The man who knew too little disc12/29/2023 The British sociologist Dick Hebdige uses the word in his 1979 study “ Subculture: The Meaning of Style” to describe how fringe groups transform the most mundane objects into emblems of resistance, like punks with safety pins - household items stripped of their practical function when stabbed through the cheek, ornament and weapon at once. Such a slippery verb, “appropriate,” from the Latin ad propriare, “to make one’s own.” It doesn’t carry the forthrightly criminal aura of “steal.” Embedded in it is the notion of adapting something so it is particular to oneself, so that it no longer belongs to or is true to the character of the original source - is no longer other but self. “CULTURAL APPROPRIATION” IS one of the most misunderstood and abused phrases of our tortured age. But can a more amorphous collective, a culture, likewise be harmed? (English lyrics were added in 1961 by the American songwriters George David Weiss, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore.) But what if it had, in fact, been a traditional Zulu song? Should that have made it fair game, even though it came not from the Western traditions that these producers shared but from a culture of which they and much of their audience likely knew very little - from a people who were suppressed and dispossessed under colonialism? Copyright law (within human history, a fairly recent development) tells us that individuals have ownership over what they create and are harmed when others copy from them without permission, attribution or compensation. In the case of “Mbube,” there was proof that Linda wrote the notes. “Who owned it? It was just out there, like a wild horse or a tract of virgin land on an unconquered continent.” “After all, what was a folk song?” Malan writes. And yet in the ’90s, when a few of these producers were squabbling among themselves over rights to the song, one of them tried to make a case that the original tune was not the product of Linda’s individual imagination but a traditional Zulu melody: a cultural artifact, like the Scottish Highlands air behind “Morning Has Broken” (immortalized by the British singer Cat Stevens in a 1972 single) and the Appalachian coal miners’ ballad “The House of the Rising Sun” (a hit for the British band the Animals in 1964), that belonged to no one and thus everyone. The race and class differentials - a poor Black man living under an oppressive regime versus slick white record producers in the booming postwar West - simply underscore the imbalance of power. (His descendants reached an out-of-court settlement with Disney in 2006.)Ī fairly straightforward story of exploitation, no? It’s almost reassuring in its clarity: Someone created something beautiful and someone else took it, passed it off as their own and got rich because of it. Instead, when he died of kidney failure at age 53 in 1962, he was buried a pauper in an unmarked grave. Eventually, Disney took notice Linda’s lilting lullaby is arguably the heart of “The Lion King.” Record executives interviewed by Malan estimated that, as of 2000, Linda could’ve earned $15 million in revenues and royalties. (Whether he understood the terms of the contract is unclear, as he could not read or write.) In the United States, the song was rejiggered for white singers who couldn’t quite manage the beat but saw their perky doo-wop arrangements climb the charts nevertheless. But by the 1950s, after the all-white National Party government had codified segregation into the system of apartheid in 1948, he was working a janitorial job at the record company’s warehouse and had signed over the copyright of the song for 10 shillings, roughly the equivalent of $41.80 today. disc and titled “ Mbube” (“Lion”), the song sold around 100,000 copies and made Linda a local star. As the South African journalist Rian Malan chronicled in a 2000 feature for Rolling Stone, Linda and his group, the Evening Birds, were on the third take of a song that had more sounds than words, with the five backup voices split in harmony but one in rhythm, steady and inexorable, and Linda’s high, clean falsetto soaring above, until he uttered into being the musical phrase that would soon make its way to every corner of the world, albeit with lyrics he never wrote: “In the jungle, the quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight.” IN 1939, SOLOMON Linda, a Zulu musician who grew up herding cattle in drought-prone Msinga in South Africa, improvised a few notes at what was then Johannesburg’s (and sub-Saharan Africa’s and possibly the continent’s) lone recording studio.
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