Two birds of the same feather, except one wants sparrow cred without sparrow wings
When I was a kid, I came across a magazine with a cover photo of Pharrell Williams in a Native American headdress on a grocery store rack. I knew there was something off about it, but a term that could encapsulate everything wrong with both the cover and how I felt about it escaped me until some years later, when a YouTube video appeared in my feed titled “Culture’s Biggest Fraud.” It was then I first heard the term ‘culture vulture,’ the harsh, biting succinctness of which would linger in my brain.
The video was talking about Drake. He makes radio hits that do what they say on the tin, and songs like “Best I Ever Had” and “Fancy” cemented his soapy lyrics and dance-friendly melodies. So when I saw music videos where he wore six-inch Timbs and oversized chains that would make Fat Joe or Blueprint-era Jay-Z bat an eye, while surrounding himself with other Black men in the projects and using their kids as trophies to boost his street cred; or when I heard a song about being “Too hard for the fuckin’ radio”—slighting DJ Mustard and his collaborators while suing Universal Music Group for paying radio stations to boost Kendrick Lamar during their beef—I had to wonder: why does he bother? Machine Gun Kelly got embarrassed by Eminem and pivoted from rap to rock, targeted Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor for calling it out, and got dragged at the Louder Than Life music festival to the point of physical altercation—ultimately failing to cultivate his new persona after striking out at being a hardened gangster in hip-hop. That’s all it is at the end of the day, right? Not immersion or interaction with a community as much as a one-sided transaction between people who want accreditation without understanding why communities form around a genre, art form, or movement. The people directly embedded in a community wear the fashion, blast the music, and make connections because they want to find others like them, while vultures aestheticize themselves in their image because they aren’t getting congratulated for being themselves.
The conversation around culture commodification has been loud and busy since Hot Topic took DVDs off the shelves and leaned into commercializing the counterculture of the 80s and 90s. The proliferation of black leggings, chokers, and skull tank tops at a major retailer is antithetical to the ethos of goth fashion, which is known for its scrappy, do-it-yourself spontaneity and self-expression—particularly in the Toronto scene, where participants regarded each other as “freaks” because they (and their British brethren who originated goth and punk movements in the 70s) existed in the periphery of the city’s wider fashion and music scene. This commodified ‘mall goth’ aesthetic is pre-packaged and shipped to a demographic who want to extract the goth visual without immersing themselves in the music, the clubs, or the art. Such an audience is given ‘access’ to the culture through mass-production and superficially-designed ‘fast fashion’ over the concentrated and intentional look of clothes cobbled together from the thrift and the theatrical. Some popular culture depictions of goth fashion or music, including The Crow, The Vampire Chronicles, and Tim Burton films, can at least take credit for exposing broader swaths of people to an underground subculture or community, but ‘mall goth’ lacks this motivation. The purpose of ‘mall goth’ is purely rooted in the cultivation of cold, corporate cash.
However, these things can get complicated. Last year, author Thomas King revealed that despite his illustrious career in Indigenous-focused literature, his estranged father was not actually part-Cherokee, nullifying his claims to Cherokee heritage. Canada has a history of ‘pretendians’ who claim Indigeneity for the cultural cache and monetary benefits, such as Carrie Bourassa, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Karima Manji. Cree journalist Michelle Cyca made excellent points about this case: King could have researched his ancestry and the fact that he only intended to return his 2003 National Aboriginal Achievement award, one among the numerous grants and accolades he received by tying himself to this identity, spoke to his character. Does that undo his entire body of work? Texts such as Coyote Columbus and The Truth About Stories were acclaimed for their ability to deconstruct the white imagination of Indigenous communities by white settlers while promoting the power of cultural reclamation. For some, art holds merit separate from the artist, but the King reveal was enough to cancel a stage adaptation of Indians on Vacation, and for Nisga’a author and English professor Jordan Abel to remove the author’s texts from his syllabi at the University of Alberta. It recontextualizes his interpretations for a touchstone of Canadian identity regardless of their effectiveness. I don’t think King’s intent was exploitation. He wrote these texts convinced of his own heritage and was praised for his subversions of Indigenous stereotypes. However, in a digital age where sites such as Ancestry and MyHeritage provide instant answers to those who desire, King is irresponsible for not fact-checking himself before launching an entire career off such a bold proclamation. He can’t pivot to LitRPGs from here and pass this off as an ‘oopsie.’
What it means to prey on or exploit the imagery, narratives, or movements pertaining to a community can have a range of different interpretations and responses. For every Vanilla Ice—who is pre-packaged, sanitized, and sold to the world as ‘hip-hop’ and who is attractive compared to those ugly Beastie Boys—there can be cases where the intent to raise awareness around certain cultural and social groups is sincere. But being predicated on misinformation can cause the wrong kind of ripples in the water. Just don’t be a culture vulture. Be a culture hummingbird or a culture grebe. Grebes are funny.