But the problem had been mislocated. In those instances, the issue was the racism, not the sharing. ‘The problem is that if The Beatles tell me that they learned everything they know from Blind Willie Johnson,’ the poet Amiri Baraka said, ‘I want to know why Blind Willie is still running an elevator in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s that kind of inequality that is abusive, not the actual appropriation of culture because that’s normal.’
