"Cultural Appropriation"

[Thumpalumpacus]

I think the essence of appropriation lies in intent. It's one thing to pay homage to a culture that's influenced your own, but for me the line is drawn at pretense. If you're pretending you understand a culture because you've adopted elements of it, you're full of shit.

I play blues on my guitar, but I clearly have no idea what it meant to be a black sharecropper or cotton-picker, and I don't pretend otherwise. Am I appropriating culture? I don't think so. I think I'm just picking what I like, a la carte, and investing my own meaning into it.

I'm a big fan of Yo Yo Ma, too. And I'm not sore about the many world-music genres adopting that most hideous of my western culture's inventions, the drum machine.