Beaner – Co-opted & Exoticized EP

La Mission knows from brown. The collective is run by a crew of devastatingly handsome deviants whose racial identity is, well…it’s complicated. We’ve lived our lives being neither white enough nor brown enough to fit neatly into racial categories.

And so we took some time out from our usual exploits (like our “MultiDirectional Playground Tire Swinging” orgies and Elected Candidate/Dead Pig/HungerGames slashfic) to focus on brownness. People started talking about “cultural appropriation” when Miley Cyrus started twerking. We couldn’t throw shade fast enough.

But cooptation and exotification runs rampant in all genres of music-including dance music. We here at La Mission feel pretty fucking awkward about it. We’ve seen queerofcolor culture turned into whitedudebro business ventures. And as brown folks with stripped and fragmented identities, we’re never sure of what culture is ours to use and abuse, anyway.

Can we honor our own roots if they’re messy and broken? When we’re “inspired” by the music of other cultural groups, is that solidarity or stealing? Nothing we have is whole. We can only work with the fragments we have at hand, well aware that there’s unfinished business… BLACKMOUTH is the live version of the classic soul/disco sampling house tune.