Culture - Identity - Representation we could talk about this for a long time (but it is more fun to do so in /leftypol)!
Honestly it is an important topic, yet one has to be careful as people's feelings easily get hurt - after all we are identity junkies and culture is our pusher.
The identity that global capitalist culture provides for most of the world's population today is "looser" - which is not a very attractive offer. That is why people tend to other sources, like so called local or traditional cultures. This explains why so called multiculturalism seemed an alternative model for society and why it became the main liberal ideology today. However the way cultures are understood in a multiculturalist society is comparatively and morphologically, like science treats botanics or biology. They are understood from their traditions, as something that grew and now is there to be compared. This means that only those aspects of a culture which have already become are interesting - all those which are yet becoming are cut off. All the peoples utopias, their hopes and dreams, which initially made them act in certain ways - the direction of their growth if you wish - are no longer deemed relevant to that culture, only the already dead branches count. Furthermore they have to be comparable, everything that is interlinked between cultures, all the commonalities becomes uninteresting, only specialities are of interest in a global system of comparison. And the more significant those differences the cleared the distinction between different cultures becomes, which means this comparative attention will get pointed towards race and the extreme forms of religion.
This is the problem with what we now call cultural identity: they only emerge when you take cultural traditions and transform them into something that is comparable in this international system of cultural differences.
The problem with our concept of culture roots even deeper: Either you define it in a cyclical manner - like "German culture are the ways the Germans live" and "Germans are those who live in the ways of the German culture" - which obviously doesn't deliver any information and renders the concept meaningless. Or you say "German culture is the ways the germans live" and "germans are those blond, blue eyed peoples with this and that genome and so on" which obviously is a fundamentally racist approach.
The results are misconceptions and prejudices: I for example only know what good sausages taste like since i went to Japan yet in an international system of dish-comparison sausages get connected to German culture, but it doesn't have anything to do with what people there are actually eating, in fact they invented Döner Kebab there!
This is why the so called liberal multiculturalist society is so repressive: Their genealogical perspective and the concepts of culture and cultural identity always makes them look to the past searching for significant differences, so they gravitate towards races, territories and religious fundamentalism. The talk of cultural appropriation always has a racist background because it needs to root it's concept of culture in a certain territory and a certain people. People pretend to fight for tolerance while promoting racism.
Moreover the accusation of "cultural appropriation" is silencing people, not empowering them:
My rhythms and sounds are produces from human- machine interaction: i let algorithms do the work, i have no idea if some arab tribe came up with some particular pattern some 500 years earlier and i don't care. If i love them i play them and don't fucking care about anything but if it kicks. - Should i instead embark on a live-time of research for each pattern, checking if someone might have pinned their precious cultural identity to it? And how did you think that culture came up with that pattern? Well either they "stole" it from another culture or they "stole" two patterns from two other cultures and mixed them up - that is how cultures work! That is how music works!!
You can not not appropriate: if you do anything it will be happening within the system of doable things. if you make a music it will sound. there will be others who have used sound before. If you do anything it will be connected to the past, to the forms that have been there before. But that doesn't mean you have to use those forms in the same way they have been used.
I am not interested in any of those differences multiculturalism is built on: traditions, skin colours, gender and so on. Those are differences from the past. I am only interested in differences coming from the future: differences that stem from the different ways we want to go, different lives we want to live and different beings we want to become!