GangstaGrass
I love mash-ups.
Combining disparate elements from seemingly unrelated genres can produce remarkable results. Sometimes mash-ups are successful (fusion cuisines), sometimes not so much (1970s mens fashion).
But even when the results don’t quite coalesce, there’s still value in the attempt – we never know when serendipity lies just around the corner.
Mash-ups can occur in any field of human endeavor, though Wikipedia defines mash-ups most commonly in the arena of music.
Which brings us to Gangstagrass.
As you might imagine from the name, GG is a blend of classic bluegrass with modern rap. Gangstagrass is based in NYC, and features a rotating group of artists unified by a common producer. GG's mash-up is certainly not intuitive: contemporary politics would imply (perhaps even insist) that there should be little common ground between rural white and urban black art forms.
Yet it works.
Gangstagrass is most famous for Long Hard Times To Come, the theme song for the superb show Justified:
And then there’s You Can Never Go Home Again, a wrenching, beautiful blend of Kentuckian strings with haunting spoken lyrics.
Home is deceptively layered, with its calming evocation of hearth contrasted with those whose hearths were stolen:
And then there's All For One, a jouyous expression of true diversity:
Gangstagrass is an excellent example of a creative mash-up; its idiosyncratic vision allowing us to see over the horizon to new artistic vistas.
One of the many distressing consequences of today’s identity politics is its insistence that we must all remain carefully sequestered in our respective cultural milieus. We are not supposed to create, adapt or (some say) even partake of any art from another identity group. This sin is called appropriation, and it is so grave that here in Portland, white women received death threats for serving Mexican food from local carts.
Yet civilizations have been appropriating from each other for going on ten millennia - architecture, art, cuisine, literature, music, science, faiths, myths and much more. Culture has been endlessly shared, blended, improved, discarded, rediscovered and celebrated around the world. Sometimes these exchanges were a result of violent conquest, other times a result of peaceful trade and migration. Woke activists often regard such practices as stained by colonialism, but theirs is a constrained understanding of history, defining appropriation solely as a function of power.
In truth, appropriation empowers – it connects the best to the best, while creating new art along the way. Crediting a people or a nation with a cultural practice is a respectful tribute to history – firewalling that practice to only those with the correct identity is woke paternalism, limiting the entire human race.
It should come as no surprise that America represents a pinnacle of cultural mash-ups. We are the most diverse nation in history, taking in from around the world and cross-pollinating seeds of new culture in return. For the SJWs who would build barriers based on biology, I invite them to consider Gangstagrass – do we have to have a problem here?