Appropriation v Participation

Some days life serves you up a huge steaming turd. Yes, we have a problem and that problem is bog standard human psychology because when we investigate a huge steaming turd we discover a defiance of the laws of nature - what produced that huge steaming turd was a smaller less offensive turd.

I am talking, of course about the attention given to Rachael "Raygun" Gunn's Olympic breaking performance. A performance for which, without any aid of public discourse I feel almost anyone could watch 10~30 seconds of and broadly understand exactly what happened, what needs to happen and really be done with it. Were we sober. But we are not. This is the shit we get high off, and that is our insurmountable problem.

By the end of the Paris Olympics, I was all like "yay Olympics" they are a great thing though perhaps not worth the price of admission. Dubious sports and all. I was likely my most interested since Sydney 2000 where the games were staged perfectly in my time zone and coincided with school holidays where I could just lay on a couch and watch it all day.

Anyway, Paris introduced "breaking" as a sport. I'm not a fan, or at least sit uneasily with subjective competitions. Like gymnastic floor routines with the ball, hoop or ribbon where a panel of judges have to observe and score on multiple criteria and then eliminate the top and bottom scores and blah blah blah. 

I saw some of the gymnastic floor routines, and even an ignoramus like me can understand that despite the artistic expression, costumes, pageantry there's clearly an athletic competition in the mix. Remove the ribbons, balls and hoops and it becomes more obvious in the case of an athlete like Simone Biles. Furthermore, there's only so much innovation one can reasonably expect out of three props that have been featured at Olympics since Stalin and Hitler were around.

By comparison, let's consider Roller Derby as an Olympic sport. A popular competition exists that has a lot of tacked on culture that I'm tempted in all cases to refer to as bullshit. Like someone can't compete as Sarah Johnson but needs to compete as "Mean Machine" that kind of bullshit. Outside the Olympics I think the culture around roller derby helps to keep the sport a women's space, it has a definite sexualized punk vibe even though from what I've observed the sexualization of Roller Derby does not serve to promote beauty ideals. Barge sized women will be in hot pants and fishnets.

I would expect that to qualify as an Olympic sport Roller Derby may need to permit a men's competition, for which I would expect the hyperfeminisation of the sport to be removed. People would compete in much the same uniforms that they compete in tennis, basketball, cycling or ice skating in. 

Breaking was clearly brought in as a spectacle, preserving much of the cultural bullshit including performance names. Though theoretically the same as sports like gymnastics, synchronized swimming, ice dancing, figure skating, diving etc. Cultural artefacts were preserved for the competition like having competitors "live react" and diss their competitor on stage. One was invited to buy into the fun and pageantry rather than treat breaking soberly like a sport. This is true of the women's gold medal match and the men's gold medal match with presumably expert commentators dropping insight like "one of the hypest songs you can get in a gold medal match..." 

Now the big steaming turd inserted into the debut sport of "breaking" was Australian women's competitor "Raygun" who scored 0 points and sucked up all the oxygen. Whatever there is to say about this flash in the pan, it is almost certain that too much will be said.

It is likely simply a story of incompetence built on incompetence, built on incompetence in a manner many people find hard to believe. The existential fear "mere incompetence" cannot be overstated, it is somewhat the basis of all conspiracy theories and the adamantanes of the conspiracists because people breaking things deliberately is much more comforting than things just breaking because we collectively are not good enough at what we do.

The first incompetence is importing break dance competitions into the Olympics. Now, there are numerous events that are popular and draw crowds and it's not always obvious what those events will be. Surfing is evergreen in terms of popularity but it is a much harder sport to spectate compared to beach volleyball on account of taking place offshore. I think indoor climbing will remain. Will the Olympics try fucking quidditch, bike polo or hacky sack?  

Culturally surfing is Hawaiian but the modern sport was popularized via california hence we may find Australian surfers saying "gnarly" but not so much "totally tubular" and they certainly don't sport Polynesian tattoos and while waiting for a wave they don't sit there doing an upper body Hula dance. Surfing can become an olympic event without participants from countries with distant cultural ties to Polynesia and California participating in the bullshit cultural artefacts some surfing snob might do a PhD thesis on constituting "true" or "authentic" surfing.

Not so with breaking, and this is about the extent that I concur with a concept like "cultural appropriation" where we get Japanese and Korean's acting, pretty much solely in the context of the breaking contest like they are African Americans from the projects. 

In this sense Surfing is like calisthenics, the group of bodyweight exercises originating from Greece that carries with it little-to-no-cultural artefacts, and breaking is like Pose based Yoga which is also a series of bodyweight exercises possibly originating in calisthenics but saddled with a bunch of cultural artefacts like mantras recited in a language most practitioners do not speak.

The second incompetence was that in both the men's and women's competitions 16 people competed and somehow Australia's female representative made the cut. Not simply making the cut on the Australian team, but got one of 16 places and managed to score 0 points. It should stretch credulity that Australia deserved representation in the women's comp. 

For example, Ukraine and the US had two "b-girls" in the competition, Canada had none even though it produced the gold medallist b-boy. South and Central America was completely unrepresented as was Mexico. Morocco was the only African nation that got representation. An Afghan b-girl was disqualified from the competition on account of incorporating some kind of political message into her act. It seems to me that Japan's second best b-girl deserved that 16 spot that Australia obtained for some reason.

The third incompetence was the Australian Olympic Commission qualifying Raygun. Soberly looking at the judging that gave her 0 points, and assuming the judges at least competently discharged their duties, a good argument to be made is that sending Raygun was worse than sending nobody at all. Her performance stimulated all kinds of reactions, and that's largely what I'm referring to when I say that it's easy to say too much about it. 

So there's a large chunk of the population who don't really understand sports at all, and their opinion for the most part, simply doesn't matter. 

Beyond that, most people need only 10 seconds or less of exposure to the phenomena to basically understand the situation completely. Somebody got into the competition that shouldn't have, for some reason, and the point is moot because that's it for breakdancing at the Olympics for the foreseeable future.

I suspect though, for many her qualification are at odds with the experience of walking down a shopping mall in the summer time and seeing kids on the street do a better job of breakdancing than she managed. 

I suspect for those contemporary in age to me or older, that's why Raygun's story did not take, and is unlikely to resemble that of Eric Moussambani's 100m freestyle qualifying swim in the 2000 Olympics. It was understood that Eric simply didn't have the opportunity to be a competitive swimmer, having never even seen a 50m Olympic size swimming pool prior to competing in the Olympics. Given the context, Eric became someone to cheer for in the spirit of participation. Furthermore the Olympic spirit is much more aligned with having Equatorial Guinea send someone to the Olympics to represent them on a world stage than it is a rich country with a bloated public spend on sports sending someone to the Olympics simply because we can.

Raygun as a selection from the AOC is from my limited understanding a direct result of the scarcity of women breakdancers in Australia, though it is possible that the core incompetence of the selection process was that Australia gave Raygun points for effort and creativity, that would not be awarded by the Olympic judges, meaning they ran the wrong contest to select a qualifier, that or Raygun made the rookie mistake of dinner party hosting where instead of cooking a straightforward recipe you are familiar with, you try to pull off something complicated on the big day.

If the AOC had money to burn on sending an athlete just to fill a roster spot, it seems they missed the trick on replicating the success of Alisa Camplin at the Winter Olympics, an ex-gymnast that Australia simply put on skiis to capitalize on complimentary skills. It feels plausible that the AOC could have gone to any of Australia's major ballet companies and found someone with the physical intelligence to be better than the best enthusiastic b-girl in Australia.

The final incompetence being that of Raygun herself. I feel it is fair to compare her somewhat to Eric Moussambani. Where there was a genuine question as to whether Eric the Eel could complete 100m freestyle, Raygun by her own testimony conceded that she simply couldn't do many of the dance moves on account of her physical conditioning.

In this regard she could be compared to the similarly self-aware Stephen Bradbury who famously won Australia's first ever Winter Olympic Gold Medal in the speed skating. Realizing he could not compete he consciously adopted a strategy that relied on the faster skaters crashing, and though out of his control the strategy paid off.

The problem for Raygun is that high speed collisions are just not a common occurrence in break dancing. Though I'm sure there's video of breakdancers doing the worm and falling off a stage, there's just nothing to suggest one could macarena or Nutbush their way to Olympic Gold by having competitors get too ambitious, especially in 1 v 1 "battles."

At which point I arrive at having more or less, nothing against Raygun. Her incompetence is the least of the problem, much like that monsters like Harvey Weinstein exist doesn't concern me anywhere near the extent that people facilitated his crimes because they could profit off of it and to my knowledge have paid no substantial penalty beyond dissolving the Weinstein company.

I have more issue with the AOC and IOC and frankly joe regular that has latched onto the spectacle.

It appears on balance of probability that Raygun was allowed up on that stage to give the world a demonstration of the at-this-point-overdetermined Dunning-Kruger effect. 

There may be some, who likely not consciously are incredulous that the breaking community in Australia isn't so mean that they would simply boo and jeer a b-girl of Raygun's age out of the youth scene. I'm against that, I think if 40 yo, 60 yos or whoever want to step into the arena, they should be able to. I am pro-participation. 

The issue lies at the point that someone determined that Raygun was the best Australia had to offer and sufficient to represent Australia on a world stage. 

What tipped me over the edge into compulsively having to say too much about Raygun, was seeing someone post an opinion about how Raygun's performance was much worse because it was a privileged woman doing a minstrel routine because cultural appropriation.

Now, I don't really have an opinion on Al Jolson though I have watched a video of him performing "My Mammie" in blackface and I simply would say: I don't get it. I don't even know why Al Jolson was in blackface when you take the clip from "The Jazz Singer" as he is singing "My Mammie" to his Lithuanian (?) mother in the crowd. 

Do I think Raygun's performance was a minstrel routine? No. I think if you are taking that much offense you are taking that much offense of your own free will. 

She is almost certainly privileged by virtue of being Australian and having a PhD. In India has a general participation rate in tertiary education of 28.8% Mexico 21%, Australia it's something like 51%. If you are born Australian to non-abusive parents you are de facto privileged, especially when it comes to the Olympics, Australia sent 9 skateboarders to Paris, only Japan and the US sent more.

The most common first names among NBA players are "Michael" "Chris" "Kevin" "James" etc. and largely white-held stereotypes might assume the typical NBA story is a kid from the inner city hood playing hoops on the street to escape the drug game with their father Denzel Washington in Jail and their single mum cooking them spaghetti-o's in a project tower, but actually many NBA stars grow up middle class and are given bog-standard Hebrew (Biblical) first names go to good schools with good basketball programs and could have been a dentist if they weren't so tall with extremely large hands and thus having promising NBA careers especially given all the resources behind them.

Now was there any malice? No. Just dazzling incompetence. Beguiling incompetence. From what little footage I have seen, it is clear she was trying to be creative in an obvious way, suspending the assumption many in the humanities do - that the status quo is non-arbitrary. Basically I think she came up with "original" moves inspired by Australian Fauna, to compensate for her lack of athleticism. What she couldn't produce was something like the Frosby-Flop that instantly revolutionised the High-Jump event. Because she lacks athleticism.

Let's keep in mind, the Venice Beach scene from "Breakin" 1984 contained more creative choreography than the entire 2024 Olympic breaking competition, including a lot of creative stuff that is much worse than what has evolved to be the repertoire of competitive breakdances - namely power moves.

She came up with a passable routine for a children's show. Somebody with high body intelligence like a ballet dancer, with ample time to field-test new moves, could probably innovate breakdancing by taking inspiration from the motor functions of animals like snakes, kangaroos, even wombats and koalas. Kung Fu has a bunch of zoomorphic fighting styles that are at the least both aesthetically pleasing and athletic, if inferior to more straightforward fighting arts like boxing. brazilian jiu-jitsu, and okinawan karate.

A better case could be made for malicious cultural appropriation by a privileged white woman, had she tried to incorporate indigenous dance steps by studying Aboriginal dance companies. Not necessarily a solid case however. Nor produce a winning strategy, as this would be like an Argentinian b-boy or b-girl trying to incorporate the Tango into a break routine. Like there's an avenue for innovation, but it's breakdancing as distinct from other styles of dance. Had she the athleticism and coordination to pull it off, she could have contended for a medal by using more conventional power moves.

This is the point at which cultural appropriation fails to garner my sympathies, because it just comes across as anti-competitive (in the same sense as Gilbert Arenas suggesting the NBA needs to kick out all the European players, an unveiled parochialism) and generally requires some kind of double standard (like Gilbert Arenas feeling his culture is entitled to appropriate basketball just because with very few exceptions black Americans have lifted the profile of the game, or in the teaching materials for the Candyman reboot, "reclaiming" Candyman for black culture when it is adapted from British Author Clive Barker's short story "The Forbidden" set on an English estate), which just cannot arrive at anti-discrimination. I feel I somewhat understand the power dynamic argument that generally founds left-wing discrimination, it's just what can someone like Rachael Gunn do? She is being asked not to participate in case she wins.

There's nothing this argument has to say about Raygun that also cannot be said of winner Ami Yuasa, Dominika Banavic, Liu Qingyi - the medallist b-girls. Without cultural appropriation breaking just isn't a sport at all. If the distinction is that a "privileged" woman made a mockery of the culture by being bad at it, then we must allow that Eminem and Elvis never be cited as cultural appropriators on account of them being good at what they do. (unless in their cases their unprivileged upbringings makes them appropriators because they are good at what they do?)

The institution won out by giving Raygun 0 points. The culture loses because she is the most talked about 2024 Olympian probably, unless incidentally like some NBA star is being more discussed because he signed a trade deal and happened to be an Olympian.

If I were to rank the 2024 Olympic memes on merit they would be as follows:

1. Photo of Gabriel Medina exiting wave on way to Gold in Surfing.

2. Turkish Yusef Dikec casually winning silver in the shooting.

Nth. Raygun's creative new dance moves.

But in terms of google trends, that ranking is reversed.

Now Rachael Gunn herself has to my understanding basically spun the reaction to her dance entry as what I shall call a "Hannah Gadsby" which is to say, she is leaning into the spectacle as apology for the lack of substance. And I know people regard Nanette as quite substantive, but in time I think it is recognized widely that as a comedy special it sucks on account of pre-subversion-jokes not being very funny, as a marketing package for an extended TED talk it rules.

What else has Raygun achieved though beyond a whole bunch of attention? 

Well, Yusef Dikec resonated because he performed while cutting through a lot of his sport's artifice. There's a positive message about backing yourself and not getting intimidated or sucked into the expensive signalling of richer nations and richer competitors. The meme is a watered down version of Abebe Bikala's story winning the 1960 Rome games' marathon barefoot - these are archetypal underdog stories of the Olympics in terms of rich national sports programs losing to poor national sports programs, and not because Abebe couldn't afford shoes nor that Yusef can't afford glasses and hearing protection, they both prefer(red) not to use them.

The photo of Gabriel Medina captures a moment that almost deifies Gabriel. He is suspended triumphant in mid air, his surfboard almost parallel. It speaks of complete dominion over his environment, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets turned into a statue somewhere. Like Michael Jordan's Airwalk or Vince Carter's dunk of death or Usain Bolt's Beijing 100m win, it is capturing a moment that seemingly expands the frontier of human possibility. Little kids will look at that photo and believe that a human being can fly.

I have to be careful how I word this next bit in particular, because I don't want to falsely attribute intent. When we take this combination of memes with a god-like surfer, an ice cold shooter and an incompetent dancer that eclipses not only the other memes, but pretty much all accomplishment - little girls are blameless for inferring from the memes that in the domain of sports men are gods and cool dudes and women are jokes.

I'm not saying it is the case, I am alluding to the packaging of ideas. The best we can say is that it is a triumph of the attention economy, a confluence of incompetence allowing this spectacle to transpire obliterates what inferences can be drawn from Simone Biles' gymnastic golds, Saya Sakakibara's bmx racing gold, Arisha Trew's skateboarding gold, Jessica and Naomi Fox's canoeing golds...even Kathryn Mitchell's ability to compete in javelin at 42 years of age. 

The misogyny is out and in full, because there is probably no easier dog to kick in western society than a middle-aged white woman. Raygun is a Karen even though she made no complaints to a manager and instead tried to have fun with break dancing. Teaching us that Karen's are not even about what Karen's do but what they are. People are reacting as if some human garbage living in some modest comfort of an academic-in-a-humanities department is an affront to the Just World Hypothesis.

Ami Yuasa the gold medalist b-girl is 25 and Japanese. Aside from that she is a university graduate majoring in English and American Literature. So we are definitely saying too much about breaking at the Olympics if I need to discuss Japanese history and Japanese culture to render arguments of "cultural appropriation" unintelligible. Sadly "do I need to explain Japan to you?" is not a rhetorical question when directed to the modern left, given the extent to which in my experience left wingers fetishize Japan despite it basically being an ethno-nationalist state highly gender-polarized and almost completely dissonant with it's history of imperialism. 

All of which is as irrelevant to Ami Yuasa's performance as the history and culture and economy of Australia is irrelevant to Rachael Gunn's. Complaints of the nature of white-privilege, cultural appropriation etc. are likely a good case study to shelve for when we can pick over the corpse of "Anti-racism" as functioning as a literal reverse racism.

If you read the abstract of Rachael Gunn's academic papers, you will see someone who is completely schooled in intersectional feminism and is trying to fight white-male patriarchal neoliberalism. This is the predictable result, because most of these critiques (either by mode or by composition) are horseshit. I'm not going to invest in reading Raygun's doctoral paper, but if she doesn't use an empirical or historical methodology to determine that lack of female representation in break dancing stems as a bi-product from the overall crappiness of the Australian hip-hop (aka skip-hop) scene then that paper is a horseshit PhD.

Hannah Gadsby took something "unserious" being a comedy special and successfully subverted it by making it serious to the point of harrowing for many. Gadsby probably leveraged millions of dollaridoos if not hundreds of thousands and I think in the fullness of time my money is on the major contribution of Nanette being archival evidence of how little was understood about male violence in the early 21st century, again thanks to pinning it on a nebulous skunked/Motte-and-Bailey term like "patriarchy" basically guaranteeing that the content cannot be understood. 

There's no need to analyse, or wait for the fullness of time with Raygun's performance. We already have movies like "The Room" and reality TV competitions like "Idol", "X Factor", "Got Talent", and "So You Think You Can Dance" for which everything is in the title to know exactly what transpired. I think Raygun could leverage this moment into possibly thousands of dollars as a guest speaker at a few events. In the meantime she is likely being psychologically destroyed by the impact of her high-risk strategy, and that middle aged white women are seen as fair game, even more so than straight white men. The inherent risk of asking: "Where the #b-girls at? politics of (in)visibility in breaking culture" assuming the question to be rhetorical.

Rachel Dracht spoofing Raygun on lightning-rod-of-desperate-need-to-be-culturally-relevant Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is just a poor man's version of Tina Fey quoting middle-aged-white-woman Sarah Palin word for word on SNL. Performances that are pure pandering and will likely age less sympathetically than their inspirations (though it is hard to be sympathetic to Palin, very much forerunner to Trump, she is a symptom of the Republican Party base, a point on the evolutionary trajectory of dumb presidents from Raegan to Bush Jr. to Palin to Trump and as NNT pointed out, if you want to scare yourself extrapolate that pattern into the future.)

Furthermore to the specific delusion, someone who mistakes "originality" as an unqualified good is not new. It is a common artistic delusion. It is the reason Melbourne population 5 million, can somewhat viably support 150,000 seats for 9 professional Australian Rules football clubs 705k memberships and about 3ish truly dedicated Jazz venues.  (I wouldn't be surprised if breakdancing is a bigger scene in Melbourne than Jazz is despite having a fraction of the economic support).

Contemporary Jazz is unpopular because it equates being original with being good. It is dwarfed both in number of performers and crowd turnout by solo female singer songwriters with acoustic guitars. On this front, I have long had a gripe that Jazz snobs think they are taking risks, where I feel risk is a measure of variability of outcome. Modern Jazz is not risky, it is almost guaranteed to alienate audiences and bankrupt its practitioners unless they can sit atop a pyramid of tutelage teaching the next generation of unpopular musicians their difficult artform. It does not resemble Coltrane or Miles Davis' highly listenable jazz, because it isn't allowed to, because originality. 

The breaking routine clearly was risky, because it has had this outsize response. The thing that deserves the most outrage would be the degree to which we are all a sucker for spectacle, schadenfreude and outrage itself. 

So at base, what we have is grist for a very problematic mill.

What do we want out of the IOC the AOC out of Raygun and PhD's? Does the public "discourse" bring us any closer? Does it even approach answering the question "how did this happen?" No, the attention economy is terrible at answering questions and solving problems.

I for one, want the IOC to take risks, to try new sports and retire old sports. There are a bunch of difficult questions in sports, not the least of which is the centrality of defining gender to sports. But like, if you contemplate just the question of prize money for winning a gold medal, does a gold medalist water polo team member deserve the same compensation as the 100m sprint winner or marathon winner?

Things are changing constantly and are unpredictable. In permitting the IOC to take risks, they need to have the competence in researching to ensure they are actually taking risks. I believe breaking was introduced to try and draw in a younger crowd, presumably than say, equestrian events do. I believe if they did their research they may have discovered that break dancing is not that popular with young people. 

The AOC needs to reign in its olympic qualifying standards, such that just because somebody is the best regional representative in a sport wouldn't automatically qualify them, as they do with the current Winter Olympic events, otherwise it represents a potential transfer in wealth from Australian Taxpayers to private citizens via the moral hazard of creating spectacle, intentionally or not. The medalling b-girls and b-boys have a common met criteria of competing in world championships or continental championships and medalling. Someone from Sydney (pop. 5.3 million) beating someone from New Zealand (pop 5.12 million) is not good enough. 

Furthermore, for new sports or exhibition sports the IOC should do its utmost to avoid a "pay-to-play" scenario, as would be true of say the IOC putting Gridiron in the Olympics that would not be true of them putting Cricket or Baseball in the Olympics. Cricket obviously has a world cup, the case for it being a truly global game is likely inferior only to Football (Soccer), baseball there are pro-leagues in Japan, the US and Latin America. Gridiron, not only are there almost no compatible international leagues (I think Canadian football is possibly a thing?) but there is also a dearth of non US players in the NFL, with only a few Australians that generally specialize as kickers playing for the big money. 

If the IOC permits NFL to be an Olympic sport we will see G7 nations putting together bullshit teams and granting bullshit citizenship to US pros in a scramble for a silver medal, but we won't see Equatorial Guinea able to send a Grid Iron team to the olympics because it is a ridiculous amount of people and equipment to put up in an olympic village in Los Angeles at taxpayer expense.

Anyway, what about the impacts on Raygun's doctoral thesis? I believe a PhD isn't revokable even when debunked, even when the doctrate of philosophy debunks her own thesis herself. Raygun is by far and away the most famous Australian break dancer of all time. She is likely currently the most famous break dancer in the world, and she did so with no particular noteworthy ability in the sport. She scored zero points and won something like 5 percentage categories in her bouts out of 270. 

She has unintentionally replicated the grievance studies affair's attempted thesis that the social sciences have no sound epistemology, that they can arrive at any a-priori conclusions in this case a lack of representation and achievement by women in breaking is a product of white-patriarchy and neoliberalism, rather than a broader correlation with a lack of interest in the dance style and the low social status in Australia of break dancers. (Raygun aside from being the most famous Australian break dancer, is also the only woman I have ever known to date a male break dancer.)

Thomas Sowell could cut and paste his critiques of critical social theories onto Rachael's thesis - by broadening the scope we can observe that breakdancing is dominated by Asia and Europe. It is popular with affluent Japanese, Chinese and Korean people. Had Rachael not nested her thesis in Sydney and Australia, she may have identified that the (in)visibility of women in the sport had little if nothing to do with patriarchy, whiteness and neoliberalism. 

Much as the IOC needs to get better at its own research, the research conducted in social sciences needs to be less insulated from reality, so that our academics don't initially test their theories only when it gets real on a stage in front of the world.