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What you guys think. It was posted in another board(where all hell broke loose because of this).
Dr.Bell Hooks on Madonna: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3CBUm7GrNI&feature=player_embedded
And this is what some poster said in response to the video(and the strong reaction in that thread):
"Once I read an interview with Madonna where she talked about her envy of black culture, where she stated that she wanted to be black as a child. It is a sign of white privilege to be able to "see" blackness and black culture from a standpoint where only the rich culture of opposition black people have created in resistance marks and defines us. Such a perspective enables one to ignore white supremacist domination and the hurt it inflicts via oppression, exploitation, and everyday wounds and pains. White folks who do not see black pain never really understand the complexity of black pleasure. And it is no wonder then that when they attempt to imitate the joy in living which they see as the "essence" of soul and blackness, their cultural productions may have an air of sham and falseness that may titillate and even move white audiences yet leave many black folks cold..."
Another reply from the same person:
"This, along with people's emotional attachment to Madonna, will probably limit how many people give hooks's article a fair shake.
Madonna is an appropriator. Always has been. She has made her living off of appropriating "underground" styles, whether it be Latin club music (freestyle aka the Jellybean Benitez days), house, black gay culture (voguing), gay culture in general, black culture in general, and recently east Indian religion and rave/electronica, and packaging it for sale to a larger audience. She spots a trend and then works it to no end.
To my knowledge, she is not indigenous to any of these aesthetics, but has skillfully learned them and incorporated them into her persona. While helping to popularize heretofore subaltern (underground) styles, such appropriations are nonetheless frought with lost meanings, half-meanings, misinterpretations, misuse, and other risks of expropriating elements of an aesthetic from its original context.
Because of their unfamiliarity with these original contexts, many in the mainstream audience will not recognize these risks. They will just simply marvel at Madonna's multicultural and multicontextual appearance and sound. However for those whose cultural practices are firmly rooted in these original contexts, they will recognize the lapses and the gaps created by the expropriation. My sense is that hooks is one of these who criticizes a partial appropriation of an element of black culture while ignoring or omitting other parts that she deems just as crucial.
Madonna would not be the first to engage in the practice of "slumming"--beat poets and writers like Jack Kerouac epitomized this practice in "Nigger Heaven," jazz age whites who flocked into Harlem to get "spade kicks" and then go back home for their "regular" lives, etc. all did this. It is using the oppositional element of the black cultural aesthetic to express adolescent rebellion (as many are doing today with hip hop) or black pleasure to further a hyper sexualized project.
A recent example of a questionable appropriation by Madonna was her foray into east Indian Hindu philosophy/religion in her "Ray of Light" CD, where she had a song which featured a ritual Hindu chant. While some thought this to be an affirmation of Hinduism in popular culture, others felt that the track along with her performance of it OUTSIDE of its original ritual context amounted to nothing short of sacrilege; and that if something is to be AFFIRMED that it be done on its own terms with deference to its intended purpose, which they felt that Madonna was not doing."
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