Singing Someone Else's Song

It all started with this piece in  The Guardian -- "We Need To Talk About Cultural Appropriation: Why Lionel Shriver's Speech Touched A Nerve".

Unaccountably and instantly, some 15 years after I'd last heard it, this piece came to mind.

In the days I spent tracking down a decent version of it on YouTube, I found a tweet linking to another immensely-gratifying read -- one from the Smithsonian entitled Keeping the Blues Alive. This, too, addresses cultural appropriation, an idea that I first encountered on Tumblr because, you know, I'm a baby boomer.

Between the Smithsonian and The Guardian, I learned something: If social media is the first place you read about a social justice issue, get thee to a library -- or start following accounts whose printed output can be found in libraries. College sophomores and their hive-minded professors are not your best sources, and only real reading of real writing will adequately school you.

Armed with a far more nuanced understanding of cultural appropriation than I'd had previously, I dove into the first two parts of Mike Oldfield's symphonic rock masterpiece, Incantations.

I waited 24 minutes and 39 seconds to get to the part I remembered -- "The Song of Hiawatha". It's based on just a smidgen of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha, and, while it doesn't seem particularly offensive or patronizing, it certainly doesn't encourage Indians to speak for themselves.

Ultimately, that's the problem with cultural appropriation: It hands the microphone to those demographic groups with loud voices and disposable income -- moneyed whites, in other words. Inevitably, these folks get bored just as they get to the place in the story where the cool, brown people's problems get thorny and "impossible" to solve.

Today's purveyors of media and popular art know this. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow did not. Nor did Mike Oldfield and the splendid players and singers he assembled to perform this piece.

You may feel differently, but given what the creators knew and when they knew it, I can listen to Incantations and enjoy it. In the back of my mind, though, I'll always wonder what I'm missing.

Here's Mike Oldfield with Parts 1 and 2 of Incantations. Steeleye Span's Maddy Prior sings "The Song of Hiawatha at 24:39.