Venus Iceberg X and the Ghe20 Goth1k Crew Call Out DJ Diplo for Musical and Cultural Imperialsm

A couple years ago, Diplo met Maluca (bka Nathalie Yepez) at a karaoke night at 205 Club in New York. They dated for a while, and when they broke up she played him the music she’d been working on and became a part of his Mad Decent family. She released a song with Mad Decent and a mixtape on her own, hung out at the mausoleum in Philly and helped clean it up.

Last week in Sally Singer’s revamped T Magazine, Maluca bemoaned that in spite of her high-profile affiliations (she just toured with Robyn, who commissioned plenty of Diplo production for her Body Talk albums), she’s hard for cash. She told Marcus Chang that, “It can be really expensive for an opening act. I had to pay for my travel, my manager came with me, who helped out with a lot of the expenses, but obviously I have to reimburse that money eventually. I got paid a performance fee, but it didn’t cover the costs for renting equipment, DJ, hair and makeup, my outfits.”

She’s dropping a series of Wepasodes dealing with being “fly on a budget” – recreating ODB’s food stamps run, explaining that she’s an unsigned artist and the costs associated with promotion aren’t always recouped. Juxtaposing images of her walking catwalks at fashion shows with her swiping her EBT card, Maluca tries to paint a picture of the decidedly unglamorous parts of a high profile career:

Maluca: Yo, it’s rough out there. People think because you’re on magazines, because you work with this producer or that producer, you got money – I ain’t got no money! I got four dollars in my pocket, I live with my mom…and I want you to see, what its really like, out here in the real world.

So maybe Venus Iceberg X is right in not trusting that an association with Diplo will lead to massive checks. But she takes the issue one step further – and calls Diplo out on imperialism:

Diplo (in red) starts saying some interesting things – calling himself an ally to Venus, and then inferring he doesn’t fit into racial or cultural categories (#columbusneedsapassport – we need to revisit that at some part):

It’s a fascinating conversation, complicated by a lot of factors. Race is one, but cultural imperialism, positioning, and authority also arise. This situation could be explained by the mercurial whims of the music industry – what propels some artists into the collective consciousness, while allowing other, equally talented artists to stay stuck in the cultural kiddie pool? Part of it is timing, part of it is management of brand and funds – and part of it is our societal structures that ascribes authority to certain groups of people over others. When we talk about cultural appropriation and musical imperialism, we’re ultimately asking who gets to be the arbiter of what is cool. Baile funk was doing its own thing pre-Diplo – but did it only make it to the States because there was a white face to make the sound more acceptable?

DJs are always tapping influences to create new soundscapes – it’s a part of the business. But the structural inequalities that manifest in the music industry, in many ways do have a common root: the violence of revulsion. Minh-ha was discussing blackface, when she explained it “highlights the privileged universal empty point that white bodies continue to occupy even in this so-called postracial moment, and in so doing, it positions racial difference against whiteness, as the other to whiteness” – but that could just as easily be applied to Diplo, despite his simultaneous embrace and rejection of his own whiteness and what that means in terms of cultural positioning. Would Diplo be Diplo if he wasn’t white? Are artists like Maluca and Venus Iceberg X struggling because people aren’t feeling their music without a white lens to make it safer? Racism and cultural imperialism are not the sole controlling factor for success and failure in the industry – but it would be disingenuous to pretend they aren’t a persistent bass line.

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