The Pop Corporation

Ah, the thorny topic of cultural appropriation eh? Where oldheads go ‘WHY CAN’T I JUST LIKE A LOAD OF STUFF IN WHATEVER WAY I WANT?!‘ and youngheads yell ‘YOU’RE USING OTHER RACES AS FANCY DRESS AND WE’VE HISTORICALLY BEEN MEAN TO THOSE PEOPLE SO IT IS GIVING US THE ICK!!‘ Of course, the majority of people have the view of no view at all, because they’re sick of everyone yelling at each other and wonder if there’s maybe a middle ground or something and can’t we all play nice?

In true Music Hack Take, we offer zero opinions and if we do, they’re thinly veiled while we talk about Gwen Stefani, who you will make your own mind up about.

See, for years, Gwen has been accused of cultural appropriation, especially when it concerns Japanese culture. She’s also flirted with Jamaica, native American culture, and worn a bindhi or two, so y’know, this is not a new conversation. So you can imagine, with Stefani being so well versed in these matters, she’ll have a really solid answer that’ll let everyone focus on the music. Right?

In a new interview, she said that visiting Japan for the first time provoked this thought: “My God, I’m Japanese and I didn’t know it.”

The Italian American (which is basically ‘American’ FYI) was asked by the folks at Allure mag about what she’d learned after the backlash from the release of her Harajuku Lovers line. She spoke about her dad working for Yamaha.

“That was my Japanese influence and that was a culture that was so rich with tradition, yet so futuristic with so much attention to art and detail and discipline and it was fascinating to me,” she said. “I said, ‘My God, I’m Japanese and I didn’t know it’. I am, you know.” She added that she thought of herself as “a little bit of an Orange County girl, a little bit of a Japanese girl, a little bit of an English girl”.

This is going well. She continued: “If people are going to criticise me for being a fan of something beautiful and sharing that, then I just think that doesn’t feel right. I think it was a beautiful time of creativity – a time of the ping-pong match between Harajuku culture and American culture. It should be okay to be inspired by other cultures because if we’re not allowed then that’s dividing people, right?”

Remember when Margaret Cho likened her ‘Harajuku Girl’ backing dancers to a minstrel show? Stefani, addressing that said: “If we didn’t buy and sell and trade our cultures in, we wouldn’t have so much beauty, you know?”

“We learn from each other, we share from each other, we grow from each other. And all these rules are just dividing us more and more… I think that we grew up in a time where we didn’t have so many rules. We didn’t have to follow a narrative that was being edited for us through social media, we just had so much more freedom.”

So there you have it. The vague whisper of cancel culture. Magic.