JULIE BURCHILL: Cultural appropriation has killed modern music.
ZE Records was started up in New York City in 1978 by Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban, Zilkha a 24-year-old entrepreneur (his father, an Iraqi-Jewish immigrant to Britain, was Mothercare) and Esteban a 27-year-old French artist, mentored by the legendary John Cale, and the boyfriend of a young Anna Wintour. This combination of dirty cash tangling with both avant-garde and haute couture would add up to an awful lot of well-bred young Americans pretending to be French – and a lot of brilliant music, a fearless fusion of punk and disco. Their best acts were ‘Was (Not Was)’, Cristina Monet (the Zelda Fitzgerald of pop) and Suicide (with the most terrifying music ever recorded, Nick Hornby writing of ‘Frankie Teardrop’ that you would listen to it ‘only once’). You’d never heard anything like ZE – but you knew you’d been waiting all your life to listen to it.
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ZE closed in 1984 – it was only active for six years, which makes its reach all the more remarkable. Suicide’s icy genius now soundtracks a perfume ad; Cristina died of Covid. Many on the left now espouse ideas of cultural purity that would shock the Aryan Brotherhood. And if you Google ‘Ze’ you’ll find the likes of this on dictionary.com:
‘pronoun (occasionally used with a singular indefinite pronoun or singular noun antecedent in place of the definite masculine he or the definite feminine she): “My friend didn’t want to go to the party, but ze ended up having a great time!”’
Did ze, though? What was the music like? Did ze approve, or should ze have had a trigger warning before Fonda Rae started singing ‘Touch Me’? Was it so beautiful and bad that it made ze sad? Never mind – in five years’ time, pronouns will have gone the way of the antimacassar. But the magnificent music of the mutant disco will play on forever.
We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Gwen Stefani is a voice of sanity: Gwen Stefani Is Right: Cultural Appreciation Is Not Cultural Appropriation.
An obsession with cultural appropriation also reveals the deep unseriousness of self-proclaimed “anti-racists.” The modern left, with its influence in boardrooms and newsrooms and classrooms, takes every opportunity to lecture weary Americans about the enduring evil of whiteness and of white supremacy.
While their racially charged screeds are almost always unfounded, within their rhetoric is a message that threatens to cultivate white pride where it didn’t exist before. By reinforcing the idea that cultural appreciation is cultural appropriation and therefore racist, woke warriors encourage white people to insulate themselves from the cultures and experiences of others and fully embrace tribalism wherein race is a focal point.
“Most critics of cultural appropriation, coming from the far left, also fear the rise of white supremacy,” wrote Julian Adorney here at The Federalist in 2018. “But the best way to combat white supremacy is to encourage people of all races, whites included, to borrow at will from other cultures — as drawing more lines between races and cordoning off the exploration of other cultures is wholly contradictory to the end goal of creating a harmonious, diverse, and pluralist society.”
Americans who take pride in the melting-pot nature of this grand experiment would likely agree with Adorney, as does Stefani. “If we didn’t buy and sell and trade our cultures in, we wouldn’t have so much beauty, you know?” she said. “We learn from each other, we share from each other, we grow from each other. And all these rules are just dividing us more and more.”
Take a tip from Stefani. Don’t let the race-baiters bully you into giving up cultural appreciation.
Related: “As Richard Fernandez tweeted: ‘The elites lost their mojo by becoming absurd. It happened on the road between cultural appropriation and transgender bathrooms.’ It was fatal: ‘People believe from instinct. The Roman gods became ridiculous when the Roman emperors did. PC is the equivalent of Caligula’s horse.’”