More Artists Could Stand To Be Normal About Their Black Music Influences

Black culture—and Black people by proxy—has always shouldered the burden of being at the epicenter of what makes shit cool while watching that same creativity get stripped for parts. This phenomenon shows up virtually everywhere: our slang gets sanded down, our influence in popularizing media like anime gets discredited, and our sound gets repackaged when artists are suddenly “inspired” by Black music as a launching pad for their careers, only to inevitably switch lanes to a different, whiter genre. That’s why it matters when artists are straightforward and sincere about their inspirations, like Hikaru Utada. 

In a podcast interview with GoldNRush (which you can watch in full here), Utada—the Kingdom Hearts and Chainsaw Man singer and, frankly, the regent of Japanese pop—talked about their musical inspirations. The biggest takeaway was how deeply Utada credits their mother, Keiko Fuji (real name Junko Utada), for shaping their musical intuitions. Turns out, Fuji wasn’t just a celebrated enka singer in the 60s; she also reared Utada on Black music from an early age. 

As Utada recalled, their late mother was one of the first Japanese artists to dive into R&B and hip-hop. While Fuji was transitioning into her rock music career, Utada recounted their mother playing Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” and Snoop Dogg’s “Doggystyle” as they were “living in the studio” between New York and Tokyo. There, Fuji would have Utada shyly sing songs with her in the booth after they finished homework. Utada would marvel at their mother showing off her hip-hop dance moves (which she had taken classes for) and geek out over the intricacies of Black musicality, telling Utada with absolute conviction, “Black music, this is it!” 

“Honestly, rap and hip-hop, I got into it because of my mom,” Utada said. “She’s the reason I fell in love with it.” 

As a longtime fan of Utada’s work, this revelation came less as a surprise and more as a “well, duh.” First Love, one of their earliest albums from 2002, is as pure R&B as anything in Utada’s early discography. Songs from that era, like “First Love,” “Movin’ on Without You,” and (my favorite) “Automatic” feel less like musical mimicry of popular artists at the time, like Brandy and Aaliyah, and more like a colleague throwing a track on the grill at an R&B cookout. Likewise, Distance’s “Can You Keep a Secret” and Deep River’s “Traveling,” while showcasing the early stages of Utada perfecting their own unique sound, still carry the DNA of neo-soul and R&B instilled by Momma Fuji at a young age. 

Case in point: “Blow My Whistle,” Utada’s slept-on track on the Rush Hour 2 soundtrack—a movie that, for better or worse, stands the test of time as the equinox of the relationship between appropriation and appreciation between Black and Asian culture—doesn’t come off as tacky or culturally vulture-y in hindsight. Much of that has to do with Utada speaking on it in such a nonchalant way, without trying to claim the space for themselves or attempt to elevate/save/keep it alive with misplaced fervor, which is downright refreshing.

Utada isn’t the first non-Black artist to earn the coveted (and elusive) cultural-appreciator gold star. Many musicians have put so much soul into their records that Black listeners were shocked to learn they weren’t Black after Googling them. You’ll be hard-pressed to find Black elders who didn’t double-take upon learning that artists like Adele and Bobby Caldwell weren’t Black. Whether through their soulful vocals or the instrumentation of their tracks, there’s a depth, a poetry, a lived-in musicality that reads as genuine long before you know anything about the person behind the mic. 

And then there are artists who didn’t just borrow from Black music but worked within it as collaborators, not tourists. Folks like a post-NSYNC Justin Timberlake became fixtures in the 2000s and early 2010s, when every rap song had to have an R&B singer on the hook. Obviously, it didn’t hurt that he was one of the many artists directly inspired by Michael Jackson, with a similar vocal register (and fewer zeroes to invoice as a feature). The same goes for Robin Thicke (pre-“Blurred Lines”), whose presence in Black musical spaces felt more like a “We see you” from the Black community than side-eye whenever certified classics like “Lost Without You” would spin on the radio. 

Even artists like Hannah Williams & The Affirmations, whose “Late Nights and Heartbreak” became the emotional core of Jay-Z’s “I’m an idiot for cheating on Beyonce” anthem on 4:44, share a similar Adele/Caldwell phenomenon. And the ties that bind all the aforementioned artists together are that there’s a poetry and a sincerity in their sound that doesn’t feel like it’s playing in anyone’s face. That’s the real distinction that separates Black folks from treating an artist like that one GantZ meme. 

Whenever I have the misfortune of listening to the latest artist to appropriate Black culture, I think of comedian Paul Mooney, who famously once said, “Everybody wanna be a nigga til its time to be a nigga.” Granted, there’s no universal line between appropriation and appreciation, but I’m not stupid. I can always tell when someone is treating Black musicality as a costume. It’s why I side-eye certain K-Pop acts (the greatest offender) who pivot to hip-hop/rap aesthetics without any connection to them and end up getting clowned on for it.

I hear it in the way BTS’ “Hooligan” lifts the sonic palettes (and ad-libs) of Tyler, The Creator and Kendrick Lamar without carrying the thematic weight or cultural grounding their artistry was built on. Mind you, they don’t need to say they copied the LA rappers' flow. It’s obvious to anyone who has listened to the track that they were influenced by them. It’s insulting and par for the course that the boy band didn’t do the bare minimum of giving them a shout-out as a sonic influence on their sound.  

It’s also why I can’t feign surprise when groups play Icarus in flying too close to the sun with their appropriation in ways that not even their biggest stans can defend. Controversies like Kiss of Life’s racist livestream and the Blackpink girlies singing "nigga" to Drake and Kendrick rap verses live rent-free in my head—not in a pearl-clutching way, but in the same “Oh lord…” cringe ballpark as former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s affinity for Blackface at a costume party. It’s embarrassing. 

But the most common example of this phenomenon is white artists who dip into Black musicality like an “in case of emergency, break glass” instinct. You’ve got your Jelly Rolls, your Post Malones who secure their bag before going back to country music, having gotten their stimulus from cribbing on Black soundscapes. It happens all the time, but artists like Jack Harlow, who loudly announced he “got Blacker” for his R&B album, Monica, is the least normal way to go about appropriating Black music.

It wasn’t enough that Harlow’s album—whose name may or may not be Harlow cheekily riffing on “My Nigga”—had the audacity of having me see the Kentucky artist wear a hat so absurd that Grammy-award winning artist Dionne Warwick had to air him out on Twitter. Musically, Monica sounds like the backrooms, trying to remember the rhythm and blues of D’Angelo and Erykah Badu. The result is a mangled facsimile too surface-level to even be called derivative that failed to make my toes tap and only made the little snail in my ear beg me to take my headphones off. 

As NME reviewer Fred Garratt-Stanley wrote, Monica is “perhaps too much of an easy listen” to “leave a lasting impact”—a sentiment I’d argue applies not just to Harlow but is an endemic symptom of Black music culture vultures en masse. 

Which is why artists who do get it stand out so clearly, not just as individuals but as artists who feel they belong in our musical lineage as collaborators rather than colonizers. Their relationship to the poetry of our songs doesn’t feel like co-play or opportunism, but respect, study, and genuine influence. 

As YouTuber FD Signifier correctly noted, there are no invitations to the cookout—even if you’re an artist that Black people don’t play about their love for, like Utada and Ms. Hayley Williams. But that won’t stop me from giving them “the nod” whenever I hear them do their thing, honoring Black musicality rather than lampooning it for their own short-term financial gain.

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