Following the winter-solstice holiday when the shared birthdate for the gods Horus and Osiris in Egypt; Attis in Asia Minor; Mithras in Persia; and Heracles, Dionysus, and Adonis in Greece—December 25—is attributed to a Jewish preacher born in Bethlehem in the spring (a calendar date determined three centuries after his death, by the Emperor Constantine), this week’s Substack theme is: “Cultural Appropriation.”
Borrowing. Sampling. Stealing. Sharing. Gifts.
Sometimes—in the case of hip hop, say, or Christmas—cultural appropriation is a marvel. In the case of so-called “Pretendians”—non-Natives assuming the identity of American Indians for their own benefit (a subject on which I’ll write more soon)—appropriation is a sham(e). During a week in which the president of Harvard was ousted for ‘appropriating,’ or plagiarizing the words of others (read the most level-headed take on that debacle, here), and AI continues to steal from us all (except, perhaps, lowly Substack scribes like myself), this topic feels especially relevant.
Happy late holidays.
What follow are a few Bits and Pieces from this publishing platform (I’ll summarize what I gleaned from each of these; readers can link to them below). But first, a few notes on the topic of appropriation, and year-end reflections on what it’s like to read, and publish, here.
The thrust of several of the following publications about ethnic cross-fertilization is that it’s beneficial. “Cultural appropriation,” in the words of one Substack writer and podcaster below, Kmele Foster (echoing Patti Smith and Def Jam producer Rick Rubin), “is culture.” We can’t, nor should we want to, silo cultures or hermetically seal them off from one another. As long as exploitation or deception isn’t involved, sharing is beautiful and brings us together.
Now, some notes on the platform, since many of the ideas on Substack and elsewhere seem to be ‘appropriated’ and recirculated by writers who share something in common, myself included.
Substack is what free-speech advocates and anti-disinformation experts alike refer to as an information “ecosystem.” An overlapping term might simply be a “community,” of readers and publishers. A more troubling concept, one I’d like to guard against, is “echo chamber.”
Many of the writers and creators here appear on the same media platforms (in addition to this one). Some host or reference one another on their respective newsletters, podcasts, or TV shows. Some simply share overlapping interests, or promote one another on Substack and other media.
Nancy Rommelmann, to use one of this week’s examples— who is mother to an actress on the TV series Reservation Dogs and was once married to Native American actor Tim Sampson—recently hosted perhaps the most famous Native author alive, Sherman Alexie.
For my part, just this week, I discovered that someone I casually contacted for a few back issues of a periodical, then struck-up a correspondence with (the former editor of Radio Silence: Literature and Rock & Roll, who’s published everyone from Tobias Wolff to Ted Gioia to Bruce Springsteen)—is now the Head of Culture & Music at Substack.
This is all wonderful and communal.
But as an obvious booster of Substack, someone who, like many writers here, owns a small piece of it, I thought I’d begin by sharing two outside perspectives. It’s always good to step outside your bubble, which was part of the initial appeal of this platform, besides boasting some fantastic writers. I might have disagreed with some of the perspectives espoused in the work below, not too long ago; some I still might. But that’s the point: engaging with other viewpoints.
So here are two quick counter-narratives, perspectives from outside the world of Substack. The first is an outsider perspective on the platform itself; the second concerns the twentieth-century avatar for what is known as cultural appropriation. Someone whom Alice Walker, Chuck D., Greil Marcus and many others have written about: Elvis Presley.
Filmmaker Godfrey Jordon’s Opinion of Substack
Last June, I was riding an elevator down to the pool of a Tulsa hotel, to get the blood pumping before a long afternoon of sitting in conference rooms. I met a speaker from the festival of art and ideas I was attending in Oklahoma, the “Tulsa Switchyard.” Turned out the man on the elevator was a filmmaker, his most recent project being a documentary about a Bob Dylan concert in a small medieval Irish town.
Godfrey Jordon.
Here he is in his younger days, with James Brown.
And more recently, with Leonard Cohen.
As you can see, he’s a likable guy.
Here’s Jordon’s homage to the 1967 Bob Dylan music video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues”—from D.A. Pennebaker’s film, Don’t Look Back. The homage was part of Dublin’s annual Bloomsday celebration of James Joyce, which Jordan produced for the president of Ireland.
(Here’s D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 original, which Godfrey Jordan appropriated.)
As we sauntered out of the elevator towards the pool, I asked Mr. Jordan what he was doing in Tulsa, and he shared his vocation (he failed to mention James Brown, Leonard Cohen, or James Joyce). When asked the same question, I told him I was writing about Tulsa for a column, on Substack.
“Ah, big coin,” I heard him tease, through a light Irish brogue.
I chuckled as we parted ways, thinking he’d made a joke about the prospects of financial remuneration on this platform, at my own expense. It was a few seconds before I realized he was actually espousing a similar concern to my own at the time, by comparing Substack to an overhyped pyramid scheme.
“Bitcoin,” is what Godfrey Jordon said to me in Tulsa.
2.) The Professor’s Opinion of Elvis
I’d invoked Godfrey Jordan’s “bitcoin” analogy myself, about a month earlier. In correspondence with a professor specializing in Southern Gothic, African American, and Nineteenth-Century American literature. We were discussing Elvis, the composers whose songs he performed, and cultural appropriation.
Also, at my instigation, my new publisher:
I don’t know if you’re familiar with Substack—it’s an online subscription-based publishing platform, founded and funded by writers. I invested in it myself, a little, when they privileged the first round of public offering to writers. (I know I must sound like a bitcoin proselytizer, but it really seems to be a promising new forum for creative expression, so long as print publishing continues to languish—many creatives I respect agree.) A lot of writers have migrated there—Salman Rushdie, Sherman Alexie, George Saunders, Patti Smith, to name a few. Plus some favorite music critics, journalists, and historians.
This professor had worked for an entertainment accounting firm in the 1970s, and in- between proselytizing for bitcoin Substack, I was inquiring about one of her former accounts. She’d once told me a story about appropriation and compensation. Something I recalled about her…
signing or sending a royalty check to a certain artist, in the amount of some paltry sum—and that the real shame of what Eric Lott called “Love and Theft” was not so much the issue of white artists “appropriating” or stealing black music, but the lack of adequate financial compensation for black composers (and to a lesser extent, in certain cases, the lack of proper attribution to the original composer).
The artist in question was Otis Blackwell, who composed several songs recorded by Elvis Presley.
As the professor, and former manager of Otis Blackwell’s account, clarified:
We handled finances, bill payments, and taxes for magicians, actors, playwrights, singers.... I wouldn't say [Otis Blackwell’s compensation was] "paltry," but it was lower than I would have expected. He bought his mother a house with it, and he was very quiet and retiring compared to our other clients. Songs include “Don't Be Cruel,” “Return to Sender,” and more.
Re: appropriation vs. compensation—they're absolutely related. White artists could make a fortune performing the very same songs for all kinds of reasons. In the case of Elvis, my understanding is that he copied the inflection, delivery, etc. of the Black musicians whose songs he used—recordings, not written music.
This, of course, was very often true. (Though as I would argue in the case of one “Elvis” arrangement below, sometimes more complicated.) I offered the professor my take on the subject as well…
Just to put my cards on the table, my romantic conception of American popular music is that the imitation in both directions between “white” and “black” artists—while messy, financially-lopsided, unfair and often racist (especially in the 19th and early 20th c.)—helped to symbolically prepare America for integration through art long before politics, protest, or legislation (though the latter obviously became very important as well).
I also think it’s our greatest contribution to world culture, and following the example of Albert Murray, that the U.S. is: "a nation of multicolored people…that the white people are not actually white, and that black people are not really black. They are all interrelated one way or another,” especially though music.
I realize there are strong arguments to the contrary, but this is my ideal, in response to recent political and ideological craziness, some of which seems to favor a weird form of re-segregation and racial essentialism.
That’s just my take, I’m sure you have your (more informed) own.
This is part of what I’ve been writing about at The Third Ear (a term I borrowed from Skip Gates’ Signifying Monkey)—my weekly on Substack.
The professor thanked me for sharing, and graciously offered to read a manuscript of mine that had recently been edited, then declined, by a local publishing house.
She didn’t mention The Third Ear on Substack.
As an addendum in support of Albert Murray’s multicultural ideal, what he called the “Omni-Americans,” I include this tidbit, which I just rediscovered in the footnotes to Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music.
Alice Walker—who won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for The Color Purple, rediscovered Zora Neale Hurston’s career and introduced her into the canon (and happens to be a bit complicated herself when it comes to antisemitism)—wrote a lightly-fictionalized version of Elvis’ appropriation of the song “Hound Dog” from the legendary Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, titled “Nineteen Fifty-five.” In Walker’s short story, Greil Marcus explains:
the good-hearted Elvis figure gains wealth and fame from a black woman’s song, but because the song can never truly be his, he is destroyed by his alienation from his own false creation; if only it were that simple.
Unlike Bob Dylan’s “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” which Elvis adopted after hearing it sung by black folk singer Odetta, “Hound Dog” was taken up by Elvis only after he saw it performed in Las Vegas by a white novelty act, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys (though he surely listened to “Big Mama” Thornton’s version of “Hound Dog” as well, a number one hit in 1953).
The song was originally composed by Jewish songwriting team Leiber and Stoller, who taught the song to Willie Mae Thornton. Thornton only claimed authorship of the song later, likely “at the urging of her producer, Johnny Otis, the white man who ruled the Los Angeles R&B world while passing for black.” To complicate things further:
…not only did Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller write “Hound Dog,” teaching their arrangement to Thornton in the studio—when they wrote it, in a Los Angeles where cohabitation between unmarried blacks and whites was a matter for the police, Leiber was a member of an interracial, male-and-female communist commune (Stoller was was a hanger-on: “he never got me roped all the way into that,” he said in 2007)…
Most hilariously of all, thrilled with the success of their smash hit with “Big Mama” Thornton, Leiber and Stoller’s first triumph “brought forth from Leiber’s comrades not praise but condemnation of commodity fetishism”:
“We walked in full of excitement,” Stoller said… “and they went through this whole lecture on why our excitement had no real social value, and that we were falsely elated and stimulated falsely about what we were doing and I can remember how dragged I was.”
If only they knew.
A song about “nothing,” in the words of one of its composers, written by a Jewish songwriting team, adopted by a black blues singer, at the urging of her white producer passing for black, covered by a Las Vegas novelty act, then popularized by a poor white boy from Mississippi, and fictionalized by a black Pulitzer-winning author with an antisemitism problem.
To paraphrase Greil Marcus, how do you pull justice from that maze?
I no longer have any concerns about Substack being perceived as a pyramid scheme, shady tech start-up, or forum for unpopular ideas (the last one is actually a plus). Much of what’s published here is available for free, and writers alone were invited to make a one-time investment, in something they believed in, limited to a few shares.
It does, however, remain the Wild West, and there are some quirks and foibles to publishing here, which perhaps I’ll write about sometime (last month my tiny newsletter was followed by Tucker Carlson, for example, and from time to time I’ll pick up an anonymous subscriber who reads a suspiciously-large number of other publications, suggesting there are bots or some sort of mass-promotion scheme afoot).
But the fact remains there’s some great writing and reporting here, and some of it is determining the course of mainstream media coverage (The New York Times, Washington Post, and Atlantic began offering newsletters in the wake of Substack’s success) and creative writing…
Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em (Podcast): Sherman Alexie Wants His Scars
“Talking about Pretendians, the silliness of the word ‘indigenous,’ blackout drinking and bad nudity with the celebrated Native American writer”
I’ll have much more to say about the history of Pretendians next week, in reference to this conversation between Sherman Alexie and journalists-and-authors Nancy Rommelmann and Sarah Hepola.
For now, listen to Sherman Alexie opine on the subject (first half-hour is free, or subscribe for the full 90 mins—message The Third Ear for free gift subscriptions). As well as what it’s like to fly by the seat of your pants on Substack.
Or simply read one of the best pieces of journalism from 2023, for free, in a few minutes:
The ‘I’ in BIPOC: Not all Native Americans are leftist political activists, by Sherman Alexie.
And don’t miss Nancy Rommelmann’s fullest account of her adjacency to Native culture and film, at:
The Free Press
“The Long, Strange, Beautiful Road to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’: My father-in-law and my late husband, both accomplished actors, wished for a time when Hollywood would make movies about real Native Americans. Now my daughter is living it,” by Nancy Rommelmann
The Fifth Column (Podcast)
“Handel’s Messiah and stock portfolio”
“Musicology is dumb”
“Hip-hop is appropriation and it’s great”
“Method Man thinks the Stones and Bootsy are the same”
This one’s available for free, in its entirety, but I’m recommending it for the first fifteen minutes alone. In which:
Michael Moynihan meditates on the program from a performance of Handel’s Messiah at the Met (problematic content warning: the composer inadvertently profited from the slave trade three centuries before Jimi Hendrix occupied his London apartment)
Fab Five Freddy agrees that Afrika Bombaataa appropriated German music from Kraftwerk in early hip hop
De La Soul’s first two albums are revealed to have been lifted from Steely Dan
Matt Welch shares the two most-sampled sources in 1989 hip hop: James Brown and… Van Halen?
Method Man shares some of his early influences (“Bootsy Collins’’’ “Get Off of My Cloud”)
Eddie Van Halen behind the uncredited riff for Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”
Kmele Foster weighs-in on the silliness of “presentism,” and cultural appropriation in 2023
The Honest Broker
Ted Gioia tells the story of how African musicians came to the royal courts of Henry VIII, Portugal, and in the case of Vicente Lusitano, the priesthood in Rome, as well as Germany, where he married his Protestant wife.
In the process,
Western song styles became dominant because they were the most multicultural musical idioms in the world. Remember that the next time people attack this music for its lack of diversity. Nothing could be further from the truth […]
This is no different than Elvis Presley drawing on the blues tradition in his home state of Mississippi, and transforming it into a powerful mainstream sound. The same thing happened with Arabic and North African music in Spain, which spread throughout Europe via disseminators from southern France.
Whatever you think about cultural appropriation, or Substack, hopefully The Third Ear has given you some diverse perspectives to consider.
Stay tuned for next week, when I look at the peculiarly-American tradition of passing for Native American.
Happy 2024.