Just where is Margaritaville?

Last Christmas, the Not-So-Little-Drummer Boy was home from college for Christmas.  We were talking about his classes, especially a class in Afro-Caribbean music.    "I can never listen to Jimmy Buffett again," he declared.  "He just appropriated everything from Caribbean cultures."  I agreed at the time, but now, I'm pretty sure he's wrong.

I love Jimmy Buffett.  I am the first to admit he is not the best songwriter or singer in the world.  Some of his lyrics grate painfully.  His voice, although animated and amusing, is average.

But he resonates, in large part because I understand the world which he is coming from.

Yes, there are some songs that clearly and unabashedly rip off Caribbean rhythms and nuances: "Volcano" and "Great Heart" (from Hot Water), come to mind, as does "One Particular Harbor."   But most of his music doesn't.  First of all, most of it is straight ahead pop-rock.  (Closer to country, really: his duet with Alan Jackson on "It's Five O'clock Somewhere" is really very similar to most of his other music.)  Unless you want to define the addition of steel drums to a rock song as being culturally appropriative, or referring to pot as "ganja" as being disrespectful of Jamaicans, or the references to tropical subject matter objectionable, the argument doesn't hold up.  (By the way, I have heard pot referred to as "ganja" since before I heard Jimmy Buffett.  I have also heard of it referred to as "square grouper," but that's another story.)  Yes, you can pick and choose to find songs he's done which seem more objectionable than others, but to toss out a man's entire oeuvre because of a few songs seems overkill.

Coastal Florida is a melting pot of cultures.  (I have recently thought of it as being a cross between Southern California and Georgia, with Caribbean influences thrown in.)  It has its own rhythms, its own feel.  Jimmy Buffett has captured some of that: the seniors at my high school had lyrics from "Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes" painted near the lockers for a reason. His music does not sound strange or foreign to me; it sounds like home.

Buffett is not Paul Simon going to  South Africa for Graceland.  He is not walking into a culture he has never experienced and lifting music wholesale from a world he has no stake in. Buffett has been part of the South Florida landscape since the seventies. You think Florida has no tropical or Caribbean overtones? You have clearly never been to Key West. Or Miami.  Or even Tampa. And it always looks south for its inspiration.

Actually, I think a more interesting discussion would be the extent to which Buffett has possibly appropriated Cajun culture for songs such as "I Will Play for Gumbo." 

Rock music has always taken from many cultures.  If Jimmy Buffett allegedly appropriating Caribbean music is objectionable, what does that say about the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin channeling black American bluesmen? Or the myriad white performers who have written or performed reggae songs? Why is one acceptable and the other not?

For that matter, why does music differ from food in this regard?  Bobby Flay, born in Brooklyn, is a master of Southwestern cuisine. Nobody bats an eye. Which is, perhaps, the way it should be: the world is a varied place, and incorporating what we find to make new and interesting things does not strike me in and of itself as being bad.*


*That said, I think it is true that there is far too little understanding or awareness of Caribbean music in general (especially if you remove reggae from the mix), but I chalk that up more to typical American myopia than to being Jimmy Buffet's fault.