APPROPRIATION
Onika Tanya Maraj, better known as Nicki Minaj, is a Trinidadian-born American rapper, singer, songwriter and actress. She has always been praised by her fans for being such a fashion icon but during this course I have realized that a lot of her ideas come from previous art works of the past. Appropriation is a practice that involves re making styles or arts from different cultures of the past. Nikki Minaj has used appropriation in many of her works but has also been wrongfully accused of appropriation as well.
THE CARIBBEAN CARNIVAL HEADDRESS
Extravagant headpieces have been worn throughout history by numerous cultures. Americans believe that this only unique to Native American tribes. In a recent photo of Nikki Minaj used for promotional purposes she was wearing one of these traditional head pieces. Fans were in an up war over this use of
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“appropriation”. What fans don’t realize is that although they may believe that this is only a Native American thing it isnt. Head pieces are a part of Carnival, which is a celebration known across the Caribbean. The festival started in Europe and then it spread to the French and Spanish who then brought it to Trinidad, Dominica, Haiti, and other islands. Carnival traditions were restricted to European settlers only, and slaves weren’t allowed to participate. So they created their own carnival, which soon outgrew the European carnival. The colorful Caribbean carnival headdress people see today is just a beautiful blend of African and native Indian influences. Which is similar to the head dress Nikki Minaj was wearing in her promotional photo. I think that she had no intention of disrespecting the Native culture, she may just like the head pieces. ANACONDA VIDEO Nicki Minaj created a full video for “Anaconda”, which is an ode to booties where she sampled shout out to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s 1992 signature jam “Baby Got Back.
What was surprising was remembering how much controversy this video caused when Sir Mix-a-Lot dropped the song in 1992. MTV would only play this song at night when kids were supposed to be sleeping. In his video the women wore shorts that covered their cheeks. The also wore tights underneath for extra coverage. Nikki didn’t use any of the clothing ideas from the original video. In her video the ladies wore basically hat you could describe as a bikini.
I think her intent for this video was to give the viewers what they want. Everyone says it all the time that sex sells; Nikki Minaj was sold. When this single was released featuring oily “asses” in a steaming jungle it was clear that she was not afraid to show off big butts. She wanted to show off the dance moves that are often recycled by artist and used to oversexualize black women. “Anaconda” welcomes these features by paring sultry imagination with empowering
lyrics. YOUR LOVE VIDEO Nikki Minaj made a music video to the song, “Your Love” in 2010. This video was very oriental in regards to Japanese culture. The song includes the lyric, “When I was a Geisha he was a Samurai...” Geishas have been highly sexualized in the West. In Japan a Geisha is respected as the ideal artistic performer & hostess. Geisha’s spend many years learning how to play various musical instruments, learning to sing, dance, tell stories, and hold conversations about art or politics. A Geisha gives off the illusion of female perfection; she’s supposed to be absolutely untouchable. When male Westerners first came to Japan they assumed that geishas were also supposed to sleep with them. In the video Minaj dances in a sexy kimono that does not have a bottom skirt and wears chopsticks in a geisha-inspired hairstyle while suggestively dancing in a silky wind tunnel. The long finger attachments that she wears in the video are not at all Japanese, they are more than likely from the Thai in origin. At the beginning Minaj wears what looks like a mix between a Japanese karate gi and the clothes usually worn by a Chinese Shaolin monk. The beads that the instructor is wearing looks like they’re supposed to be Buddhist prayer beads. Nikki then dresses in a different form of kimono while hiding behind curtains before shyly comes out. This kimono is more accurate than the last one, but it still sexualized her because of her very visible cleavage. In the very last seen Nikki engages in a duel with another woman, they are both dressed in sexy samurai/ninja attire. I think that Nikki just took pieces of the western culture and added touches to them in her video. I do believe that her intent was to turn their culture into something a little sexier. I don’t think she meant to sexualize Geisha’s, I think she just went along with the idea that Geisha’s are sexy and beautiful women who can be edgy kind of like Minaj herself. CHECK IT OUT VIDEO Minaj also pulled an Ariel Lavigne in her 2010 “Check It Out” video starring will.i.am. A Korean actor comes out in the video to introduce Nikki Minaj and will.i.am. . In a mixture of Korean and broken English he yelled out, “Check It Outtaaaaa”. He is yelling out to what is supposed to be an “expressionless” Asian crowd. In the video an Asian woman follows after him in high heels with a large boom box. This homogenous Asian crowd is very hard to please as their unimpressed expressions remain stale throughout the entire video. will.i.am. and Minaj then begin to rap as Korean characters continuously come across the screen. Supposedly they are giving a very rough translation of the lyrics, but to a non-Asian viewer they’re meaningless decoration to make the video look foreign. ONLY VIDEO Nikki Minaj took the most heat for her song, “Only”, video because people believed that it took on Nazi Germany imagery. The Anti-Defamation League made a statement and the organization national director stated that the video was “a new low for pop culture’s exploitation of Nazi symbolism.” Nikki Minaj argued an apology stating that the artist who made the lyric video for “Only” was influenced by a cartoon on Cartoon Network called, “Metalocalypse” and “Sin City”. Nikki argues that the producer and the person in charge of overseeing the video (which is one of her best friends) are Jewish. Nikki stated that she did not come up with the concept but that she is very sorry and takes full responsibility if it had offended anyone. She said that she would never condone Nazism in her art. The song “Only” is about Nikki, she wrote it to describe how tough she is, how big her butt is, and all the good things about her. I do believe that Nikki Minaj did not come up with the concept on her own and even after she was shown the concept she still wasn’t sure of what everyone had meant. After doing research the concept actually mimics Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will.” W MAGAZINE The last example I am going to discuss is Nikki Minaj on the cover of the November 2011 issue of W magazine. Nikki posed for a shoot of pictures edited by framed artist Francesco Vezzoli. He was asked what made him interested in working with Nikki and he stated that he wanted to play with the public image of a female hip hop star. Vezzoli added that he has always been fascinated by powerful women and spent a lot of time researching how images of women have been used to mold the public’s views of imaginations. His main desire was to link historical approaches of female representations to contemporary icons of the media era. Vezzoli basically wanted to turn the Nicki Minaj into a powdered 18th-century courtesan. I can admit that Nikki Minaj has used a lot of clips and ideas from other artist, movies. She is not the most original artist out there but she does have a way of spinning things into something sellable. She takes bits and pieces from things that she likes and turns them into her own unique art. I can respect that people don’t want their culture to be recognized in the wrong way or made fun of but I do believe that Nikki is just having fun and giving her fans something to enjoy.
Cyrus was the host 2015 VMAs and she did a racist performance of using black culture, a popular, trending culture in America, to promote herself as “wild and dangerous” by using black people as “props” for butt slapping and twerking (Makarechi 2013). Therefore, Manji turned her acceptance speech toward Cyrus by calling her out on her liberalist discussion about her on media a few days earlier. Cyrus had stated that Manji should blame herself for not being nominated as the best music video of the year along with Taylor Swift and other artists (Feeney 2015). Manji pointed out how the entertainment industry chose white artists to win awards and ignored nonwhite artists even though their music was also very popular and well-deserving to received awards as well. Furthermore, Manji pointed out that if Cyrus was going to enjoy black culture, she should care about the black people who created that culture as well. Cyrus, on the other hand, refused to give a response (Feeney 2015). Hence, in summary of what Wiley thinks, she stated, “’[White feminism] thinks twerking is a revolution on Miley but wants to know why Nicki just won’t respect herself though’” (Button Poetry
Hip hop music videos present two-dimensional women that have unrealistic body proportions. Perry states that the women in these music videos are lighter-skinned with “long and straight or loosely curled hair” and have “a ...
genre of music. Nicki Minaj leaves a mark on you that many female rappers on this generation
1. What you are studying (which three works and the topic of your paper) Topic: I’m going to be writing my paper on Cultural Appropriation. I’m going to focus on cultural appropriation in music and hip hop. Then I’m going to use cultural appropriation in hair as a way of questioning whether cultural appropriation is actually cultural appreciation.
Since young girls today spend more time surfing the web, they are exposed to more mainstream advertisements that boast sexual content, and as a result, many girls want to do the things they are seeing young girls just like Winifred do. In addition to exposure to sexual content on the internet, the music of popular culture leaves very little to the imagination. Women in these music videos are more often shown as provocative and wearing revealing clothing. Many girls look up to these women and want to emulate them because they are their favorite artist. For instance, Beyoncé’s album “Beyoncé” features the song “Partition”, where Beyoncé says “He Monica Lewinski all on my gown”. The sexual reference to Monica Lewinski is hypersexu...
The music video for “Tip Drill” takes place in what is identifiable as a brothel, with scantil...
Rap artists’ using women in an offensive way in the lyrics and videos is something that has recently been taking affect. Many decades ago, rappers did not rap about women the way rappers
Have you ever taken offense when you saw someone dressed in traditional garments from your culture? In America, this happens quite often. Some people may not recognize it and some refuse to acknowledge that it even exists. Cultural appropriation is a situation in which a dominant culture steals aspects of a minority culture’s, such as hair, clothing styles, and music.
Women have consistently been perceived as second-class citizens. Even now, in times when a social conscience is present in most individuals, in an era where an atmosphere of gender equality 'supposedly' exists, it is blatantly apparent that the objectification and marginalization of women is still a major social issue. In reality, progression in terms of reducing female exploitation has been stagnant at best. Not only is the degradation of women a major problem that to date has not been eradicated, but it is actually being endorsed by some music celebrities. There are a growing number of people who purchase rap albums that support the fallacy that women are mere objects and should be treated as such. As the popularity of rap continues to climb at unprecedented rates, so too does its influence on the perception of women. In the vast majority of hip-hop songs, the depiction of women as sexual objects, the extreme violence directed towards them and the overall negative influence these lyrics have on the average adolescent's perception of women make rap the absolute epitome of female exploitation.
Lyrics expressed of feminism and another of exploitation. This is another huge controversy as now women are becoming more mainstreamed than men in the hip-hop culture. For example, female Rapper, Nicki Minaj was noted for one of the wealthiest rappers alongside some of the prominent men in hip-hop. In her article, “Now That's a Bad Bitch! The State of Women in Hip-Hop” Ahsa Layne stated, "But at what cost?" This implies how women are stereotyped by the image of their bodies and how men perceive them as words described so openly in hip-hop as “bitches” or “hoes.” When hip-hop was first starting out, we heard more women expressing unity and empowerment amongst each other and in the black community. For example, one of my favorite hip-hop songs is "Doo Wop (That Thing)” by Lauryn Hill was a song to encourage women to choose integrity over hypocrisy and self-respect over sacrificing their identities. During my time of hip-hop, this is what I preferred to listen to more. Now as we have the millennium culture where hip-hop has evolved in my eyes as almost unrecognizable. Consequently, it is a market driven industry of self-exploitation in the hip-hop culture and this type of exploitation sales at all
We have more or less gender stereotype and create our own set of standards how men and women are supposed to behave. The music video delivers a weird impression that something is wrong with the story because the characters in the video are acting opposite from society’s expectations of gender stereotype. The video portrays a couple’s normal daily life, which may have been seen everywhere, and it’s nothing special except that the perspectives of males and females are opposite from what we would expect. The main cast includes Beyoncé as a wife who is a police officer and Eddie Goines as her supportive husband who works at an office. In the video, the storyline is slightly twisted because Beyoncé
In our new age, social media-strained society, you will find different artists expressing their ideas on a controversial topic. One of the controversial topics is Cultural Appropriation. Cultural Appropriation is a “sociological concept which views the adoption of the use of elements of one culture by members of a different culture as a largely negative phenomenon (James Young).” Consequently, many see it as an appreciation of a culture, while others feel it is a degradation of one. However, cultural appropriation should not be used as fashion, or blatant ignorance without knowledge of the culture first hand.
While it is true that Minaj used a lot of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s words, it wouldn’t be entirely accurate* to automatically assume that she was expressing the exact same sentiment*. After all, Minaj does rap about sleeping with Troy and Michael * (cite), which seems to feed into the “Jezebel concept” * (cite, ad 948 – represented as a ho, characterized by sleeping around with men) and makes it appear that Minaj is willingly offering herself up for objectification. However, one must also consider the possibility that Minaj utilizes this objectification as an empowerment tool for women. While Sir Mix-A-Lot’s song* was projecting the message “I am a man and I am standing up for curvaceous women”, Minaj’s song declares “I’m a curvaceous woman and not only can I stand up for my body, but I can also do whatever I want with
Nicki’s apparent feminist agenda through her music and identity is being distributed to her wide audience, which covers a massive array of hip-hop and pop music fans. Her wide reach and continual influence has the potential to lastingly correct the anti-feminist, misogynistic tone of the male-dominated genre and culture. Despite her hyper sexualized image and defamatory lyrics, she is arguably a positive, albeit controversial, feminist role model, which is evident in her motivation for success, lyrical discourse, and use of and meanings behind her alter egos.
Although the film has endured some criticism, the film’s after-after party at Kingston’s Club Mirage proved that Dancehall Queen isn’t “the invention of a perverted production team in search of celluloid satisfaction. Real-life dancehall queens stroked their crotches, winded their hips and rubbed their well-oiled buttocks” (St. Hill).