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They could have called it, “Indian woman,” “Colombian flute,” “Indian woman and Colombian Flute,” “Woman and Flute (because their ethnicities aren’t technically important for the naming of the song), and really any permutation of those words. This means that the name of the song isn’t strictly accurate. After doing some research, I learned that the song’s sample is from a Colombian song, specifically this one: Guy 1: Are you sure? Isn’t it just because everyone in India spends all their time trying to get snakes to come out of baskets?įunny enough, the main melody of the song isn’t even from an Indian song. It probably has something to do with the country’s over-population, incremental job growth, underdeveloped education system, general lack of effective governance, and you know, colonialism. Guy 2: That’s a really difficult question to answer. Guy 1: How come there is so much poverty in India? I imagine it led to a lot of confusing conversations like this one: Interestingly enough, the snake charming stereotype has become less prevalent over time, but there was a time when, based on media depiction, your average person would have thought Snake Charming made up 70% of India’s GDP. Like, if my Indian Father were to have approached a racist caricature artist in the 1980s and said “give me the usual,” I’m almost certain the guy would have depicted him as a snake charmer. It’s not that snake charming represents an inherently harmful stereotype to Indian people, it just feels like an incredibly dated caricature. In any case, right from the beginning, the video is super racist. It seems like a strange choice for the video, as if Timbaland and Magoo were trying to trick the audience into thinking that they hit the studio with a real-life, snake-charming session player to gain additional legitimacy, but overestimated just how much currency this would be worth. The video opens up on a Snake Charmer, whose hypnotic melody is evidently supposed to be providing the backdrop to the song, while simultaneously coercing a young woman to emerge from a ceramic pot. Even Timbaland, who evidently wrote, produced, and performed this song, has probably purged it from his memory.
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Having peaked at number 73 on the US R&B charts, I imagine that the only people who remember this song are myself and Magoo. To begin, I should explain that the reason you don’t remember this song is because it wasn’t a hit. Lacking the time, determination, and resources to try and back my hypothesis by gathering quantitative data, I’ll do the next best thing and prove how apathetic society was to the issue of cultural appropriation just one decade ago by examining Timbaland and Magoo’s unlikely 2003 single, “Indian Flute” I’m not saying that the idea wasn’t out there and discussed widely by a minority of more-aware people, but it definitely wasn’t something I would have spoken about drunk at a party with a group of complete strangers (something I did this past weekend). More than just my age though, I’d venture that this blissful lack of awareness was allowed to persist because the issue of cultural appropriation had yet to really enter the broader cultural discourse. government uses racist sentencing laws to bolster profits of a private prison system AND WHITE PEOPLE STOLE JAZZ?” I can’t remember exactly how it happened in my case, but I imagine the revelation sounded a bit like this: “So, let me get this straight, the U.S. One fine day, we all grow up and learn that there are straight up levels to this marginalization shit. It’s a natural progression in the life of every young liberal, it seems. I’d barely even begun to process the viscerally affecting, overt details. I think back to where I was six years ago and I just know there was no way I was tuned in enough to pick up on the subtle details of racial oppression. 24 years old now, this may just be a function of my age. Not a time before cultures were appropriated, but certainly a time before cultural appropriation, the concept, became embedded into society’s general consciousness. It seems strange to say in a cultural climate where traffic to Iggy Azalea think pieces makes up 12% of the Internet’s bandwidth (not confirmed), but I feel like I can remember a time before cultural appropriation.