I’ve seen the video — to my untrained, socio-politically insensitive eye, it’s a beautiful tribute. By now, you must’ve seen it, too. British band Coldplay, in their new giddy, fluorescent direction, shot their latest music video, Hymn for the Weekend, in Mumbai, India, featuring insets of collaborator Beyoncé styled in Bollywood-inspired fashion via old-school TV monitors. Indian actress Sonam Kapoor is also featured briefly, wearing clothes by Indian designer Mayyur Girotra, while Beyoncé wore clothes by Indian designing duo Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla. The India-themed video is being criticized for “cultural appropriation,” a baffling issue that to me is best explained by this one line from Rashmee Kumar’s article in The Guardian: “Coldplay’s video romanticizes Hinduism to further exoticize India as a westerners’ paradise unsullied by harsh realities.” Okay, when it’s said this way, it’s hard not to agree.
The semantically neutral term “cultural appropriation” actually points to the misrepresentation of a culture, in this case, packaging it to suit a purpose and sweeping the rest of it — presumably the grittier, unattractive, unpleasant aspects — under the rug. On one hand, I can try to understand the wrong in it. Whether by ignorance or commonsense, the video left out the pollution, illness and poverty that plagues Mumbai. On the other hand, it’s not that kind of video. This is not Michael Jackson singing They Don’t Care About Us in Brazil. It’s not a statement against corruption and abuse. It’s called Hymn for the Weekend — by the title alone, you’d know that there’s not much to read into.
If you’ve been following Coldplay’s spiral (upward or downward, depends on the listener) into the glass-half-full band that it is now, it should be clear that Coldplay is in a state of boho rhapsody. The band’s latest album “A Head Full of Dreams” is a trippy soundtrack for this journey. The actual vinyl discs for the double album are transparent pink and blue, and on the sleeve is a dreamy, kaleidoscopic sort of landscape. I get altitude sickness just by looking at it. It’s that upbeat. With its current disposition, Coldplay seems too far into its own world to have intentionally caused an entire culture to feel offended.
Some might argue that this is exactly the problem: the ignorance and sense of entitlement in more privileged societies. The thing is, the production actually made an effort to include Indian professionals in the video. Why did Beyoncé get more screentime than Sonam Kapoor? Maybe because she is singing in parts of the song? They could’ve gotten any designer to dress Beyoncé, too. And if they had presented the band immersed in a more accurate depiction of India, would that have stopped us from crying “cultural appropriation”?
Part of me thinks I feel this way because I don’t know what it feels like to have my culture wrongly appropriated. I would love to see Chris Martin film a video in Manila, maybe get stuck in traffic along EDSA, and sing about “adventures of a lifetime.” That’s not gonna happen though. Our culture is difficult to stylize, our flaws are hard to conceal. Still, a glass-half-full interpretation of it is possible, as with any culture. It would be eye-opening to see my country, a country I complain about every day, through alien eyes. Maybe they see something we don’t. Maybe there’s a lot more to love than meets the eye.
I don’t think anyone really knows what exactly is wrong with cultural appropriation. Is it about money, the rich getting richer, the poor staying poor? Is it about ownership, people in “power” taking what they want? Is it about purity and the bastardization of sacred things? These problems existed long before any of us did, but these catchphrases have complicated things. They tell our brains we are offended when our hearts are not, to partake in pointless debates with accounts that don’t even have profile photos, to intellectualize when we should feel, to become outraged so easily that outrage loses its gravity. Fighting for fighting’s sake. We need to take a chill pill from Chris Martin’s chill pillbox. Clearly, it’s working for him.