensive, lashing-back, wounded-gazelle nature of the way she responds to being criticized for it. That, and her Twittter feed, just in general.