Appropriation & Re-Appropriation

Appropriation and re-appropriation have played a major role in how people have expressed themselves in American culture. In fact, everyone borrows from others. After reading about these two concepts, I began racking my brain for instances that I thought stood out in recent history.

When I was thinking of appropriation, I thought of one of my mother's favorites, Pat Boone, who was a popular American singer that got his start in the 1950s. Boone became a success because of the covers of R&B songs, originally performed by black artists, which he released for the white community. For instance, his cover of Fats Domino's Ain't That a Shame was a huge hit that received a lot of airtime. The original release of the song by Fats Domino, however, was limited to a select audience, although now it is a classic. Boone took fantastic R&B songs that were not heard by many people and re-released them as covers to the white community, exposing a group of people to music they might otherwise not have heard. During this time in American history, this was not uncommon, the release of covers by white singers of black artist's musical creations. Therefore, it could be said that many white singers were actually stealing the music of the black culture and changing it to appease the white mainstream culture. Although mainstream American society would not have been exposed to the original R&B music at that time, in this circumstance, appropriation may have stymied the musical aspirations of many black artists.

When it came to re-appropriation, I remembered seeing a documentary about the inner-city dance subculture in New York that revolved around "balls" and created the 90's dance style known as voguing. The ball culture was started by the gay "drag" community, which emphasized high style cross-dressing as a means of self-expression. These balls were competitions where people would "walk" for trophies and prestige in hopes of one day becoming a legend. Experienced competitors would often times dance and vogue while walking in various genres of drag. Later, the specific style of voging began to revolve around model-like poses combined with sharp movements. This style was very popular among this subculture, but it became a craze after Madonna released her now famous song called Vogue. In essence, Madonna grabbed onto this style of dance, making it trendy through her song and spreading voguing to popular culture. In this case, re-appropriation allowed the mainstream American culture to experience a fabulous form of new expression through voguing. To individuals in the drag community, voguing was a way they could live out their wildest dreams, to be someone they knew they could never be, and now the world could experience that too.