I'm going to separate the discussion of "The Beautiful Struggle" and the discussion of "Bricks" because the cases are quite different.
"The Beautiful Struggle" - . But I'm mostly inclined to think that vidding is an art form that's about appropriation of some kind and so the transfer of context in and of itself isn't a problem (YMMV, naturally):
And as you rightly suspected, I call bullshit. There's a big difference from white people appropriating black history and individuals appropriating corporate productions. Stealing from the dispossessed isn't revolution. Cultural appropriation is just business as usual. How is it a revolution if the result you produce looks exactly like the cause of the revolt? Both here and in your own subsequent post, you treat "political" and "revolutionary" as synonyms and elide the specific racial component of my critique, which misrepresents my point: the problem isn't the use of a musical style traditionally associated with blackness being used for white characters, it's the use of a particular and consciously historically situated song in such a way that its history is erased even as it's used: its black politics are made to stand for politics, but not for black people. Race is present, and people of color are absent. It's using the song in a way that is antithetical to the very message the song is expressing, and it's that which makes watching this vid more and more painful to me as it goes on, as the cognitive dissonance between what the vidder is trying to do, what the vidder is actually doing, what the visuals are saying, and what the lyrics are saying, grows greater and greater.
The Beautiful Struggle
"The Beautiful Struggle" - . But I'm mostly inclined to think that vidding is an art form that's about appropriation of some kind and so the transfer of context in and of itself isn't a problem (YMMV, naturally):
And as you rightly suspected, I call bullshit. There's a big difference from white people appropriating black history and individuals appropriating corporate productions. Stealing from the dispossessed isn't revolution. Cultural appropriation is just business as usual. How is it a revolution if the result you produce looks exactly like the cause of the revolt? Both here and in your own subsequent post, you treat "political" and "revolutionary" as synonyms and elide the specific racial component of my critique, which misrepresents my point: the problem isn't the use of a musical style traditionally associated with blackness being used for white characters, it's the use of a particular and consciously historically situated song in such a way that its history is erased even as it's used: its black politics are made to stand for politics, but not for black people. Race is present, and people of color are absent. It's using the song in a way that is antithetical to the very message the song is expressing, and it's that which makes watching this vid more and more painful to me as it goes on, as the cognitive dissonance between what the vidder is trying to do, what the vidder is actually doing, what the visuals are saying, and what the lyrics are saying, grows greater and greater.