One of the unusual things about Imanuel is that he seemed to materialize out of nowhere, mostly isolated from the assumptions and contexts that accompany rap in the West, and rose fast enough to nearly skate by questions of appropriation or identity.
Questions of appropriation are always legally thorny; there's no clear point at which audio background noise becomes part of the public domain.
More importantly, with Anthony Rodriguez III doing a brilliant job as The Engineer, there was no question of cultural appropriation in the casting of this key role.
The question of cultural appropriation is a touchy one for Gud, made even touchier by his mixed-race heritage—"My problem is I can't decide" on a racial identity, he tells me.
But as Mr. Madof recognized, questions of cultural appropriation are almost bound to arise, much as they did in the mid-2000s when the Hasidic singer Matisyahu took up reggae.
Their latest – which looks east, recounting a shamisen-strumming boy's quest to unpick a tangled family history – fends off questions of cultural appropriation via the refinement and sensitivity of its penhand.
As a d.j., Diplo helped popularize, in America, several strains of non-Western dance music — Brazilian baile funk and Angolan kuduro, in particular — which later invited urgent questions of cultural appropriation.
But it's also surfaced darker questions of cultural appropriation, as the sound has become rife with saturation.
Artists, intellectuals, editorialists and the general public have traded barbs on both the merits of the project as well as on wider questions of cultural appropriation, artistic freedom, and censorship.
The mixtape included three baile funk tracks simply labeled as "Baile Funk One," "Baile Funk Two" and "Baile Funk Three," by Brazilian artists who Diplo neglected to credit in the track list (this later caused some controversy over questions of mis-appropriation).
