Lastly: What the fuck is up with the Appropriative Portland Google Docs “shit list” drawn up mere hours after this whole Kooks burrito dust-up? This list is even more egregious than the Willamette Week story. Spend your money where you want to, but don’t use your performative wokeness to be the White Savior you think you’re being. This list is irresponsible and let’s just say it: It’s. Not. Your. Place. To. Say. You may think you’re coming from a place of allyship, but you’re making that look performative, too. Sit down and let the people you think you’re trying to help speak for themselves.
And for my final act, I’ll pull out everyone’s favorite troublesome argument trope: the false equivalency. By your logic, Portland Google Docs shit lister, white folks like yourself should feel scandalized when listening to music that was, indeed, culturally appropriated from African American musicians. Outright stolen, in some cases. So to put a stinger on the end of this rant, no Beatles for you. No Bowie, either. Talking Heads? T. Rex? The Ramones? Nope, nope and nope. No, what you deserve is nothing but white sad bastard music for the rest of your days. Enjoy your Ray Lamontagne, your Damian Rice and your Bon Iver. Have fun clapping yourself to sleep every night on the 1 and the 3, you joyless miserable white.
Black music? Sorry, but without European harmonic structure, Skeltonic verse, and chord progression imported from Europe, you wouldn’t have anything remotely sounding like the Beatles, Ramones, or much of anything else most people listen to. I’m glad Black people used these things and European musical instruments to create twelve bar blues because I like Blues music. I also like Classical and a lot of African and European traditional music and if people listened to more of it, they probably wouldn’t assign race to music but simply enjoy it. Thankfully, Duke Ellington and Little Richard didn’t frown on the piano as a “White” instrument because I’ll get to enjoy their output for the rest of my life.