Shakira... did it again?

If you haven't seen Shakira's "Did it Again" music video, definitely check it out - it's certainly entertaining to watch.

We've already talked a bit about diaspora and pastiche - how music, music videos, films, art, etc. can take elements of a displaced culture for reappropriated use. Shakira, I think, is a really great example of this... sometimes her videos make sense, sometimes the elements she incorporates into her music, particularly from her own cultural origins, make perfect sense and even better 3-minute entertainment.

Sometimes... I'm terribly confused by what's going on. In the "Did it Again" video, for example, the drummers in the beginning are performing a type of Korean drumming called "Sam Go Mu" a traditional dance and drum performance art. While it's great that viewers are seeing something they might not have seen before, it's taken quite out of context.

My personal experience with traditional Korean "folk art" forms gives me a bit more context than the average viewer and I can say for certain that the general message of Shakira's video and song hardly coincide with the tradition of Sam Go Mu performers. In Korea, and even to a certain extent in the US, the masters of traditional drum and dance are literally considered "living treasures" - maybe, to make a simple comparison, to the extent that opera is high culture.

On the other hand, Shakira's whole image and concept with this video seems to go in very different direction, for example the "fight" between Shakira and the male dancer (bboy Cloud) speaks to a highly sexualized image and message. You might also be interested to know that Shakira stated in an interview with MTV that she had paintings of Turkish baths by artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema in mind as the inspiration for the sauna scenes in the video.

If you check out any of the comments for this video, and videos of other performances of this song on YouTube, many remark that the "Chinese drummers are really cool." The presence of the drummers are almost negligible, but when they are acknowledged it's often in the same way - they're the "Asian drummers" homogenized and in the background rather than the central focus. There's very little acknowledgement of who they are and what exactly they're doing.

It actually reminds me a lot of Gwen Stefani's Harajuku Girls, "Love," "Angel," "Music," and "Baby." These four Japanese girls usually appear in the background, anonymous and silent, of Stefani's videos and performances - almost, as this blog argues, like human pets. It's a trend of "stuff white people do" in terms of cultural appropriation. These drummers are there "for the sole purpose of spicing up her [Shakira's] own self-presentation," for the spectacle "rather than for actual recognition and celebration" of a culture. And, yes, Shakira isn't actually "white" - she's Colombian, Spanish, Lebanese, and Italian. But let's be real: without her accent, she could pass for it - her hair is blond, she's light skinned, and next to the drummers, she's quite easily the unmarked body.