I recently wrote about white appropriation in hop hop and it’s relation to some recent events involving Macklemore and Iggy Azalea. Today, I came across two interesting video clips involving Blondie and Madonna that continue that conversation.
The first video includes Blondie talking about her song Rapture. In the second video music label executive Seymore Stein talks about how he marketed Madonna as a black woman on her first single “Everybody” (cover art below, listen).
The two videos come from a NOVA/BCC TV documentary series “Rock and Roll: The Perfect Beat”. I won’t go into an extended analysis but these videos at least offer more examples of how white musicians, and music labels, have interacted with black music.
*This post has got me thinking and working on resolving the cognitive dissonance around encouraging the right to freely remix/sample, and discouraging cultural appropriation.