- Is this quarantine
about to kill all of us?
How is everyone doing?
Hey guys, it's Jouelzy,
to the Headsmart Brown Girl in Charge.
And I feel so bad in this
time of the coronavirus.
Everyone wants to say love,
in the time of coronavirus
'cause "Love in the Time of Cholera"
a book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but ugh.
I don't feel love.
Don't feel the love in
this season of (laughing)
I keep saying season of sadness.
We're now in a sea of sadness.
I hope everybody is surviving.
For all those who have shutdown orders
from their government,
those who are quarantining,
quarantining, what's
the right pronunciation?
Somebody put me on.
But I especially feel bad,
as much as we could all
have depressing commentary
(laughing) my birthday is
the 25th of this month,
canceling all our trips and all that.
But I especially feel sad
for the class of 2020.
Baby, let me tell you,
I feel bad for people,
of the youths (laughing)
who have worked so hard
to get to graduation.
For most of us, school's gonna be canceled
for the rest of the year.
And they're gonna miss
out on all the things
that come with graduation
that they have been
waiting for for so long.
So let's do a youthful topic
and have a little fun here, all right?
So I want to talk about Billie Eilish
and cultural appropriation.
Now at first glance,
nothing about 18 year old
Billie Eilish screams Black culture.
At least not when you play her music.
With her grunge aesthetic
and her funky colored hair
and her alt-pop music that
has spawned such songs
like her hit single "Bad
Guy" I mean it's a bop.
♪ I'm the bad type, make
your mama sad type ♪
It could be confusing,
especially when you listen to her music,
why there are critics that
are accusing the songstress
of cultural appropriation.
Now I can imagine that most of my audience
isn't a part of Billie
Eilish's core fan base.
You might maybe know her
if you are around teenagers
or have teenagers yourself.
Or you might have seen photos online
of a teenage white girl
dressed like an early
2000s NBA draft pick.
And for those of you who
still (laughing) don't know
who Billie is, here's a brief background.
She was born and raised in Los
Angeles to musician parents.
Ooh, I actually want to pull
up her full name, hold on.
'Cause she got a very interesting name.
And there is a good bit of video
with her and her parents
showing her childhood home
where she produced her first album.
But her full name is Billie
Eilish Pirate Baird O'onnell.
Get creative with your children's names.
There's no holding them back here.
But Billie began making
music with her older brother
Finneas, I love these names.
And it was with Finneas
that Billie recorded
her debut album "When We All
Fall Asleep Where Do We Go?"
It's that album that landed
Billie in Grammys history
becoming the youngest,
and only second artist
to win an award on, in, is it in or on?
All four major categories with the first
being Sam Smith in
2015, and yes, yes, yes.
If you see a thing happening here.
The Grammys and music at large
do actually have a race problem.
That's word to Tyler, the Creator.
But (coughing) we're talking about Billie
not the entire music academy here.
Billie took home the
awards for Best New Artist,
Album of the Year, Song of the
Year and Record of the Year.
- [Woman] To
OK, are we ready?
Billie Eilish!
(screaming)
- Billie Eilish!
(screaming)
"When we Fall Asleep"--
- "Bad Guy"
(audience cheering)
by Billie Eilish.
- My God
so many other songs deserve this.
I'm sorry. (exclaiming)
- "Bad Guy" Billie Eilish.
(audience cheering)
- Thank you.
- Thank you. (laughing)
Bye!
- And it was after the Grammys
when people started talking
about what they considered
the obvious influence
of Black American culture
on Billie's image.
At the 2020 Grammys, she was dressed
in an oversized Gucci,
shall we say Dickies though?
Like the cut, the style,
top down, up top, you know?
With a lime green turtleneck
and long Gucci acrylic nails.
(laughing) In a tweet,
music journalist Ivie Ani
pointed out how Billie
dresses in aesthetic
most commonly associated with hood girls
from Billie's acrylic
nails, the big hoop earrings
she frequently dons.
Others took it further
to flatly accuse Billie
of cultural appropriation
because her aesthetic
across the board does harken
to the early era of SWV
and the '90s, to early
2000s R&B girl groups.
So (laughing) you know, you know my style.
Allow me to get a little academic here
for just a moment, for
just a brief, brief moment.
The term cultural
appropriation is an expansion
of the concept of cultural colonialism.
Kenneth Coutts‐Smith in his white paper
on Observations on the Concept
of Cultural Colonialism
merges the principles
of the Marxist theory
of class appropriation
where the dominant culture
or the dominant class
appropriates and defines
high culture with what he
calls cultural colonialism,
because much of high art is restricted
to a European a la white
cultural experience.
Now to break that down more colloquially,
'cause I know y'all have
experienced this, y'all lived this.
Cultural colonialism
and its modern iteration
of cultural appropriation
requires a power dynamic
in which an ethnicity
dominates the other ethnicity
(clearing) sorry, we got braces,
by taking a claim to
their cultural markers
and redefining said markers
through the dominant cultural lens
and claiming it as their own curation.
Now, the Kardashians are constantly
a pretty clear example of this.
But we get so used to
throwing the term at them
that sometimes it is used and abused.
(sucking teeth) They
don't need my defense.
Their bank account's gonna be all right.
Another example is the
history of rock or jazz music
where white musicians and record execs
would pluck the music of black musicians
as their own curation, giving
the Black artist no credit
or ability to properly
monetize their artwork.
Billie Eilish is not herself
culturally appropriating.
She doesn't claim ownership or monetize
the long acrylic nails and baggy clothing.
Her aesthetic may be
the output of a society
that has a history of appropriating
and commodifying Black culture.
And as a child of the 2000s
in the age of the internet,
the default really is
almost always Black culture.
Regardless of race, many of Billie's peers
take similar strains of inspiration
as we see with the
resurgence of 1990s fashion
and way overpriced Champion
sweatshirts. (laughing)
I'm trolling.
But born three years into Generation Z
in December 2001, Billie, at 18 years old
is the first artist born in the 2000s
to have a number one hit.
She grew up in the age of
Rihanna and Tyler, the Creator
and somehow that makes
me feel woefully old.
But she counts both of
them as fashion influences.
Plus, with the near
ubiquity of street wear
thanks to people like designer,
(clearing throat) grifter,
Virgil Abloh, and her
peers, Justin Bieber,
Justin Bieber, I'm old sorry, the Jenners,
and the influence of fashion
influencers on Instagram,
it's hard to suggest that
her aesthetic is born
out of a desire to coopt culture
rather than it simply just
being a part of the pop culture
Billie grew up in.
Billie has grown up in
an age where the internet
has rapidly replaced many
of our mainstream outputs.
Do kids even watch TV anymore today?
And to quote Rob Dozier in Paper Magazine,
who recently put out an article
about the same topic here
entitled When White Kids Grow
Up on the Black Internet.
He was discussing precisely
this topic at hand.
I'm gonna quote it here.
The internet has provided, for white youth
who've spent a large part
of their adolescence on it,
a front seat to the
creation and distribution
of Black cultural products,
Black music, slang and dances.
But as those cultural products
move across the internet,
they get further and further away
from their original context and meaning
and often become collapsed
under the simplistic label
of youth culture.
So (laughing) end quote.
But Dozier earlier in
the piece also denotes
that Billie was born in December 2001.
The number one song was Mary
J Blige, "Family Affair."
Is that aint no hateration (humming).
(laughing) Jay Z had just
released "The Blueprint."
Outkast, Destiny's Child,
Alicia Keys, Shaggy
were all dominating the
charts, number ones.
At that time, urban
music was moving firmly
into the mainstream.
It was also the year "Hit 'Em Up Style"
was the number one song.
Have you heard of Blu Cantrell since?
If we weren't quarantined I would've gone
and got me some rimless glasses
with a little heart
embellishment on the side.
I clearly remember the year 2001.
Most of 2001 was really firmly
dominated by urban music
or at least pop music with
an urban music feature.
And by 2007, which would
make Billie like five or six,
so when she's really absorbing
the media around her,
the year of Timbaland, (laughing)
When Justin Timberlake was an output
of Timbaland's production house.
We had a complete
amalgamation that Black music
was now the zenith of pop music.
And that included the
aesthetic fashion markers.
Now even more so for the
fashion and aesthetic markers,
Tumblr, in particular has contributed
to teens' aesthetics with
niche interests, niche,
niche interests. (laughing)
Like soft grunge, blogs, that
mirror much of Billie's style
with their pastel coloring and jewelry
that looks straight from Hot Topic.
And you know when I was
growing up in the late '90s,
early 2000s, there was
a stronger delineation
between the culture of white kids
and Black kids like myself.
Though it was probably
stronger in my parents' era.
The more access we get, the
more globalization happens,
the internet becomes more prominent.
That delineation keeps shrinking.
I and most of my generation
was at the beginning
of that line really, really being blurred
as internet culture took ahold.
As Lauren Michele Jackson discusses
in her book "White Negroes
When Cornrows Were In Vogue
"and Other Thoughts on
Cultural Appropriation"
the internet depends on Black people.
Undeniable that so much content
aggregated by Millennial
targeted media orgs
traces back to Black Tumblr
Black Twitter and culture blogs.
(clearing throat) Yes,
you can pick up this book on Audible,
audible.com/jourlzy (laughing)
use my link, get a free month.
But Lauren Michele Jackson
specifically in her book,
again reasserts my point
that the coming of age
in the 2000s, Billie truly
is a child of the internet
in which Black culture is the default.
Even though society is becoming
what would say, more diverse,
there's a strong current
of cultural homogenization,
where per the impact of globalization,
cultures coalesce and you
end up with a reduction
in distinct cultural diversity, right?
Like where you have the
nomenclature and the names.
Where you could say this is clearly that.
Because of the
popularization and diffusion
of a wide array of cultural symbols,
what we're really
grappling with here is how,
in the context of American
and European cultural norms,
the base standard, even
as a popularization
of cultural symbols
happens across cultural
and country borders,
it feels like whiteness
is still seen as said, base standard.
And everything else is counter culture
until it is absorbed into the base.
"Old Town Road" the
Renegade Tik Tok dance,
long acrylic nails, full lips,
fried chicken and whiskey.
We have so many references
to watching our Black culture
be homogenized into American culture.
And Billie, as is much of Generation Z,
is a product of that
cultural homogenization.
I would be inclined to make the argument
that her aesthetic is still
seen as counter culture.
It has not been absorbed as a base,
or a mainstream aesthetic.
Now, when Black culture
has always been sold
with a white face, I do
understand the question mark
seeing a youth in the fashions
that distinctly bring to
mind SWV, XSCAPE, Aaliya,
Missy Elliot and, yes and Da Brat.
And especially as that
white youth does something
that regardless of the talent and skill,
Black artists have consistently
been blocked from achieving.
Sweeping up all the major
categories at the Grammys
in their oversized Gucci suit. (laughing)
Now much of this video was
inspired by the new book
"White Negroes, When
Cornrows Were in Vogue
"And Other Thoughts on
Cultural Appropriation"
by Lauren Michelle Jackson.
And since I've launched my book club,
I've been listening to a
lot more books on Audible
to get through all my readings, girl!
And this one was particularly glorious,
as Jackson explores the cultural markers
and racial contradictions
lurking in the background
of American culture, right up my alley.
If you are new to Audible, use my link,
audible.com/jouelzy or
text Jouelzy, J-O-U-E-L-Z-Y
to 500 500 to get your
first month of Audible free,
and give this book a listen.
Then come join the Smart
Brown Girl Book Club
where we spur discussion
around a bevy of books.
And all our members who use Audible
get through our readings quickly,
like quicker than everyone else.
They be ahead of everyone, stress-free,
with all the insight.
So use my Audible link
at audible.com/jouelzy
or text Jouelzy, do you know
how to spell my name right?
OK, to 500 500 and get your
first month free on Audible.
Thanks to Audible for partnering with me
and making this video feasible,
and allowing me to do
a bit of a deeper dive
into research and collaborating
with other dope Black women.
(clicking tongue) BT dubs,
"Everything I Wanted"
does go very hard, that's my jam.
Deuces!
♪ Thought I could fly ♪
