Is Bruno Mars a cultural appropriator? Yes, No, Maybe

This would make a great essay for an end-of-term exam question.

To answer it well, you have talk about many of the things that matter in American culture and many big changes that have taken place there.

Let me sketch what an answer might look like.

I am coming down firmly on the side of “maybe.” (Canadians, so daring, so courageous.)

Yes, Bruno Mars is an appropriator

The champion of this argument is Seren Sensei “The Grapevine,”

“What Bruno Mars does, is he takes pre-existing work and he just completely, word-for-word recreates it, extrapolates it. He does not create it, he does not improve upon it, he does not make it better. He’s a karaoke singer, he’s a wedding singer, he’s the person you hire to do Michael Jackson and Prince covers. Yet Bruno Mars has an Album of the Year Grammy and Prince never won an Album of the Year Grammy.”

See Sensei’s full argument here:

No, Bruno Mars is not an appropriator

The champion here is the very talented Ira Madison III who a couple of days ago said this in the Daily Beast:

“I remember not caring for Mars’ brand of music very much. It felt like karaoke. That is, until I saw his first Super Bowl performance. What I saw was a musician who had stage presence, talent, and was really fucking fun to watch. During his second performance, he survived a dance-off with Beyoncé. This isn’t the work of a pop star dabbling in a genre that they don’t understand and performing just barely enough to get accolades. Mars puts in work.”

See Madison’s full argument here.

Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t

I think that one of the things on which the issue turns is that famous line from T.S. Eliot, the one that says

“Bad poets imitate. Good poets steal.” (Original context here.)

Bad poets help themselves to someone else’s creative work. But good poets make this work their own.

The metaphor isn’t perfect. What we are really talking about is “rights of use.”

The Eliot condition, let’s call it, is this:

You may appropriate if you are good and gifted and disciplined. You may appropriate if you are devoted to the thing you “steal.” Your skill, your abilities, your devotion, these give you rights of use. (But never ownership.)

Or, to put this another way, you may appropriate if and only if, in Madison’s words, you “put in [the] work.”

If, on the other hand, you are sloppy, ungifted, mechanical or otherwise unworthy of the work, you are appropriating. This artist deserves a place in that special hell reserved for those who steal the cultural work created by others.

This is a crowded place, filled with all those white producers who dared claim copyright on the music made by African American musicians and… well, there are so many cultural appropriators in American culture, it’s hard to know where to begin.

When you appropriate well, you honor the original. When you merely borrow, you diminish it.

It comes down to this

Do you think Bruno Mars is a good artist and worthy of the work he’s working with? Or do you think he is a bad artist?

Madison thinks Mars is good. I do too. As, I think, must most of the nation. Anyone who had any doubts should have found SuperBowl XLVIII clarifying. Mr. Mars shared the stage with the Red Hot Chili Peppers who ended up looking like incapable clowns by comparison. (See the performance here.)

For a glimpse of Mars in all his performance glory, go here. (Ok, he’s a little pitchy at the beginning, but the dancing, good lord.)

How do we tell if someone is good or bad?

Is there less impressionistic way of making this determination, of identifying musicians who appropriate?

One simple device: leave it to the audience at the Apollo. Survive there and you are good to go. Fail there and, well, just go away.